In the first half of the 1970s, the US Congress attached human rights criteria to the disbursement of foreign aid and in some cases banned the sale of weapons to repressive right-wing governments. During his 1976 presidential campaign, Jimmy Carter pledged to give US foreign policy a moral foundation; once he was elected, the Department of State Human Rights Office emerged as an important voice on the world stage, most especially in South America, where anti-communist governments maintained secret detention centres and murdered enemies with impunity.
William Schmidli has written a fine book about ‘the Carter administration's effort to translate human rights rhetoric into clear-cut foreign policy initiatives, using U. S. relations with Argentina as the primary case study’ (p. 2). The State of Freedom Elsewhere is a book about US actors and US policy towards Argentina. Early chapters contextualise Washington's hemispheric goals after 1945, the evolution of US–Argentine relations and the eventual questioning of Cold War orthodoxies during the Nixon and Ford administrations. Schmidli underlines the importance of domestic factors for Argentina's dysfunctional politics and post-war development, but he also sees US military aid and training as the essential elements behind a national security doctrine that justified coups in 1966 and 1976 as well as extralegal violence against civilians. Less consideration is given to the junta's perception of events, its response to US pressure, or its conviction that Argentina stood on the front lines of a major Cold War battlefield.
During the first two years of Carter's presidency, state-sponsored violence in Argentina reached peak levels, prompting the State Department to block some loans and military transfers to Buenos Aires as a punishment for Dirty War atrocities. Concurrently, a congressional arms embargo helped convince Argentina's junta to accept a visit from the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights. Despite these achievements, the Carter administration's efforts to prioritise human rights ignited a bitter debate within the federal government.
Carter's national security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, disliked idealistic rhetoric about pan-Americanism; he advocated a single policy towards the southern hemisphere. Raúl Héctor Castro, US ambassador to Argentina from 1977 to 1980, increasingly viewed US commercial and military sanctions as counterproductive. He thought such measures strengthened hard-line nationalists in Argentina as opposed to moderate elements more open to the liberalisation of security policies. Castro also disdained embassy personnel who independently supplied Washington with information about human rights abuses because he felt such actions subverted the chain of command. More generally, career diplomats typically considered strident condemnation of repressive regimes to be an ineffective strategy, preferring quiet diplomacy and back-channel communications. They also criticised policies that treated Latin American military regimes differently to dictatorships in Iran, South Korea or the Philippines.
Carter's deputy secretary of state, Warren Christopher, aspired to apply a consistent human rights policy to US aid designations, but that goal inevitably clashed with US geostrategic interests in Asia and the Middle East. Furthermore, Christopher's practice of examining countries on an individual basis failed to establish clear human rights precedents that could be integrated into subsequent policy-making.
Meanwhile, US businessmen expressed frustration with Washington's inability to supply a clear set of guidelines on the human rights issue. As Buenos Aires turned to European manufacturers for arms and technology, the US business community blamed the loss of commercial opportunities in Argentina on inconsistent and ill-advised policies. Ultimately, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, combined with revolutionary upheavals in Nicaragua and Iran, prompted Carter's return to more traditional Cold War strategy in 1979.
Schmidli is among a group of scholars who regard Carter's mixed record as a significant shift in US foreign policy towards Latin America. As a work of diplomatic history, Schmidli's approach is innovative. He weaves state, non-state and high-level actors into a single narrative by profiling a diverse set of characters, taking the time to describe each figure's background, outlook and place in US government or civil society. Profiles of Patricia Derian and Raúl Héctor Castro illuminate two high-level actors with differences of opinion about US foreign policy and human rights. These, along with profiles of foreign service officer Robert C. Hill, human rights activist Olga Talmante, and Franklin ‘Tex’ Harris, internal affairs officer at the US Embassy in Buenos Aires, fulfil Schmidli's declared aim to ‘illustrate the complex motivations that guided political activism in the 1970s from both sides of the political spectrum, and balance an analysis of the importance of individual agency with an assessment of the shaping power of the Washington bureaucratic structure’ (p. 5).
Schmidli's research shows the limited tools that Washington had to influence Argentina's generals as they pursued a systematic campaign of state terror, yet he stresses the importance of non-governmental human rights activists and their congressional allies. It was this movement, Schmidli says, that laid the legal foundation for Carter's human rights initiatives while congressional legislation blocking Argentina's access to US arms gave the executive leverage with the junta. By showing a rhetorical commitment to human rights in foreign policy decisions, Schmidli asserts that Carter ‘created an unprecedented, government-sanctioned arena for the human rights movement’ (p. 6). Schmidli further suggests that while Carter's presidency may not have fully institutionalised human rights in foreign policy-making, it introduced new questions into foreign policy debates and helped make the rhetoric of human rights more permanent.
William Schmidli tells a compelling story about the practical challenges Jimmy Carter faced as his administration attempted to pioneer a foreign policy informed by human rights concerns. The book's textured analysis makes a valuable contribution to the history of human rights and US–Argentine relations during the Cold War.
