The protection and promotion of human rights and democracy in Latin America, a region historically beset by civil strife, military actions, and foreign intervention, is a difficult task. Before World War II, human rights and democracy promotion were not factors in U.S.–Latin American relations (or, in fact, international relations in general). When the United States or regional governments invoked concerns about human rights or democracy during the Cold War, they did so based on narrow security interests rather than any serious commitment to human rights or democracy. However, there has been a renewed commitment to human rights and democracy in the twenty-first century. This chapter addresses human rights and democracy promotion in the context of the construction of norms and agreements by U.S. and Latin American governments.

This chapter deals with the response of Willy Brandt, West Germany’s former chancellor and towering moral figure, to the 1981 imposition of martial law in Poland. As Chancellor, Brandt had played a central role in putting human rights-related questions into the Final Act of the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE) and thus on the agenda of East-West relations. In December 1981, however, he demanded Western restraint toward events in Poland and even expressed some understanding for the Polish government. To explain this stance, this chapter deciphers the ideas and wider imaginaries that informed his actions, an approach that also provides insights into the intellectual changes that powered the human rights revolution of the 1970s and the 1980s. Brandt, this chapter shows, understood human rights work in a way indebted to 1950s and 1960s discourses revolving around a vision of competing political and social systems, of antagonistic ways of organizing society, of fundamentally different views of how long-term historical processes shaped the fate of nations. Enmeshed in this culture, Brandt believed that a successful human rights policy had to take structural constraints and broad time horizons into account. The demands of the dissidents—calling upon the international community to intervene for the human rights of everyone, everywhere—seemed to Brandt not morally objectionable so much as implausible and unreasonable.

This chapter discusses the impact of the imposition of martial law in Poland in December 1981 on a follow-up meeting of the Conference on Security and Cooperation (CSCE) in Madrid. Thus, the chapter complicates the widely held view of the Final Act of the CSCE as a milestone for the human rights revolution of the 1970s, arguing instead that six years after the Final Act had been signed the position of human rights in international politics remained strongly contested and highly precarious. To make this point, this chapter focuses particularly on the response of the US, the UK, West Germany, France, and Italy to events in Poland.Thus, this chapter demonstrates that, when confronted with massive human rights violations in Poland, the US government did not invoke the CSCE's human rights provisions so much as try to use the situation in Poland as a pretext to end the entire CSCE process. West European governments, on the other hand, insisted on the CSCE Final Act's noninterference clause. It was only a rag-tag alliance of activists from Western civil societies – trade unionists, Cold War hardliners, French Left-wing intellectuals, even peace activists – which pushed their governments to pressure Warsaw to respect human rights.

Chapter 3 examines how the SED leadership used “socialist human rights” in international relations. Seeking to break its diplomatic isolation outside of the socialist bloc, the SED decided to use the UN International Year for Human Rights in 1968 to launch a propaganda campaign aimed at the Third World to demonstrate East German solidarity against Western imperialism. Although this effort failed, the bureaucratic machinations surrounding the campaign cemented for SED officials that socialism and human rights were one and the same and that the GDR was on the right side of this global struggle. This paved the way for a series of treaties and agreements, including recognition from West Germany and entry into the United Nations, that included public commitments to international rights treaties and culminated in the GDR’s signing of the Helsinki Accords in 1975, which finally led to universal diplomatic recognition of East German sovereignty.

Chapter 4 looks at the beginnings of human rights dissent in East Germany, starting with the Christian churches in 1968 as part of a plebiscite on a new socialist constitution during the International Year for Human Rights. Although Christians were among the loudest voices calling for the entrenchment of human rights during the discussions surrounding the constitution, Protestant church leaders decided, in the wake of the Helsinki Accords, to endorse the SED’s claims to realise human rights. In so doing, they hoped to gain recognition from the state and more effectively facilitate private protests against state abuses of their congregants. Many seeking to leave the GDR turned to human rights provisions in the Helsinki Accords and other international agreements to argue their case, but when these demands were refused human rights rhetoric was largely abandoned. Similarly, while the East German intelligentsia became increasingly disillusioned with the GDR in the 1970s, few wanted to take up the cause of human rights against the SED for fear of being seen as endorsing Western anti-communism.