On the Poverty and Possibility of Human Rights in Latin

American History

Patrick William Kelly

Humanity: An International Journal of Human Rights, Humanitarianism,

and Development, Volume 5, Number 3, Winter 2014, pp. 435-451 (Review)

Published by University of Pennsylvania Press

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/hum.2014.0025

For additional information about this article

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/562807

Access provided by Universitaetsbibliothek Frankfurt a.M (20 Oct 2017 16:53 GMT)
 Essay-Review

On the Poverty and Possibility of Human Rights

in Latin American History

Patrick William Kelly

Human Rights and Transnational Solidarity in Cold War

Latin America
Jessica Stites Mor, ed.
Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2013. x Ⳮ 264 pp.

We Cannot Remain Silent: Opposition to the Brazilian Military

Dictatorship in the United States
James N. Green
Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010. xiv Ⳮ 472 pp.

If the global history of human rights has expanded considerably in the past ten years,
much of it still remains unwritten.1 This is especially the case when it comes to Latin
America. Indeed, Latin America’s absence from what is admittedly a very young field
of human rights history is peculiar if one thinks of its prominence in so many of the
twentieth century’s landmark human rights events.2 Scholars in disciplines other than
history have stressed the Latin American contribution to the normative codification
of human rights ideas in the 1940s, whether in the Universal Declaration of Human
Rights or the American Declaration of the Rights and Duties of Man.3 Yet too often
this has taken the form of a celebration of a unified ‘‘Latin American tradition’’ of
human rights, as if all countries spoke with one voice, or of a hagiography of stand-
alone nationalist figures—the Chilean Hernán Santa Cruz or Cuban Guy Pérez
Cisneros—rather than a meticulous inspection of (geo)political calculations.4 What
did the idea of human rights mean for the Latin American statesmen who championed
them in the 1940s? How were they reconciled with the region’s historically robust
protection of national sovereignty and the doctrine of nonintervention? Can one
detect any popular expression of human rights in Latin America that might suggest
that the 1940s ‘‘Latin American’’ voice was spoken outside of international diplomatic
fora?
Since the late 1960s, Latin America has been at once the target of human rights
advocacy and the site of a series of monumental developments in local, regional,
national, and transnational human rights politics alike. Western activists from organi-
zations like Amnesty International and later Americas Watch (the regional forerunner
to Human Rights Watch) turned to Latin America to expose rampant state use of

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 torture, summary executions, forced exile, and disappearances in a variety of countries
that fell under military rule: Brazil after 1964, Chile and Uruguay after 1973, Argentina
after 1976, and in Central American countries in the 1980s.5 At the same time,
domestic human rights organizations, groups like the Vicarı́a de la Solidaridad in
Chile and the Madres de la Plaza de Mayo in Argentina, emerged as frontline
defenders of human rights in domestic confrontations with repressive military dicta-
torships. The Catholic Church in Latin America especially stands out for its
pioneering protection of human rights victims, starting first in the Southern Cone in
the late 1960s and 1970s but also in Central America in the 1980s (Argentina is a
notable exception).6 Yet, shockingly, scholars of human rights have paid very little
attention to the transnational vectors of Catholic (and the broader Christian)
engagement with human rights.7
Anthropologists and political scientists, not historians, have taken the lead in
writing some of the first studies of human rights in Latin America. Kathryn Sikkink’s
trailblazing construction of transnational Latin American advocacy networks is
perhaps the most significant, as well as her efforts alongside Margaret Keck to revolu-
tionize international relations theory by providing a constructivist model for
considering the role of nonstate actors in international politics.8 The anthropologists
Sally Engle Merry, Peggy Levitt, and Winifred Tate sketched intimate portraits of
human rights activism, either through showing how human rights concepts are trans–
lated or ‘‘vernacularized’’ into local idioms, in the case of Levitt and Merry, or in
revealing the complex and convoluted ways that the language of human rights spread
in Colombia, in the case of Tate—noteworthy in no small part because its multifaceted
violencias failed to spark the flames of transnational advocacy networks to quite the
same extent as those of its South American neighbors.9 The political scientist Vania
Markarian has contributed the most fine-grained analysis of transnational human
rights networks in her study of Uruguayan exiles from the late 1960s through the early
1980s.10 And as many Latin American countries moved from authoritarian to demo-
cratic forms of government in the 1980s and after, a sizable scholarly literature has
emerged on truth and reconciliation, as well as on the promise and limits of (post-)
transitional justice.11
Notwithstanding these works, we have few histories of human rights in Latin
America that parse what actors in particular times and places thought about human
rights, how they used the language, and the ways in which it was a galvanizing prin-
ciple for their diplomacy or activism.12 The few exceptions are works by scholars of
U.S. diplomacy and by historians and scholars from Latin America.13 But even those
works rarely engage the nascent field of human rights history. This review essay turns
to two recent works on human rights in Latin American history to encourage further
discussion about the relative dearth of scholarship on human rights in Latin America
and to suggest a few future lines of inquiry for scholars of transnationalism and human
rights in the region.

