How Congress Shaped the Carter Administration's Human Rights Policy
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Abstract WHITE JR., JAMES DOUGLAS. Negotiating Authority: How Congress Shaped the Carter Administration’s Human Rights Policy toward Uruguay in 1977. (Under direction of Dr. Nancy Mitchell). Before Jimmy Carter became president, the US Congress had begun leveraging foreign aid to pressure governments to improve their human rights records. In 1976, it passed the Koch Amendment cutting all military assistance to the authoritarian junta in Uruguay. Although human rights advocates in Congress welcomed Carter’s emphasis on human rights during the campaign, they were skeptical that he would translate rhetoric into action. Thus for the Carter administration’s human rights policy to be effective, it needed to be visible to Congress. However, officials in the State Department worried that if they scolded foreign governments too vehemently, the administration would be criticized as interventionist. How did the Carter administration craft an effective human rights policy negotiated between Congress’s desire for an active human rights policy and State’s desire to minimize the appearance of interventionism? By studying US human rights policy toward Uruguay and the role of the Organization of American States (OAS) in that policy in 1977, this thesis shows that the Carter administration tried to square this circle by using multilateral and personal diplomacy to encourage the Uruguayan junta to be more transparent about its human rights record. In the OAS, the Carter administration strengthened the Inter-American Human Rights Commission (IAHRC), which published reports on countries’ human rights abuses and was working on a report on Uruguay. In its bilateral relationship with Uruguay, high-ranking US diplomats, military officers, and members of Congress informed the junta that the US government was united in its concern for human rights. If the Uruguayan government wanted to resume normal relations, it would need to convince both the executive branch and Congress that it had improved its human rights record by sharing information directly with them as well as with the international human rights organizations that supplied the US Congress with information. The Carter administration had two goals in mind when it encouraged the junta to be more transparent and helped the IAHRC play a more active role in the hemisphere. First, it hoped increased international scrutiny would pressure the junta to improve its human rights record while allowing the State Department to avoid publicly criticizing Uruguay and appearing interventionist. Second, by making human rights progress more visible, the Carter administration hoped that Congress would be reassured that it was actively promoting human right. Negotiating Authority: How Congress Shaped the Carter Administration’s Human Rights Policy toward Uruguay in 1977 By James White A thesis submitted to the Graduate Faculty of North Carolina State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts History Raleigh, North Carolina 2021 APPROVED BY: ___________________________ ___________________________ Dr. Nancy Mitchell Dr. Michael Morgan Chair of Advisory Committee ___________________________ Dr. Frederico Freitas ii Biography James White is a MA student at North Carolina State University. He received his B.A. in History at his local college, Cal State Bakersfield. While at Cal State, he received a series of academic awards from the History Department and the College of Arts and Humanities before graduating summa cum laude in 2019. From there, he was accepted to attend North Carolina State University as History M.A. student under Dr. Nancy Mitchell. iii Acknowledgements Writing this thesis over this past year and a half has been a great deal of work, but it has also been a great deal of fun. This work would not have been possible, however, if not for the help of various people in my life who helped me with the research and writing of this paper. First and foremost among these people is Dr. Mitchell, my advisor, who read and reread various iterations of each chapter and the completed thesis and who provided me with many of the online archives that I used for my research. Without Dr. Mitchell’s guidance and aggressive editing, this thesis would likely border 200 pages, so any reader should thank her for saving them from that fate. I would also like to thank two other committee members for agreeing to read and critique this paper. Dr. Morgan, despite working at a different institution, agreed to not only to read my thesis but also to allow me to take several of his classes. Those classes proved to be incredibly helpful to my research for this paper and thinking about world history. Dr. Freitas, too, went out of his way to help me. Despite being on sabbatical when I asked him to serve on my committee, he generously agreed and then helped me locate several Uruguayan documents I had been struggling to find. I would also like to thank all those who agreed to be interviewed for this thesis. Joe Eldridge, Juan Raul Ferreira, Robert Goldman, Tom Farer, and Charles Flynn all let me lob questions at them about their experience with the Carter administration’s human rights policy. Dr. Kathryn Sikkink also proved incredibly helpful to this work, not only through her writings, but also in her generosity with sharing an interview she conducted with Lawrence Pezzullo. This interview was eye opening and had some fantastic quotes, many of which did not make their way into the final thesis. iv I would like to thank my friends who proofread this thesis and helped me along the way: Braden Benson, Dylan Hollifield, and Farris Smith. And finally, there’s my wife, Heather White. Heather listened to my long-winded rants about my research when few others would, though the pandemic made her something of a captive audience. She—together with Dr. Chris Tang, Dr. Nate Olson, my father, and my pastor—convinced me to come to North Carolina and get my degree, and I am glad they did. v Table of Contents List of Tables ................................................................................................................................. vi Introduction ......................................................................................................................................1 Historiography .....................................................................................................................6 Outline................................................................................................................................10 Chapter One: Congress and Human Rights ...................................................................................14 Section 1: The Rise of Human Rights................................................................................18 Section 2: Congress’s Definition of Human Rights ...........................................................22 Human Rights as Anticommunism ........................................................................22 Human Rights as Moral Equivalency ....................................................................26 The Divide’s Effect on the Carter Administration .................................................32 Section 3: Why Congress Enforced Human Rights ...........................................................35 Why the United States had to Act ..........................................................................35 Genuine Concern ...................................................................................................41 The Power of the Past ............................................................................................43 Inexorable Institutions ...........................................................................................50 Conclusion .........................................................................................................................55 Chapter Two: Carter, Uruguay, Human Rights, and the OAS .......................................................58 The Carter Administration’s Human Rights Policy ...........................................................60 The OAS and Multilateral Diplomacy ...............................................................................65 The IAHRC and Multilateral Legitimacy ..........................................................................73 Conclusion .........................................................................................................................80 Chapter Three: US-Uruguay Bilateral Relations, 1977 .................................................................83 Section 1: Background .......................................................................................................84 The Uruguayan Junta and the Koch Amendment ..................................................84 US Military Aid to Uruguay: September 1976 to February 1977 .........................88 Section 2: Ambassador Ernest Siracusa .............................................................................92 Section 3: Ambassador Lawrence Pezzullo .......................................................................98 High Level Visits and a Government United .......................................................101 Including the US Congress ..................................................................................106 Conclusion .......................................................................................................................111 Conclusion ...................................................................................................................................115