Measuring Human Rights

Chile and US Foreign Policy
In the years that immediately followed the military coup d'État of 11 September 1973,
the military regime engaged in a counter-offensive against civil society and
committed gross violations of human rights. By 1976, Chile had passed a series of
Constitutional Acts that institutionalised the regime and made General Pinochet the
President of the Republic. Alongside these developments, the regime created the
National Intelligence Directorate (DINA), which was responsible for internal security
and arguably, committed most of the human rights abuses for the remainder of the
Pinochet years. Jimmy Carter was elected President of the United States in 1976, and
shortly thereafter declared that US foreign policy would be guided by a concern for
human rights. Diplomatic pressure and public pronouncements by the administration
may have led to the promulgation of the 1980 Chilean Constitution, which gave a
further institutional legitimacy to the regime and was accompanied by an easing in
repressive tactics.
The arrival of the Reagan Administration in the US led to a policy shift away from a
concern for human rights, and Chile plunged back into a highly repressive period
through the mid-1980s, and then experienced a failed plebiscite for Pinochet in 1988,
followed by a rapid transition to democracy. In the event, the Reagan administration
claimed that its policy of support for the Pinochet regime led to its eventual return to
democracy.
3
In this brief account it is possible to see how both the Carter and the Reagan policy
could be viewed as having a positive impact on human rights protection, even though
ideologically and in practical terms, both policies were diametrically opposed to one
another. An easing of repression followed Carter's human rights policy
pronouncements, while Reagan's support for Pinochet was ultimately followed by a
democratic transition. Judging the impact of human rights policy in either case, is
difficult from this kind of anecdotal evidence, where time -series measures of rights
protection and estimates of possible impact of policy can be better approximated with
quantitative analysis (see below).