ABSTRACT

This chapter analyzes the differing policies of the Nixon-Ford and the Carter administrations and describes how these policies were implemented by US diplomats. Within the Department of State the two bureaus charged with using diplomacy to implement US policy on human rights in Latin America are the Bureau of Inter-American Affairs and the Bureau of Human Rights and Humanitarian Affairs. Most of the witnesses who appeared at the initial human rights hearings by the Fraser subcommittee in 1973 noted that the Nixon policy was to denigrate humanitarian values in foreign policy making. The message to US diplomats was that the value of human rights in US policy toward Latin America had increased considerably. If one were to search for the single most prominent difference between the foreign policy of the Carter administration and that of its immediate predecessors, surely the distinction would be the policy on human rights protection.