This chapter examines efforts by government officials to blunt the impact of social movements on their human rights policymaking. Grassroots solidarity advocates tried to save the victims of the Argentine military regime – including West German citizens ensnared in the Dirty War – broaden the refugee admission program to Argentinean political refugees, and end abuses in the Colonia Dignidad in Chile. Government officials and mid-level Social Democratic politicians did not welcome these demands because they saw activists demands as unwelcome intruders in the making of foreign policy. Yet the Social-Liberal coalition’s attempt to shove aside popular advocacy for human rights in Latin America failed in the face of solidarity advocates’ refusal to give up. State officials and mid-level Social Democrats responded with a technocratic human rights policy that prioritized expert knowledge over the demands of social movements.

This chapter argues that a neoconservative, market-friendly vision of human rights gained hegemony during the first four years of Helmut Kohl’s chancellorship (1982–1986). Christian Democrat Heiner Geißler, the Konrad Adenauer Foundation, Nicaraguan anti-Sandinista activists, market-friendly human rights advocates from the IGFM, and neoconservative thinkers worked to vilify Sandinista Nicaragua and the Salvadoran guerrillas as human rights violators. Claims by market-friendly human rights advocates conflicted with reports from NGOs such as Amnesty International or Americas Watch. Their evenhanded assessments served market-critical advocates to rebut conservatives’ exaggerated claims. However, government officials opted to accept the conservative interpretation. Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher and State Minister in the Foreign Ministry Jürgen Möllemann presented El Salvador as a successful example of democratization that Nicaragua ought to emulate. By 1986, West German government officials dropped the ”silent diplomacy” and took human rights claims seriously in the making of foreign policy. But they also chose a diluted version that excluded social and economic rights.

In late eighteenth-century Havana, residents frequently referred to the existence of large communities of negros and pardos as “officers in the trade of painter” and the authors of “exquisite works.” But who are these artists, and where can we find their works? What sort of works did they produce? Where were they trained, and how did they master their crafts with such perfection? By centering the artistic production and social worlds of artists of African descent in Cuba since the colonial period, this revisionist history of Cuban art provides compelling answers to these questions. Carefully researched and cogently argued, the book explores the gendered racial biases that have informed the constitution of the Cuban art canon; exposes how the ideologues of the slave-owning planter class institutionalized the association between “fine arts” and key attributes of whiteness; and examines how this association continues to shape art historical narratives in Cuba.

Contrary to Central America, the politics of emergency remained an essential framework for solidarity activists with the Southern Cone. However, these activists mobilized an explicitly market-critical interpretation of the human rights problems in Chile and Argentina. Grassroots human rights advocates criticized the lack of thoroughgoing judicial accountability, and the continuation of the economic policies imposed by the outgoing military regimes. Government officials, conservative politicians, and market-friendly NGOs such as the IGFM rebuffed these demands. They endorsed market-friendly democratization, the cornerstones of which were a negotiated ending to military rule, continuation of the neoliberal reforms initiated by the military regimes, and the non-prosecution of most perpetrators of human rights abuses. Pro-Pinochet activists favored a protracted process of democratization in Chile to ensure the continuation of his economic policies. This clashed with the efforts of Christian Democrats Heiner Geißler and Norbert Blüm, who wished to speed up the end of Pinochet’s rule and endorsed the acceptance of left-wing political asylum seekers to the FRG on humanitarian grounds.

The Preface introduces some of the key questions and analytical points of the book, its sources, and some of its contributions. It details how the book was inspired by an art exhibition that the authors co-organized with art historian Bárbaro Martínez-Ruiz and the process through which some of the questions posed by the exhibition became a book project. It discusses how it was frequently difficult to assess whether an artist was racialized, at least in some social contexts, as a person of African descent, and the author’s strategies to handle this question.

This chapter examines the emergence of the Chile solidarity movement, a broad umbrella of Latin American exiles, West German New Leftists, Social Democrats, trade unionists, and orthodox Communists united by the idea that the Pinochet regime was fascist that required their opposition given Germany’s fascist past. The chapter explains why these leftists employed a human rights rhetoric that leftists had largely shunned in the 1960s. It argues that from 1973 to 1976 there was a widespread consensus among solidarity activists that the demand for human rights and expressing solidarity with Chile’s socialist experiment under Allende were compatible claims. Human rights became part of a common strategy to secure the international isolation of the Chilean military regime. These “politics of emergency” enabled the close collaboration between leftists and Amnesty International. These “politics of emergency” were controversial, but the Chile solidarity movement was forced to adopt them to help the Chilean left survive. The chapter concludes by showing how this consensus weakened after 1976 because Maoists rejected the endless continuation of the politics of emergency.