Principles in Power

Latin America and the Politics of U.S. Human Rights Diplomacy

Vanessa Walker

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781501713682
• eBook ISBN: 9781501752681
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Latin American & Caribbean History
• Index: History

Vanessa Walker's Principles in Power explores the relationship between policy makers and nongovernment advocates in Latin America and the United States government in order to explain the rise of anti-interventionist human rights policies uniquely critical of U.S. power during the Cold War. Walker shows that the new human rights policies of the 1970s were based on a complex dynamic of domestic and foreign considerations that was rife with tensions between the seats of power in the United States and Latin America, and the growing activist movement that sought to reform them.

By addressing the development of U.S. diplomacy and politics alongside that of activist networks, especially in Chile and Argentina, Walker shows that Latin America was central to the policy assumptions that shaped the Carter administration's foreign policy agenda. The coup that ousted the socialist president of Chile, Salvador Allende, sparked new human rights advocacy as a direct result of U.S. policies that supported authoritarian regimes in the name of Cold War security interests. From 1973 onward, the attention of Washington and capitals around the globe turned to Latin America as the testing ground for the viability of a new paradigm for U.S. power.

This approach, oriented around human rights, required collaboration among activists and state officials in places as diverse as Buenos Aires, Santiago, and Washington, DC. Principles in Power tells the complicated story of the potentials and limits of partnership between government and nongovernment actors. Analyzing how different groups deployed human rights language to reform domestic and international power, Walker explores the multiple and often conflicting purposes of U.S. human rights policy.

Chapter 1

The Chilean Catalyst

Cold War Allies and Human Rights in the Western Hemisphere

In March 1976 U.S. congressman Tom Harkin (D-IA) stood outside the gates of Villa Grimaldi, an alleged secret detention center on the outskirts of Santiago, Chile. In the coming years, reports would confirm what was only whispered about at the time: that Villa Grimaldi was the site of some of the most grotesque forms of torture and human rights abuses perpetrated by the Chilean military government under the leadership of Augusto Pinochet. With Harkin were Congressmen George Miller (D-CA) and Toby Moffet (D-CT), as well as Rebecca Switzer, a congressional aid, and Joe Eldridge, the head of a small nonprofit organization called the Washington Office on Latin America.

Villa Grimaldi was surrounded by a tall wall, and when the delegation arrived there was no visible activity. Congressman Harkin walked up and knocked on the gates, with no response. After a short time, a large covered truck drove up to the compound, and as the gates opened to let the vehicle in, the delegation followed behind. Just inside the gates, the group quickly found themselves surrounded by gun-wielding guards who were confused and not too happy to have unexpected visitors. Joe Eldridge later recalled that Tom Harkin was holding up his congressional ID as if it were bulletproof yelling, “I am a U.S. congressman. I am an official representative of the U.S. government,” with Eldridge translating to Spanish as fast as he could. When asked by the guards what they were doing there, Harkin stated that the delegation had permission from the military government to inspect any place they wanted in the country. The guard briefly disappeared into a nearby building; when he returned, he told them to leave. Harkin, Eldridge, and the others were quickly deposited outside the gates. They left the site without seeing one prisoner or witnessing any unsightly behavior, aside from their less-than-friendly reception, yet their visit had reverberations throughout U.S.–Latin American relations and the emerging U.S. human rights policy framework.¹

After the delegation returned to the United States, Harkin declared in a press conference, “Human rights in Chile is nothing short of a disaster,” and he stated that they “found clear evidence of systematic denial of basic human rights and efforts by the military to stomp out all opposition.” Three months after the visit, the U.S. Congress passed the Security Assistance Act of 1976, which terminated all military sales to Chile. It also contained an important amendment that generalized the link between security assistance and human rights performance.

The Chilean government, for its part, rebuked the delegation for acting unprofessionally on the visit. The Chilean embassy issued a press release stating that the U.S. delegation had been given “total freedom” and had conferred with “50 Marxist women and were falsely informed that there existed in Chile ‘clandestine concentration camps’ and that persons continued to be tortured.” The embassy also attacked Eldridge directly for setting up these meetings, seeking to discredit him based on his well-known “support to the Allende’s [sic] government and opposition to the present Chilean government.”² A spokesman for the Chilean government told the press that Villa Grimaldi was used for “temporary detention,” and “those reports, you know, on torture and things, they are not true.”³ Within months, however, the military government began to include the site on its list of detention centers—making it accountable to international agencies that would later come to evaluate human rights conditions.⁴

Despite promises from the Pinochet government that individuals who met with the congressional delegates would not be harassed, in the days after their visit the government-controlled press launched an attack on those who talked with the U.S. representatives, labeling them “anti-patriotic” and “enemies of Chile.” José Zalaquett, the legal advisor to the Catholic Church’s Vicaría de la Solidaridad (Vicariate of Solidarity or Vicaría), was expelled from the country a month after meeting with Harkin’s group. The outcry from the human rights community over his exile in turn provoked the first public reprimand of the Chilean government from the Ford administration on human rights issues. This trip thus put pressure not only on the Chilean government but also on Washington’s ongoing support of the regime, raising broader questions about the nature and costs of the United States’ Cold War alliances.

