Rights, Reports, and Regionalism:
The Chilean Coup and the Inter-American Narrowness
by Francisco-José Quintana
Published on 22 December 2023
[The Latin American leaders of my generation] lacked power, and they lacked power because they allowed foreign capital to continue to control their essential wealth. In other words, they did not seek to achieve economic independence for their countries.
President Salvador Allende in conversation with Régis Debray, 1971
Unpleasant News and an OAS stopgap
On 20 September 1973, US National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger received a phone call from Frank Mankiewicz, a Latin America expert from the progressive wing of the Democratic Party. Mankiewicz sought to advise Kissinger, soon to become Secretary of State, on the US response to the coup d’état in Chile. Just days prior, on 11 September, General Augusto Pinochet had led a military coup to overthrow the democratically elected socialist government of President Salvador Allende.
Mankiewicz emphasised that this was ‘not your kind of classic Latin American coup by any means’. He warned Kissinger that he was going to start receiving ‘a fair amount of rather unpleasant reporting’ because the Chilean military were ‘not very nice people and very insecure’ and there were ‘probably a lot more people dead’ and ‘torture going on and people being held in the stadiums’. Alert to the diverse set of US interests affected by the coup, Mankiewicz suggested that ‘regardless of what kind of face the US is going to put toward this at a very minimum we could be talking about human rights’. He offered one concrete proposal: there was an ‘OAS [Organization of American States] rights commission and unlike anything connected with OAS [it] has done some good work in the past … almost in spite of [itself] and has some respect down there’. Notably, he added, ‘it would be very difficult for these people to refuse to let it in’.
This conversation not only reminds one of the exceptional violence of the coup; it also raises questions about the response of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) and the broader trajectory of inter-American regional law and organisation. Mankiewicz’s reference to the Commission—even if he did not get its name quite right—highlights the institutional gravitas and the respect it had already garnered within inter-American diplomacy by the time of the coup. This inference appears intriguing, given that histories of human rights and Latin America tend to portray the IACHR—and inter-American human rights more broadly—as ascending to relevance chiefly as a response to the authoritarian violence of the 1970s, not as an institution with pre-existing prominence. If the Commission had already become an important actor prior to the surge of authoritarianism that defines the self-accepted history of human rights in Latin America, one might ask: what ideals and interests guided the Commission? What could individuals like Mankiewicz (or Kissinger) expect from the Commission – and did its subsequent actions align with their expectations?
Enter the Action Body
One month after the coup, IACHR Executive Secretary Luis Reque arrived in Santiago. Over an intense five-day trip, Reque visited detention centres and met with various authorities and victims of human rights abuses. His disquieting findings—‘harassment, abuses, maltreatment, and, in some cases, torture’ had taken place—prompted him to recommend that the IACHR considered proceeding with a full on-site investigation. Acting on his assessment, the Commission sought information on forty-two individuals who were reportedly disappeared, executed, tortured, or detained without explanation. Met with evasive responses from the Chilean government, the IACHR formally requested authorisation for an ‘in loco observation’. Following a tense, drawn-out correspondence, Chilean authorities ultimately granted the IACHR’s request.
The IACHR commenced its twelve-day mission to Chile on 22 July 1974, inaugurating an era of human rights oversight in Chile under Pinochet. Anchored in law and precedent, its approach rested on three key mechanisms. First, there were the two on-site investigative missions, which set the tone. However, no subsequent missions were conducted due to escalating frictions with the government. Second, the Commission compiled four detailed reports on the human rights situation in Chile, published in the years 1974, 1976, 1977, and 1985. Finally, throughout this period, the IACHR furnished the Chilean government with recommendations, often integrated into the reports.
