Human Rights and United States Policy Toward Latin America
How America chose human rights
Description
In September 1976, a car exploded on Embassy Row in Washington. Inside were Orlando Letelier, a former minister in Salvador Allende's Chilean government, and an American colleague, Ronni Moffitt. The bomb had been planted by agents of a regime the United States had helped bring to power three years earlier. The killing happened blocks from the State Department, in the capital of the country whose officials had spent much of the decade arguing about whether the way foreign governments treated their own citizens was any of America's business at all.
For most of the twentieth century, the answer had been simple: it was not. A government's treatment of its people fell inside its sovereignty, and Washington dealt with Latin American states on grounds of security, trade, and anti-communism, not on whether they tortured dissidents. Then, across the 1960s and 1970s, something shifted. The phrase human rights, which had lived mostly in United Nations declarations nobody enforced, migrated into congressional statutes, aid decisions, and the daily traffic of the bureaucracy. By the time Jimmy Carter took office in 1977, it was official American policy that repression abroad should carry a cost.
Lars Schoultz set out to understand how that happened, and what it produced. His study runs from the early sixties to 1980, and its interest is less in the speeches than in the plumbing: the committees, the offices, the reporting cables, the fights over a single clause in an appropriations bill. The story is not one of a nation suddenly discovering its conscience. It is one of a value being pushed, clause by clause, into a machine built for other purposes.
The question we’re asking : How did the treatment of foreign citizens become a criterion of American foreign policy, and what did the machinery of government do with it once it arrived?What we’ll see : How a moral concern crossed from rhetoric into law, and what the institutions that received it made of the change.
Table of contents
01Chapter 1 — A word that broke into the foreign policy vocabulary
For the generation of officials who ran American policy toward Latin America after the Second World War, human rights was not a category of analysis. It was a phrase for speeches at the United Nations, useful for embarrassing the Soviet Union and largely inert everywhere else. The working assumptions were older and harder. A country's internal conduct was its own affair. What mattered to Washington was whether a government kept order, honored its debts, welcomed American investment, and stayed out of Moscow's orbit. Measured against those tests, an anti-communist dictator was an asset, and how he handled his prisoners was a detail.
Schoultz traces how that consensus began to fracture. The Cuban revolution of 1959 sharpened the security lens: for a decade, almost everything in the hemisphere was read through the fear of a second Cuba, which if anything strengthened the tolerance for repressive allies. But the same years produced a countercurrent. Missionaries, returning Peace Corps volunteers, exiles, and human rights organizations began sending back a different account of what stability actually cost in places like Brazil after 1964 or Chile after 1973. Torture stopped being an abstraction and became testimony, with names and dates.
02Chapter 2 — How Congress forced the issue
The decisive pressure did not come from the executive branch, which owns foreign policy in practice and guarded that ownership jealously. It came from Congress, and Schoultz's account of the mechanics is the heart of the book. Through the early 1970s, a group of legislators discovered that the appropriations process gave them a lever the State Department could not easily wrestle away: the power to attach conditions to money. If aid was the currency of the relationship, then aid could be made to depend on conduct.
The instruments accumulated one at a time. Hearings — dozens of them, run by figures like Representative Donald Fraser — built a public record of abuses that the executive preferred to keep vague. Then came the statutory language. Section 502B of the Foreign Assistance Act declared it American policy to reduce security assistance to governments engaged in a consistent pattern of gross violations of internationally recognized human rights. Section 116, the so-called Harkin amendment, applied a similar test to economic aid. Country-specific cutoffs targeted the worst cases directly. Each clause was fought over word by word, because each word decided how much discretion the executive would keep.
03Chapter 3 — The bureaucracy that had to be rebuilt
Once the law existed, it had to be administered, and the State Department was not built to administer it. The department's culture had long treated human rights advocacy as an intrusion — the concern of amateurs who did not grasp that diplomacy meant working with the governments one had, not the ones one wished for. The regional bureaus, whose officers spent careers cultivating relationships with the very governments now under scrutiny, had every professional incentive to soften the reports and preserve the ties.
Congress tried to force the issue institutionally. It pushed for a Bureau of Human Rights and Humanitarian Affairs and eventually for an Assistant Secretary to run it, someone whose entire job was to argue the human rights side against the regional bureaus in internal fights. Under Carter, Patricia Derian took that role and used it. Schoultz shows the machinery in motion: the human rights office and the Latin American bureau clashing over a single aid decision, each armed with cables and country reports, the outcome turning on which side the Secretary and the National Security Council backed that week.
04Chapter 4 — When values meet the national interest
Step back from the cables and a larger claim emerges from Schoultz's work, one that reaches past Latin America. A moral concern does not become foreign policy by being felt, or even by being proclaimed. It becomes policy only when it is fought into institutions — statutes that compel action, offices with standing to argue, reports somebody is obliged to write. Sentiment without machinery evaporates on contact with the national interest. What the 1970s produced was the machinery, and that is why the change outlasted the mood that created it.
The uncomfortable half of the argument is that the same machinery which enshrines a value also domesticates it. Every provision that committed the United States to human rights was written with the discretion that let it be set aside. The human rights bureau institutionalized the concern permanently, but institutionalizing it also meant subjecting it to the ordinary weighing of interests, where it competed against security, trade, and alliance and often lost. A value that has been made into a bureaucratic input has, by that fact, been made overrulable.
05Conclusion
The bomb on Embassy Row killed Letelier in a decade when the United States was, for the first time, holding hearings about the governments that ordered such things. The two facts belong to the same story. The Chilean junta had been an American security asset; it was also, by 1976, the subject of American reports, cutoffs, and internal fights over whether its aid should flow. The value had arrived, and it had not yet won. Both were true at once, and Schoultz's achievement is to explain how they could be.