I would hope that the nations of the world might say that we had built a lasting peace, based not on weapons of war but on international policies which reflect our own most precious values. These are not just my goals, and they will not be my accomplishments, but the affirmation of our nation's continuing moral strength and our belief in an undiminished, ever‐expanding American dream.1 President Jimmy Carter, Inaugural Address, 20 January 20, 1977

The assassination of Orlando Letelier, former Chilean ambassador to the United States, by Chilean agents on the streets of Washington, DC, in September 1976 became a rallying point for human rights advocates against the Chilean junta led by Augusto Pinochet. By 1979, ongoing conflicts over Letelier’s assassination — part of the Carter administration’s larger campaign to promote human rights — brought US-Chilean relations to their nadir. Further, the administration’s handling of the crisis alienated some of its strongest domestic supporters, calling into question its commitment to human rights. Letelier’s assassination thus reveals the tensions and paradoxes that marked the Carter administration’s human rights agenda in Latin America and beyond: tensions between effecting change and respecting sovereignty, between high expectations and limited influence, between public affirmation of principle and competing national interests. This article examines how the Carter administration sought to use human rights to move away from the US legacy of intervention and hegemony in the Western Hemisphere, as well as the limits of such a policy.

This chapter analyzes the early development of the Carter administration's human rights agenda, built in tandem with a new approach to U.S.–Latin American relations during its first year in office. From the outset, the Carter administration envisioned a human rights policy that would simultaneously mitigate human rights violations abroad, build U.S. credibility and stature in the international sphere by reasserting a moral and ideological pole of attraction, and signify a move away from the excessive secrecy and power of the Cold War presidency at home. Although Carter largely shared the premises of the Movement's vision, differences over the implementation and signifiers of this policy in high-level diplomacy created rifts between like-minded advocates and policy makers. Carter found himself grappling with the legacies of both U.S. intervention in the region and also congressional and public distrust stemming from past excesses of the Cold War presidency. The administration's options in implementing its policy were bounded by both past regional relations and human rights advocacy itself.

This introductory chapter provides an overview of how different groups deployed human rights language to reform domestic and international power, which reveals the multiple and often conflicting purposes of U.S. human rights policy. U.S. Cold War policies were deeply implicated in the human rights violations perpetrated by many of Latin America's governments. This entanglement of U.S. policy and human rights abuses make the Western Hemisphere a critical site for the development and implementation of U.S. human rights diplomacy during the Ford, Carter, and Reagan presidencies. New human rights advocacy targeting Latin America in the 1970s not only sought to mitigate foreign abuses but also challenge Cold War relationships between the United States and repressive right-wing regimes, contesting presidential prerogatives over the very mechanisms of U.S. foreign policy making. Latin America is essential for revealing the uniquely anti-interventionist and self-critical elements of human rights policy that took shape at this time; it was at the core — not the periphery — of both U.S. domestic policy debates and the new international policies that reached far beyond the hemisphere.