Ambivalent allies: Advocates, diplomats, and the struggle for an 'American' human rights policy

This project explores the relationship between U.S. policymakers and non-government advocates in Chile, Argentina, and the United States to explain the ascendancy of human rights language and policy in the 1970s. Bringing together high-level diplomatic and political history with that of activist networks and social movements, it argues that human rights campaigns and policies reflected a complex dynamic of domestic and foreign considerations that took place both within and between the United States and Latin America. Responding to the long history of U.S. intervention and support for military governments in Latin America, advocates and diplomats targeted both the foreign dictatorships that violated human rights and the U.S. policies and Cold War paradigms that buttressed them. Advocates, and later diplomats, sought to use human rights to demonstrate an increased respect for sovereignty in the region and divorce the United States from interventionist legacies that had both undermined self-determination and exacerbated humanitarian crises. Human rights policy, in this context, was not an abstract moral gesture or a new form of interventionism, but rather a recalibration of U.S. power and regional relations to support both vital national interests and democratic values.;The Carter administration embraced the advocate vision of policies designed to be transformative both at home and abroad. This dual purpose gave rise to a uniquely noninterventionist human rights policy in Latin America, which distinguished the Carter administration's foreign policy of human rights from those of other administrations. These two objectives—improving human rights abroad and changing the United States' image by distancing it from repressive regimes—were mutually reinforcing in the early 1970s, but increasingly conflicted by the end of the decade, constraining human rights efforts and overshadowing the administration's achievements.