This comprehensive response was far from an ad hoc improvisation in the face of urgency; it was an enactment of the Commission’s ethos as an ‘action body’ – a term coined by US diplomat and international lawyer Durward Sandifer, one of its inaugural members. Originally established in 1959 with the discreet task of promoting human rights, the IACHR progressively transformed itself into a much more ambitious body for their protection. During the 1960s, it broadened its powers in two decisive steps: first, by interpreting its foundational instruments expansively, claiming powers such as considering individual petitions and conducting on-site investigations; and second, by deploying these self-asserted powers in Cold War hotspots like Cuba and the Dominican Republic. Recognising the Commission’s role in preserving geopolitical stability, American states eventually formalised these new powers through amendments to the OAS Charter and the American Convention on Human Rights. As early as 1967, a US commentator described the emerging inter-American human rights programme as uniquely suited for a backward region, focusing on mitigating ‘more flagrant violations of human rights’ during internal strife rather than adjudicating individual claims. While the IACHR showed expansive ambition in addressing human rights issues on a broad scale, its focus remained constrained when it came to substance: it focused on civil and political rights, and largely sidestepped material economic concerns.
On the Political Economy of Inter-American Human Rights
Chilean Orlando Letelier likely had the IACHR as much as Amnesty International in mind when he wrote the 1976 essay that has been discussed by key human rights thinkers – Naomi Klein, Susan Marks, Samuel Moyn, and Jessica Whyte among them. Former Ambassador to the US under Allende with the defence of the nationalisation of copper as his main assignment, Letelier argued that ‘repression for the majorities and “economic freedom” for small privileged groups are in Chile two sides of the same coin’. He criticised the ‘convenient concept of a social system in which “economic freedom” and political terror coexist without touching each other’, which allowed ‘financial spokesmen to support their concept of “freedom” while exercising their verbal muscles in defense of human rights’. Months later, he was killed by Chilean government agents in Washington D.C.
The IACHR’s reports on Chile presented harrowing pictures of state crimes, but one would not learn much from them about the coup or the political, economic, and historical context of the violence. In its first report on Chile, the IACHR went to considerable lengths to sidestep any accusations of acting ‘politically’. ‘It is not for the Commission’, the introduction stated, ‘to decide whether the present political regime is more or less desirable than the previous regime’. The conclusion went further, explaining that:
[The Commission did] not count as violations of human rights, the losses of life that occurred on both sides in the first few days of this process, so that it may entirely avoid the consideration, which otherwise would be essential, on the legality or illegality and the justice or injustice, of the actions of the previous regime, a topic which is outside its competence.
A contemporary US commentator praised this decision as ‘a wise course to follow’ which ‘strengthens the force of the Commission’s conclusions’, discrediting ‘in advance any argument that the Commission was motivated by any “political” considerations’.
Decades later, Klein famously presented a different take on the apolitical stance of human rights action. Focusing on Amnesty International, Klein argued that the 1970s Southern Cone served as a laboratory for both Chicago School neoliberalism and the grassroots human rights movement. While conceding that the latter played a decisive role in ending the worst abuses, Klein argues that ‘by focusing purely on the crimes and not on the reasons behind them, the human rights movement also helped the Chicago School ideology to escape from its first bloody laboratory virtually unscathed’. Samuel Moyn, however, finds Klein’s account ‘exaggerated and implausible’, since there is ‘no reason to think that a human rights stigmatising “superficial” abuses could not coexist with a more “structural” politics’. According to Moyn, human rights did not help produce but have been merely ‘a powerless companion of market fundamentalism’ and inequality.
While Moyn rightly cautions against facile assumptions of causality, it is important not to underestimate the perils of false contingency when examining the architecture of inter-American regionalism. Emerging in the 1960s and heavily influenced by the IACHR, the framework of inter-American human rights evolved with distinct priorities. It largely side-lined issues of inter-state economic cooperation and equality; prioritised civil and political over social and economic rights; adopted a narrow understanding of democracy; focused on flagrant violations in contexts of political turmoil; and dovetailed with projects of liberal institutional development on matters of rule of law, elections, and security. As I develop in forthcoming work, the ascent of this framework was enabled by modes of international legal argument and practice that favoured pragmatism, policy, and (non-legal) expertise over legal form – in the name of preventing violence, preserving stability, and promoting orderly change. This overt instrumentalisation curtailed the possibilities of political contestation through law and thus simultaneously hindered more structural regional visions (for related arguments in rather different contexts see, famously, Koskenniemi, and Rodiles).
