The Human Rights President
Carter became the human rights president not only because he was a man of deep moral convictions and an enduring commitment to humanitarianism; he understood the widespread public revulsion of the CIA scandals in Chile, and the growing political repudiation of Richard Nixon’s and Gerald Ford’s open support for the Pinochet regime and other murderous Latin American military dictatorships. During his televised debate with President Ford in the 1976 election campaign, Carter specifically addressed the “deep hurt” that U.S. policies in countries like Chile had caused. “We’ve seen in the past the destruction of elected governments, like in Chile, and the strong support of military dictatorship there,” he noted in an attack on the Ford-Kissinger backing for such regimes. “These kinds of things have hurt us very much.”
After he became president, Carter explicitly repudiated Kissinger’s “realpolitik” embrace of the Southern Cone military regimes. In his first major speech on a new approach to U.S. foreign policy in May 1977, Carter decried what he called “that inordinate fear of Communism which once led us to embrace any dictator who joined us in our fear;” he declared an end to “unilateral interventionism,” and proclaimed “human rights as a fundamental tenet of our foreign policy.”
To his credit, just a few months later, Carter personally implemented those new principles in a face-to-face meeting with General Augusto Pinochet in Washington D.C., during the signing ceremony of the Panama Canal treaty. A declassified memorandum of conversation of the September 7, 1977, meeting shows that Carter explicitly raised human rights and democracy as the key bilateral issues in U.S.-Chilean relations.
General Pinochet, according to the “memcon,” tried to convince Carter that “he was a great admirer of democracy, and it was his fondest wish to leave office having built one.” The infamous human rights violator also mendaciously claimed that “the military coup was designed precisely to preserve human rights,” and that “today, there are no political prisoners” in Chile.
Carter pushed back on these lies, however diplomatically. “Yet, in the eyes of the world Chile still had a human rights problem,” the meeting summary records the President telling Pinochet. He “asked for Pinochet’s suggestions on how the problem could be alleviated—how to improve the world perception and demonstrate that the progress was real. He asked if he, the UN or the OAS could help,” and then prodded Pinochet to accept UN human rights monitors in Chile.