ABSTRACT
Through a history of US-based solidarity with Latin America, this essay explores how human rights became a dominant way of framing and mobilizing international solidarity during the 1970s and 1980s. As late as 1970, international human rights was barely on the map, not part of mainstream discourse, and not yet part of the Latin American solidarity toolkit. More than this, there were other, more prominent and longstanding, internationalisms from which people drew upon in order to understand and organize solidarity in the Americas, including most notably socialism, anti-imperialism, anti-colonialism, labor solidarity, and pan-Africanism. During the 1970s, however, human rights replaced these other, better travelled, internationalisms in the marketplace of ideas and practice. This essay explores how and why human rights, as opposed to other currents of internationalism, became the vehicle through which US–Latin American solidarity emerged as an identifiable political project during this period. It also examines how the ascendancy of human rights shaped both internationalism and the US left more broadly. In so doing, the essay suggests that the emergence of human rights as a dominant way to think about and practice internationalism served to detach international solidarity from an identifiably left politics in two fundamental ways. First, by marginalizing forms of left internationalism that advocated for structural transformation, and by elevating a relatively limited and depoliticized form of internationalism, the rise of human rights contributed to the narrowing of political vision/practice within the US left. Second, by advancing a mode of politics that relied on small, professionalized, and relatively depoliticized (non-governmental-type) organizations, the ascendancy of human rights brought with it a political infrastructure that was incapable of advancing a politics that was designed to transform the social order in fundamental ways.