The events in Chile bring the connection between the rise of inter-American human rights and the fall of more ambitious regionalist projects into sharp focus. Allende’s fall unfolded against the backdrop of unsuccessful efforts to transform regional economic relations through law, from the failed Economic Agreement of Bogotá (1948), through a perennially postponed international economic conference, all the way to the purportedly multilateral Alliance for Progress development programme. Allende himself had been a strong critic of the Alliance for Progress, arguing that it failed to address Latin America’s ‘dependency’. Chile’s nationalisation of copper—and the subsequent ‘international economic boycott’ that followed—formed part of the lead-up to the coup, set against an Inter-American System that had proven unable (and unwilling) to address the perennial problem of the prices of raw materials and the role of foreign private investment. As broader regional economic aspirations crashed, the narrow regional human rights framework rose. The focus on specific civil and political rights and the deliberate depoliticisation were not merely tactical responses to the Pinochet dictatorship; they were integral facets of the IACHR’s established approach by that time. Key (legal) conditions of possibility for the development of this regional human rights framework that ultimately served to denounce and resist authoritarian violence also had broader detrimental impacts on the advancement of structural politics.
‘Who is going to use whom?’
At one point in their famous conversations, President Allende and French writer Régis Debray discussed an existential question for Chile and Latin America: ‘who is going to use whom?’. Would it be the proletarians or the bourgeoisie, the workers or the bureaucrats, the Latin American countries or the OAS? As we reflect on the 50th anniversary of the coup against Allende’s Popular Unity government, we might ask the same question in relation to structural ambition and narrow human rights politics.
It is tempting to view, with many others, the IACHR’s actions in Chile as putting an end to the selectivity of a body that had until then concentrated too much on curbing real or imagined communism. The IACHR undoubtedly played a central role in denouncing the worst abuses of Pinochet’s brutal dictatorship and in protecting their victims. However, the concern surrounding the politics of inter-American human rights transcends mere selectivity. Politics did more than (simply) determine where the IACHR could intervene; they fundamentally shaped the overarching contours and ideology of this human rights programme – resulting in a framework that is, at best, highly limited for reform. Put more succinctly: there has always been a politics behind the veneer of anti-politics.
While it is crucial to remember the many victims of human rights violations and acknowledge the individuals and organisations who exposed these abuses, an international legal appraisal of the coup in Chile should also extend to other dimensions. The very ‘promise of human rights’ carries the weight of structural transformation, including at the level of international economic law that preoccupied Allende (see, e.g., the contributions to this symposium by Cong and Saunders) – and many other Latin American international lawyers, economists, and diplomats before him (see, e.g., Perrone & Schneiderman, Thornton, and myself). International legal thought can be instrumental in this transformative task. By scrutinising the institutional arrangements of global governance as expressed in legal detail, lawyers and legal thinkers can elucidate their inner workings, thereby enriching discussions about alternative institutional possibilities. However, achieving this vision demands a rupture with the pervasive jurisprudential idealisation of existing arrangements – an idealisation that, perhaps especially in Latin America and especially focusing on human rights protection, veils the possibilities for meaningful change. In other words, advancing structural change calls for an expansion of our legal attention – and the true fulfilment of the promise of human rights calls for their de-idealisation. This, too, is a human rights lesson from the coup in Chile.
Francisco José Quintana is a Max Weber Fellow at the European University Institute and an Associate Editor at the European Journal of International Law. This piece draws on his doctoral research at the University of Cambridge.