ABSTRACT
Leaders in the United States and Latin America focused on the tension between human dignity and the region's wars. Carter and his supporters in the United States and Latin America focused on the horror of killing civilians, whereas Reagan and his allies argued that communism was inherently evil. In the 1976 presidential election, Jimmy Carter promised he would change US foreign policy by prioritizing concerns about human rights. He argued that just because military leaders were anticommunist, it did not mean that they should be considered allies. Through the early 1970s, human rights groups in the United States criticized Nixon and Kissinger's support for Latin American military dictatorships as inconsistent with US values. These criticisms became part of a larger concern about government morality in the early 1970s. Through the late 1970s, Ronald Reagan, the former governor of California, attacked Carter for weakness in the face of communist advances around the world.
