United States

   U.S. involvement in the “dirty wars” can be traced to the advent of the Cold War. From the 1950s onward, the United States trained thousands of Latin American military students at its School of the Americas (at locations such as the Panama Canal Zone and Fort Benning in Columbus, Georgia) and other army facilities such as the Inter-American Defense College (IADC), at Fort Lesley J. McNair in Washington, D.C. (The School of the Americas is now called the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation.) In the absence of any external threat, the primary concern of this military cooperation was to combat communist subversion, the fear of which became more pronounced after Fidel Castro came to power in Cuba in 1959. Students at the U.S. facilities were trained in counterinsurgency and anticommunism and immersed in North American culture and values. Some were groomed for leadership: the IADC curriculum included courses in financial management, communications, and international finance. The result was the creation in each country of a military that equated its interests with those of the United States and could be expected to maintain stability. Among the graduates of the IADC, for example, were Admiral Emilio Massera of Argentina and General Gustavo Leigh Guzmán of Chile, both of whom were members of ruling juntas, and General José Cardozo of Uruguay, who headed his country’s antisubversives board. This military crossfertilization-Argentina also drew on the advice of French officers who had fought in Algeria—led to a rethinking of the primary role of the military in Latin America. The military identified the primary threat as coming not from external forces but from internal “subversives” who blended in with everyday society. An unconventional enemy called for unconventional warfare and had to be rooted out, even in disregard of internationally recognized human rights. Although the United States supported the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, for much of the Cold War the country’s foreign policy ignored or paid little attention to human rights. During the administration of President Dwight D. Eisenhower (1953–1961), Secretary of State John Foster Dulles equated the support of human rights with the containment of Soviet-led communism. The shortlived administration of John F. Kennedy (1961–1963) continued the anticommunist approach to policy. To that end, it unveiled the Alliance for Progress, a program aimed at promoting economic development and rescuing people from poverty and repression. The assumption was that flourishing economies were the best defense against communist aggression. A bureaucracy was needed to administer U.S. assistance, and the Agency for International Development (AID) was created. The problem was how to keep communism away until prosperity took hold. The answer was to use military aid to bolster countries’ national security. Out of this concern arose the guerrillafighting U.S. Army Special Forces (Green Berets) and a wide range of military support to Latin American and other countries—advisors, engineers, and increased training.

   When Kennedy was assassinated in 1963, optimism died with him. During the administration of President Lyndon Johnson (1963–1969), an increasing number of AID personnel received military training, and a large share of the economic aid for Latin America went for counterinsurgency training. During the administration of President Richard Nixon (1969–1974), human rights—secondary considerations under Kennedy and Johnson—were devalued further. Nixon’s secretary of state, Henry Kissinger, made no secret of his belief that human rights often interfered with other foreign-policy objectives. In the early 1970s, political fallout from the Vietnam War and the Watergate scandal led to a questioning of a foreign policy preoccupied with anticommunism. The impetus came from Congress, especially Representative Donald M. Fraser, whose Subcommittee on International Organizations and Movements of the Foreign Affairs Committee conducted a series of human-rights hearings, beginning in 1973. As the hearings continued over the next three years, the countries of Latin America fell under scrutiny. Congress was outraged by what it heard to the point of legislating against continued assistance. Congress had been especially shocked by growing evidence of U.S. involvement in the overthrow of President Salvador Allende Gossens in Chile. The administration of President Jimmy Carter (1977–1981) built on congressional efforts and gave the issue of human rights an independent status, separating it from what Carter called the U.S.’s “inordinate fear of communism.” He named Patricia Derian, an outspoken human-rights advocate, to head the State Department’s Bureau of Human Rights. The enforcement of Carter’s human-rights policy, however, was inconsistent. Even in Latin America, where the administration’s pressure was credited with saving many lives, the policy succumbed to pragmatism over time.

   With the administration of President Ronald Reagan (1981– 1989), Cold War policy returned. The protection of human rights was once again reduced to the fight against communism. Leading the attack on Carter’s human-rights record was Jeane Kirkpatrick, the U.S. ambassador to the UN. By the beginning of Reagan’s second term, however, Kirkpatrick’s ideas had fallen out of favor. Overlooking human-rights abuses committed by anticommunist allies was seen as counterproductive, since repression often provokes unrest. Reagan’s policy shifted from fighting communism to promoting democracy, at least in South America and the Caribbean, where Chile, Haiti, and Paraguay were beneficiaries. On the other hand, anticommunism still drove policy in Central America, where the administration aimed at overthrowing the Sandinistas in Nicaragua and defeating the guerrillas in El Salvador. Nevertheless, it was the South American and Caribbean successes that influenced the administrations of George H. W. Bush (1989–1993) and Bill Clinton (1993–2001), who tended to equate democracy promotion with human rights. That view was reflected in the name change of the Bureau of Human Rights, which is now the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor.

   The United States was the venue for the landmark human-rights case Filártiga v. Peña-Irala (1980), which the Center for Constitutional Rights has called “probably the most important domestic international human rights case of the modern era.” It has been the basis for nearly 20 successful human-rights cases brought on behalf of citizens from Argentina, Chile, El Salvador, Ethiopia, Mexico, Nicaragua, and the Philippines. Ironically, the case came under scrutiny during the administration of George W. Bush (2001–2009), which argued that the precedent could dissuade foreign allies from assisting the United States in its so-called war on terror.