"Human rights is the soul of our foreign policy" : Jimmy Carter e a diplomacia estadunidense para o Chile

Abstract

This dissertation aims to analyze how the human rights foreign policy of President Jimmy Carter intervened in the Chilean dictatorship under Augusto Pinochet. Therefore, I propose to discuss the measures taken by the Democrat and his team of diplomats based on the analysis of the documentation released by the United States through the Chile Declassification Project, a collection poorly explored by the Latin American historiography. In examining the period from 1977 to 1981, there is a clear reorientation of American foreign policy, which leaves anticommunism to contemplate human rights. Unlike Argentina and Uruguay, Carter gave a vote of confidence to Augusto Pinochet after the closure of the Chilean secret police (DINA) and after heard the dictator’s proposal for a peaceful return to democracy. However, in the final half of the U.S President tenure, new acts of state sponsored terrorism orchestrated by the Chilean dictatorship were discovered and Carter opted for application of harsh economic sanctions for the Chilean government. We seek to understand whether these two different stages of the Chile-US relations have had some effect on the Chilean dictatorship.