A Complicated Relationship: Transnational Solidarity and Human Rights

Given the state of the field, Human Rights and Transnational Solidarity in Cold War
Latin America, a compilation of essays edited by Jessica Stites Mor, shifts attention to

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a pair of topics that has gone unaddressed in Latin American historiography. The
volume aims ‘‘to establish a theoretical frame for the study of transnational solidarity
in Cold War Latin America and to inform the intellectual currents of human rights
and citizenship struggles from this perspective’’ (Stites Mor, 4–5). This is an important
intervention, as even the best studies of Cold War Latin America do not address
human rights and touch only briefly on solidarity.14 But it is a tall order, for both
solidarity and human rights are capacious and confounding concepts. On the one
hand, the compilation provides illuminating histories of transnational solidarity in
Latin America. Indeed, the volume deserves praise for its nuanced attention to the
ways that transnational solidarity has shaped and been reshaped by local contexts. The
editor has assembled a diverse array of scholars (all but one are historians) of Latin
America whose work has shown a deft sensitivity to the challenges of writing histories
that integrate local, national, and transnational levels of analysis. On the other hand,
Human Rights and Transnational Solidarity in Cold War Latin America is sometimes
disconnected from the emergent scholarship on human rights.
These tensions and silences emerge most clearly in the interplay of the volume’s
two intended interventions in the areas of ‘‘transnational solidarity’’ and ‘‘human
rights.’’ It sheds light on the history of transnational solidarity in Latin America most
clearly in Alison Bruey’s essay on the interaction between transnational solidarity and
Chilean history (120–42). In examining how solidarity movements affected poblaciones
(poor and working-class neighborhoods in Santiago), Bruey weaves together a two-
part historical survey of Marxist and Catholic conceptions of solidarity. Her essay is
particularly strong at drawing out the sweeping changes in the Catholic Church in
the post–Vatican II world and its radicalizing effects on parts of the Latin American
clergy. This is expressed in her analysis of the 1968 Episcopal Conference at Medellı́n
as well as in the growing cachet of Liberation Theology, evinced in the works of
Gustavo Gutiérrez. She acknowledges that the 1973 coup in Chile changed the nature
of solidarity and human rights, noting that ‘‘what ultimately came to be called solid-
aridad initially arose in response to the human rights crisis in all its facets’’ (127).
Bruey explains how by the mid-1970s the notion of solidarity took on an all-
encompassing communitarian ethos. Catholics were encouraged to help both the
targeted left and the poor; in this sense, solidarity ‘‘meant working together to protect
one another, solve collective problems, and build community’’ in the face of what
Steve Stern has called the ‘‘policide’’ of the political left and the neoliberal structural
reforms carried out by Pinochet’s government (130).15 Yet, in the second half of the
essay, discussion of human rights largely fades away. Such a study of solidarity
divorced from human rights could likely be justified—solidarity as a concept has a
longer and more robust history than human rights—but it makes less sense in a
volume that so manifestly desires to put the two concepts into productive dialogue.
In fact, neither the introduction nor any of its contributors offers a sustained
engagement with the historiography of human rights. And while the volume is
packaged as a ‘‘critical human rights’’ study—it is part of the new Critical Human
Rights series from the University of Wisconsin Press—the category itself and the
volume’s relationship to it are underdeveloped.16
The conceptual and methodological hurdles involved with writing human rights

