ABSTRACT
On June 19, Somoza held a press conference and promised to invite the Inter-American Human Rights Commission and allow the return of the Group of Twelve to Nicaragua. In addition, he said he would consider signing the American Convention on Human Rights and declaring an amnesty for political prisoners. The crisis in Nicaragua forced a distracted Carter Administration to confront some hard policy choices—not between human rights and security, as some have suggested, but whether, and if so how, the United States should influence the process of political change in a small Central American country. By September 1978, the frontier of US human rights policy had been reached. As the war worsened in Nicaragua, the human rights policy proved to be less of a constraint on Somoza's behavior and less useful as a tool for pursuing US interests. The issue became, what role the United States should play as Nicaragua became engulfed in civil war.