The Chilean coup and subsequent military dictatorship played a uniquely catalytic role in the emergence and construction of U.S. human rights policy as a challenge to existing Cold War paradigms of national interests in the 1970s. Earlier coups and dictatorships played a crucial role in conditioning the U.S. response to Chile; U.S. intervention in the Dominican Republic and the dictatorship in Brazil were both crucial in mobilizing the early core of the human rights movement that would emerge in the 1970s.⁵ Moreover, by 1973 the failure of three consecutive U.S. administrations to devise a strategy to secure any semblance of victory in Vietnam undermined a host of assumptions that underpinned Cold War foreign policy for two decades.⁶ Many Americans questioned the general tenor and direction of U.S. foreign policy, including its willingness to embrace dictatorial regimes that professed anticommunist values, the overwhelming reliance on military power to meet U.S. interests abroad, and the seeming inability to distinguish between the nation’s vital interests and peripheral concerns. Many saw the failures of U.S. policy in Vietnam as emblematic of mismanagement and overreach by the executive branch. The Watergate scandal further reinforced the idea of a power-drunk presidency, unable to craft policy in the best interests of the country.⁷

Fallout from Vietnam and the Watergate scandal undoubtedly attenuated U.S. public and congressional reactions to the Chilean coup. Yet Chile also had its own unique elements that made it a powerful force in U.S. politics. Salvador Allende’s democratic path to socialism had captured worldwide attention—both as a symbol of hope and an object of fear. In the United States, many had seized on Chile as a way to critique U.S. policies as interventionist and neo-imperialist, especially in Latin America; this critique gained damning weight with the Chilean military coup on September 11, 1973, that ended Allende’s government and his life. Congressional hearings on the coup tied the United States directly to the overthrow of a democratically elected government and the subsequent military dictatorship in Santiago.⁸ Some certainly believed that Allende’s Chile was a gateway for Soviet influence in the hemisphere, but the specter of the Cold War had weakened in its explanatory power. A sense of U.S. complicity in the coup—and hence the atrocities in Chile reported daily—gave the human rights agenda an urgency and weight it had previously lacked for a U.S. audience.

Galvanized by the Chilean human rights crisis, a loose coalition of groups and actors formulated a vision of human rights that sought to mitigate repression abroad by targeting U.S. government policies and challenging the strategic assumptions of Cold War diplomacy. The liberal Americans for Democratic Action and leftist Institute for Policy Studies, transnational socialist and religious solidarity networks, and new groups such as the Washington Office on Latin America and Amnesty International coalesced into what one State Department official, George Lister, labeled “the Movement.”⁹ Never monolithic or totally detached from the broader human rights community taking shape at this time, the Movement found common cause with congressional forces ready and eager to reconsider Cold War axioms of national security and the expanded executive power that had advanced them.

Motivated by a sense of complicity in foreign repression in places such as Chile, the Movement’s focus on the U.S. government and its repressive allies was more than an altruistic gesture or emotional response to the moral vagaries of the nation’s Cold War crusade. The connection between U.S. policies and foreign abuses made domestic reform of U.S. foreign policy a strategic choice. The vision of human rights catalyzed by the Chilean coup sought to realign U.S. foreign policy with domestic democratic values, but its proponents also championed it as the most direct means of effecting significant change.¹⁰

The reaction to the Chilean coup that unfolded in the United States under the Ford administration marked a crucial moment for establishing human rights mechanisms and legislation and also initiating dynamics and tensions that would permeate U.S. human rights politics for the next decade. In this, Latin America, particularly Chile, played a central role in defining the mechanisms and meaning of human rights as a vehicle to reform U.S. policy and rein in the power of the Cold War presidency. It was one of many constructions of human rights policy taking shape in the 1970s, but it had a disproportionate impact on emerging policy frameworks.¹¹ Although violations in the communist sphere were of great concern to many, the policy frameworks that took shape during the Ford administration focused overwhelmingly on U.S. policies that supported human rights violations abroad, often perpetrated by traditional Cold War allies.