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 history are manifold, and the volume throws a number of issues into sharp relief. The
first is definitional: what is human rights history and how should its parameters be
defined? Many studies treat ‘‘human rights’’ as a timeless concept rather than one with
an evolutionary history of its own. Before scholars interrogate the relative value of
human rights for transnational social movements, they first must lay the groundwork
for a historicization of the idea and its dissemination as an activist language. In her
introduction, Stites Mor points to the 1973 Chilean coup as ‘‘something of a watershed
in terms of the articulation of an international human rights platform.’’ As I have
argued elsewhere, she is undoubtedly right.17 However, beyond the Chilean coup,
future scholarship on human rights in Latin America should aim to recover why,
when, and where Latin America actors started to talk about human rights in any
sustained fashion. This will involve ascertaining the validity of claims that seek to
connect the 1940s Latin American embrace of human rights by diplomats and bureau-
crats at international organizations to the 1970s flowering of human rights talk and
practice among social activists.18 I am less certain that there is a strong linkage between
the two periods: not only because there is no evidence of any broad-based social
movement that consistently employed human rights ideas and language in Latin
America (or anywhere) in the 1940s through the 1960s, but also because the Latin
American ‘‘tradition’’ of social and economic rights is largely absent from the 1970s
renaissance, with the possible and partial exception of more capacious claims made by
members of the Catholic Church.19
An essential task for scholars will be to differentiate the use of ‘‘human rights’’ and
‘‘solidarity’’ in activist movements. Although human rights language was spoken by
many activists, its most poignant defense came in the form of prototypical NGOs like
Amnesty International. Amnesty eschewed any overt mention of politics in favor of a
depoliticized defense of human rights. This took the form of a balanced approach to
activism—the rule of threes, for example, mandated that Amnesty activists adopt pris-
oners of conscience from the West, the socialist world, and the Global South.
Solidarity activists, in contrast, were clearly driven much more by political pursuits.
While they made some appeals to human rights, and some did more so than others,
the majority of solidarity activists espoused anti-imperialist and Marxist beliefs that
struck Amnesty members as too radical. The stark delineation between solidarity and
human rights as discussed in this review is admittedly a bit schematic—there was
often overlap between the two groups, and solidarity groups often evolved over time
to embrace the language of human rights—but future scholarship will note that when
activists spoke the language of human rights, they did so with many different ideas in
mind.
A second challenge for historians of human rights is how best to integrate varying
levels of analysis. Human rights activism developed in Latin America as a result of
interactions among local, national, and transnational actors. It is for this reason that
it makes less sense to wall off Latin America or to write the history of human rights
and solidarity as part of a ‘‘South-South’’ model of global connections.20 Latin
American historians should consider the influence of Northern activists, many of
whom are rarely present in extant works on the region. These include NGOs like
Amnesty International, intergovernmental groups at the United Nations and the

