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[3] Torture and Summary Execution in U.S.–Latin American Relations
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Guided by the goal of avoiding “another Cuba,” the foreign policy experts in the United States moved Latin America to the top of the list in Cold War planning after Fidel Castro’s 1959 revolution. Security assistance (military grants, sales, and training) became the primary tool in Washington’s arsenal for achieving this end.1 This chapter grants primary attention to four of the largest aid recipients—Chile, Nicaragua, Peru, and Argentina—in the two decades following the Cuban Revolution. The first three of these states were among the earliest signatories of military assistance accords, or Mutual Defense Assistance Agreements (MDAAs), with the United States after World War II. Into the early 1970s, Chile ranked as the second-highest recipient of military assistance in Latin America behind Brazil—Peru was third. Argentina signed an identical agreement following the ascension of a pro-U.S. regime to power in 1964. It quickly became one of the largest annual recipients of U.S. credits, training, and sales in the region.2 These commitments were deeply institutionalized within the U.S. policy process. During the Cold War, security assistance through MDAAs represented an executive-legislative partnership. In the 1949 and 1951 Security Assistance Acts, Congress granted the president the authority to negotiate individual agreements with strategically important states. Once negotiated and approved by Congress, each agreement committed the United States to provide unspecified amounts of military assistance in each funding cycle (biannually by the mid-1960s) in exchange for partner coordination with U.S. strategic defense goals as stated in the MDAA. As each accord explicitly noted, termination required an exchange of diplomatic notes. The United States registered each agreement with the United Nations.3 Given these parameters, William Mott refers to MDAAs as [3] Torture and Summary Execution in U.S.–Latin American Relations [74] “legal commitments.” Furthermore, he compares them in their “treatylike ” nature to U.S. commitments to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO).4 After years of uninterrupted deliveries of military assistance, U.S. policy to the four primary countries under study here went in very different directions. Specifically, the United States terminated all military assistance and sales to staunchly anticommunist regimes in Chile (1974 and 1976) and Argentina (1977). At the same time that Washington terminated aid to Argentina, the United States preserved assistances to the pro-U.S. Somoza regime in Nicaragua. In due course, that commitment too was severed. Peru, on the other hand, remained unaffected. The United States sustained aid to Lima throughout the 1970s and into the mid-1980s. Ironically, perhaps , a leftist military regime that at numerous points challenged U.S. strategic interests ruled Peru for most of this period. Humanitarian norms help explain why these punitive steps came when they did, why they happened to some partners but not others. A movement for the international protection of a broad set of political rights (for instance, the rights to live and due process as well as prohibitions against torture, summary execution, and cruel punishment) became well entrenched in congressional foreign aid decisions by the early 1970s. Combinations of illiberal/liberalizing behavior by partners, and information pressure from nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) best account for congressional decisions to terminate and preserve assistance. Liberal Congressional Values: Democracy and Human Rights By the early 1970s, the U.S. Congress increasingly demanded that recipients of foreign assistance respect liberal democratic values in the domestic governance of their populations. The movement to institutionalize human rights began with the Morse Amendment in 1958, which grew out of developments in Cuba. Starting in the late 1950s, the staunchly anticommunist Batista regime used brutal methods of torture, political assassination, and repression of the civilian population to counter the uprising of Fidel Castro. Foreshadowing later cases, media accounts of Batista’s brutality generated concerns in Congress. Pressure from Cuban-American and other humanitarian groups led to congressional demands for aid termination , to which President Eisenhower acceded in 1958 when he ended all security assistance to Cuba.5 Congress passed the Morse Amendment in order to limit assistance in future cases involving brutal regimes like that of Batista.6 Torture in U.S.–Latin American Relations [75] [3.227.229.194] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 07:54 GMT) The humanitarian trend in Congress intensified in the late 1960s and 1970s. The House Subcommittee on International Organizations and Movements, chaired by Representative Donald Fraser, served as the central proponent of this movement. In 1973, the subcommittee held fifteen hearings with forty...