Defeating the Enemy Within

The military coup in Chile on September 11, 1973, stunned the world, not just for the images of jets strafing the presidential palace or the reports of violence and human rights abuses that quickly emerged but also because of Chile’s long-standing history of civilian rule. In a region marked by military governments, Chile had an exceptional legacy of democracy and stability. Before the September 1973 coup, the military had ruled Chile for only thirteen months in its 130-year history. The Chilean military was the least politicized in South America, and Chileans boasted so often of their strong political culture and law-abiding nature that Chilean exceptionalism was a byword.¹² Yet despite its relatively stable government and society, Chile was not immune to the problems shared by its neighbors and the world in the second half of the twentieth century. Growing inflation, deficits, an increasingly radical youth, and divisive Cold War alignments increased polarization within Chile throughout the 1960s.¹³

Chile—with its democratic institutions and civic discourse that defied regional stereotypes of caudillo politics—had become a darling of the Left internationally as it sought a new path to socialism in the late Cold War. The world watched—some in elation, others in fear—as Salvador Allende became the first democratically elected Marxist head of state in October 1970. It watched in the coming months as Allende energized both the Left and Right in a way that strained the vaunted civil confines of political debate in Chile and alarmed the staunchly anticommunist governments of the region, particularly the behemoth to the north.¹⁴ And, some thirty months later, the world watched again as the military attacked the Chilean presidential palace and tanks rolled through the streets of Santiago, ending the hopes and fears associated with the Allende government.

Led by General Augusto Pinochet, the military leadership promised to restore the institutional structure and “character” of Chile, casting the coup as an act of duty, preventing a precipitous decline into chaos and national dissolution. Chile was undoubtedly in turmoil when its military seized power. Yet the coup was not the end of violence but rather the beginning of institutionalized state-controlled repression and terrorism against broadly defined “enemies of the state.” Despite promising to uphold the Constitution, the junta made use of provisions for a time of war to announce a state of siege and gave the military power over all civilian activities by declaring the entire country an “emergency zone.” Through a series of decrees issued under these emergency powers, the military disbanded all political parties and major labor unions, closed Congress, and implemented censorship laws for all media outlets, shutting down many newspapers and magazines.¹⁵

Although armed resistance had all but ceased within a few days of the coup, the military kept up massive raids, holding more than 45,000 people for interrogation in the week after the coup.¹⁶ Infamously, more than seven thousand citizens were corralled into El Estadio Nacional, the national soccer stadium, on the outskirts of Santiago. There they were brutally interrogated and tortured. Some were executed on the spot, and others were transported to other detention centers and prison camps, many of them never seen again. The naval ship Esmeralda, anchored in Valparaíso, also became a makeshift detention and torture center. In the poorest barrios and shantytowns, military raids turned into summary executions, with dead bodies left by the side of the road or washed up on the banks of the Mapocho River, flowing through the center of Santiago. The military and police raided factories, killing some and taking others to detention centers. Similarly, in the countryside, army and police officers, aided by local landowners, brutally cleared squatters from land, seizing peasants who had participated in land reform movements and arresting local labor leaders and leftists. Members of Allende’s government and prominent leftists, many of whom had extensive overseas contacts, received more cautious but still severe treatment. Cabinet ministers and party leaders, former senators and academics, were arrested as “prisoners of war” and flown to an improvised prison on Dawson’s Island in the far south of the country. By the end of December the military had killed at least fifteen hundred civilians, detained thousands more, and forced, directly or indirectly, another seven thousand into exile.¹⁷

The military government denied any abusive treatment of unarmed civilians while simultaneously arguing that the initial crackdown was regrettable but necessary to stave off even more violence. The regime deliberately played up the image of a violent, fanatical insurgency that would stop at nothing to foist its Marxist vision on Chile. The image of an enemy without compunction rationalized military control and ongoing repression; this internal enemy had exploited democracy’s very openness, manipulating politics to sow seeds of discontent and exacerbate divisions among Chileans.¹⁸ The military junta thus purported to simultaneously root out subversion and rebuild the country’s civil society in a way that would prevent its future corruption by similar forces.

To exercise the control necessary to realize its agenda, the junta established the Dirección de Inteligencia Nacional (Directorate of National Intelligence or DINA) on June 18, 1974. Ostensibly a...

Table of contents

• List of Abbreviations
• Introduction: The Politics of Complicity
• 1. The Chilean Catalyst: Cold War Allies and Human Rights in the Western Hemisphere
• 2. Words Are Not Enough: Building a Human Rights Agenda in the Shadow of the Past
• 3. A Special Responsibility: Human Rights and U.S.-Chilean Relations
• 4. Weighing the Costs: Human Rights and U.S.-Argentine Relations
• 5. The Reagan Reinvention: A Cold War Human Rights Vision
• Conclusion: The Golden Years of Human Rights?
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index