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Organization of American States, the United States Congress and State Department,
the World Council of Churches, and others who developed transnational ties with
domestic human rights groups throughout Latin America. Exiles from Latin America
are foundational to this story, for their personal memories and lived experiences with
violence helped connect the domestic to the transnational.21
A third and related issue for Latin American historians is the long shadow cast by
the cultural turn. This turn has informed a generation of scholars who, at times, hew
reflexively to the sanctity of the local in providing historical explanations.22 The close
attention to the local has productively destabilized and disturbed what has been
thought of as hegemonic and elite-driven. ‘‘Every member of a transnational network
or movement, no matter how supranational or widespread,’’ Alison Bruey posits,
‘‘emerges from and acts within a local context or contexts that inform his or her
political and cultural understandings, interpretations, and decisions’’ (136). It is a
useful caveat, but one can overemphasize local agency. At the same time, scholars
presume the existence of human rights as an already extant transnational ethics. Some
commentators from Latin America writing in solidarity with critical leftists in the
United States rejected the U.S. government’s use of human rights.23 But to start in
the late 1970s puts the cart before the horse. It misses an earlier moment of productive
construction, of engagement and conversation among activists in Latin America and
abroad, and subsumes the social construction of human rights discourse into a static
insistence on the hegemony of U.S. imperialism. While it is necessary to understand
local events, it is also important to grasp how the local helped to form a more transna-
tional ethos of human rights. The two were mutually constitutive rather than
endogenous phenomena.
Brenda Elsey’s essay in the volume helps us to think through some of these conun-
drums. She points to some of the transnational connections that were so vital to both
the local and the global surge in human rights activism from the 1970s on: ‘‘Human
rights bridged activists from divergent political traditions, largely in Europe and North
America, including labor unions, Amnesty International, the Catholic Church, and
the United Nations Commission for Refugees’’ (178). Elsey draws on a ‘‘popular
culture’’ analytic to artfully show how Chilean arpilleras (Chilean folk tapestries)
circulated throughout the globe as a keepsake for those in solidarity with Chilean
victims of state violence. Elsey also looks at the 1987 Miss Universe pageant, where
the Chilean Cecilia Bolocco took the top prize, ostensibly vindicating Pinochet’s rule
to the Chilean people and to many throughout the globe only a year before he was
voted out of office in the 1988 plebiscite (179). In so doing, she shows how the local,
national, and transnational can and should be part of the same conversation in human
rights scholarship.
Elsey’s essay attests to the promise of scholarship like Human Rights and Transna-
tional Solidarity in Cold War Latin America that seeks to push the fields of Cold War,
transnational, and Latin American history into part of the same analytical frame. In
the one essay not written by a historian, Russell Cobb points in especially rich direc-
tions as he explores the ways that writers like Carlos Fuentes of the Latin American
‘‘Boom’’ developed a ‘‘cosmopolitan transnationalism’’ that cannot be dismissed as

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 the mere rubber-stamping of political propaganda (104). Cobb cites Pascale Casa-
nova’s notion of an ‘‘international literary space’’ that seems to me helpful for thinking
through how Latin American exiles and activists operated in a similar transnational
human rights space (102). Cobb’s work, and other works like it, suggest that the
cultural Cold War in Latin America is one particularly promising avenue for future
historical studies of transnational Latin American history.24

Transnational Antitorture Campaigns and Brazil

James N. Green’s We Cannot Remain Silent: Opposition to the Brazilian Military Dicta-
torship in the United States is an especially important contribution to the new field of
Latin American human rights history (Green, 2–12). In part, it introduces the kinds
of transnational human rights activism that would expand so dramatically throughout
1970s South America into the 1980s Central American cases. But it also offers an
innovative analytical optic for tracing how a small group of Brazilian exiles worked
with transnational activists in the United States to draw attention to Brazil. As scholars
have noted in a string of glowing reviews, We Cannot Remain Silent serves as a model
for the type of transnational, multiarchival, multistate research mandated by topics
such as human rights activism.25
Relying on archival collections and oral interviews in the United States and Brazil,
Green examines a transnational advocacy network of leftists, exiles, artists, academics,
politicians, and clergy in Europe, Latin America, and the United States who started
to denounce the rise of state violence in Brazil in the late 1960s and early 1970s. In
fact, the title of the book, which sets up a U.S.-Brazil binary, belies some of the
transnational connections involved among activists who floated among different coun-
tries in the Atlantic world, including Mexico, the United States, and France, among
others. We Cannot Remain Silent cogently captures the 1964 coup in Brazil, when the
military deposed João Goulart with the support of the United States. But it is to the
temporal window between the 1968 decree of the draconian Institutional Act No. 5
(AI-5) and the 1973 Chilean coup that Green devotes most attention, when activists
zeroed in on the Brazilian government’s abuse of torture. AI-5 slammed the doors shut
on Congress, disbanded political parties, eviscerated habeas corpus rights, ramped up
censorship, and purged the universities of ‘‘subversive’’ academics. It most notably
precipitated the arrest, torture, and occasional killing of hundreds of suspected
Marxists.26 After 1973, as Green notes, Brazil was largely eclipsed by transnational
activism in response to the advent of military rule in Chile.
The book seamlessly stitches together a top-down analysis of governmental sources
with a more bottom-up picture of social movement organizing in both the United
States and Brazil (and sometimes Europe). As his social movement sourcebase thins
out—he is dealing with a very small number of activists, perhaps no more than a few
dozen, who lack institutionalized archives in almost all cases—Green complements
the paper trail with over one hundred interviews with American and Brazilian actors
who lived through this period. His use of oral history, particularly in the smaller
capı́tulos (minichapters) that unite the longer analytical chapters, is particularly well
done. The minichapters allow Green to explore smaller, more nuanced stories of how
activism affected the daily lives of victims in Brazil and abroad, especially Brazilian

