On March 9, 1977, at one of Jimmy Carter’s earliest White House press conferences as president of the United States, the very first question was about Chile.
At a meeting of the UN Commission on Human Rights in Geneva the day before, a State Department official had expressed “profoundest regrets” for the covert U.S. role in undermining Chilean democracy, and the subsequent “suffering and terror that the people of Chile have experienced” under the military dictatorship. Now, the U.S. media wanted to know if those remarks reflected the new President’s unique position on human rights as a criterion for U.S. foreign policy.
President Carter bluntly disavowed the apology. “I think that the remarks made by the delegate concerning our past involvement in Chilean political affairs were inappropriate,” he declared, dismissing them as “a personal statement of opinion” that did not represent the U.S. government.
But Carter did take the opportunity to call attention to human rights, which, until his election, was utterly disregarded as a principle of U.S. foreign policy. “We are still concerned about deprivation of human rights in many of the countries of the world,” Carter noted. “I think Chile would be one of those [places] where concern has been expressed. And I want to be sure that the American people understand that this is a very sensitive issue.”
Jimmy Carter, the peanut farmer from Plains, Georgia, who rose to be the 39th president of the United States, ushered the “sensitive issue” of human rights into the White House. As the first post-Vietnam, post-Watergate President, Carter aimed to restore a righteous decency to a U.S. Government contaminated by the dishonesty and criminality of the Nixon-Kissinger era. Carter also sought to bring a semblance of integrity and morality to the exercise of U.S. foreign policy now known for Henry Kissinger’s imperial abuses of power in smaller countries around the world and embrace of dictatorships in Latin America --most notably the Augusto Pinochet regime in Chile.
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.
Tepid Response to Terrorism
For the rest of the Carter era, U.S.-Chilean relations significantly deteriorated over one of the dictator’s most infamous atrocities: an act of state-sponsored terrorism in September 1976 just a few blocks from the White House that took the lives of former Ambassador Orlando Letelier and his 25-year-old colleague, Ronni Karpen Moffitt. By the time of Carter’s meeting with Pinochet, the FBI had already identified agents from the Chilean secret police, DINA, as responsible. By the end of 1978, CIA intelligence directly implicated General Pinochet for personally ordering the Letelier assassination and leading an effort to obstruct the investigation and cover up his regime’s culpability by pressuring the Chilean Supreme Court to deny U.S. extradition requests for the director and deputy director of DINA.
In response to the most significant act of international terrorism committed in the U.S. capital before 9/11, the Carter administration had several options, including leaking the intelligence it had on Pinochet’s role and then publicly seeking his extradition as the mastermind of a terrorist attack in the capital city of the United States. Given the internal outrage among other high-level Chilean military officers at the notoriety of terrorism that the DINA--which Pinochet essentially directed--had brought on their institution, an aggressive U.S. effort for accountability in the Letelier-Moffitt case conceivably could have contributed to the early demise of the Pinochet dictatorship--advancing both the cause of democracy and human rights.
In a secret “dissent channel” memorandum titled “The Letelier/Moffitt Assassinations: Policy toward Chile,” four courageous State Department officials urged their superiors to pursue that goal. They boldly recommended a strong, public denunciation of Pinochet and the DINA, along with tough sanctions explicitly intended to force Pinochet from power. “Holding out to the Chileans the prospect of repair and definite improvement in our relations when and if a ‘more responsible’ leadership is installed,” they argued, would lead to Pinochet’s removal. Carter’s Justice Department, along with his Assistant Secretary of State for Human Rights, Patricia Derian, also pushed for strong sanctions against the regime, including recalling the U.S. ambassador and suspending diplomatic relations.
But Carter’s National Security Council, led by Zbigniew Brzezinski, opposed any significant sanctions. “By what right can the U.S. State Department judge another government’s laws and court?” the NSC’s Latin America specialist, Robert Pastor, wrote in a secret memo, rejecting forceful retaliatory measures against the regime. On November 30, 1979, President Carter approved six insignificant sanctions, including reducing the military mission to Chile and suspending Export-Import Bank financing. An editorial in the Washington Post characterized the sanctions as “little more than a wrist slap.”
Carter’s Model
The verdict of history on Jimmy Carter’s policies toward Chile is mixed. It was his Justice Department that aggressively investigated the Letelier-Moffitt assassination and identified the repressive regime as responsible; but Carter personally resisted holding Pinochet accountable for this criminal atrocity committed on U.S. soil—a move that might have hastened an end to his pariah dictatorship more than a decade before the will of the Chilean people forced a return to civilian rule.
Yet, as tributes to the late president at his national funeral in Washington and from all over the world reflect, it was Carter’s presidential efforts to elevate the sanctity of human rights as a priority in U.S. foreign policy for which he will most be remembered— particularly in nations such as Chile. There, Carter’s policies played a role in isolating the dictatorship, empowering its victims, and supporting a growing international human rights movement dedicated to holding the Pinochet regime accountable for its atrocities.
The association of the United States with the cause of human rights earned Jimmy Carter the moniker of “the human rights president.” That designation of decency stands as his most enduring legacy. As the United States enters an era of great uncertainty, Carter’s humanitarian respect for human rights remains an illustrative, if not shining, model of what “strength of character” in the White House can, and should be.