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exiles. In various capı́tulos, as well as in his ‘‘Performing Opposition’’ chapter, Green
brings in a cultural analysis to show how playwrights such as the Brazilian Augusto
Boal brought attention to rights abuses in productions with the Theater of the
Oppressed and the Invisible Theater. Green’s sensitivity to culture—an analytical
category too infrequently applied to scholarship on human rights—speaks to his
training and expertise as a social historian (Green’s first book, Beyond Carnival, is a
path-breaking history of homosexuality in Brazil).27
When he lacks an archival record to flesh out social activists’ actions in confer-
ences, rallies, or protests, Green finds inventive ways to get access to the sources he
needs. This is especially evident when he turns to Brazilian intelligence reports of
social activism and press coverage in the United States for a fly-on-the-wall perspective
on concerns over Brazil’s image abroad (222, 262, 274). It says a lot, in other words,
in regard to how concerned the Brazilian government was about the handful of
activists who sought to shine the spotlight on state torture that it decided to so closely
monitor such groups. For social and political historians of transnational solidarity
movements, We Cannot Remain Silent is an exemplar of how to connect the small
world of social organizing to larger geopolitical events during Latin America’s Cold
War.
If We Cannot Remain Silent tells us much about the growth of human rights
activism during the late 1960s and early 1970s, it can valorize the Brazilian case and
elide some of the complexities of the vocabulary of human rights in the Latin
American context. Green insinuates that his story is the root of it all: he quotes Lars
Schoultz, a political scientist who quips, ‘‘The ‘Brazilianists’ [scholars of Brazil] taught
the rest of the human rights cadre everything they needed to know to get started’’ (9).
But this overstates the case by suggesting that human rights activism unfolded inexo-
rably from its initial roots in campaigns against Brazil. Green also does not show as
much interest in a rhetorical archaeology of human rights discourse: when did activists
who worried about state violence in Brazil start to talk explicitly about ‘‘human
rights’’? And why did they make that fateful choice? Throughout Green’s work,
activists are said to speak out against ‘‘human rights violations’’ and the ‘‘gross
violation of human rights,’’ probably before that legalistic language solidified as the
go-to phrase for those protesting state violence throughout the globe, which developed
gradually as human rights gained cachet throughout the decade; examples fill the
book. At times, some of these activists experimented with the language of human
rights, but other times they did not. The early 1970s landscape of moral activism was
a shifting one, where activists made their appeals in a variety of idioms, only some of
which took the explicit form of ‘‘human rights.’’ The point is far more than a simple
issue of semantics: a clear delineation of when and why activists turned to human
rights is necessary in order to form the baseline of our understanding of human rights
history in Latin America and beyond.
If only some spoke the language of human rights, Green’s work is most effective
in showing how torture in Brazil seemed to occupy the vast majority of activists’
attention. He expertly traces the connections between victims of torture in Brazil who
became exiles and Christian activists in the United States at the National Council of
Churches and the U.S. Catholic Conference. These Brazilians and Americans formed

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 ad hoc action groups, such as the American Committee for Information on Brazil
(ACIB), which assembled victims’ testimonies into an amateurish exposé titled ‘‘Terror
in Brazil.’’ The dossier circulated internationally among a small contingent of
concerned leftists; it was presented at Representative Donald Fraser’s subcommittee
hearings on ‘‘International Protection of Human Rights’’ in 1973; and it became one
of the key documents that exposed the systematic use of torture in Brazil.
Green’s story also allows us to see how antitorture activists provided much of the
testimonial evidence that would bolster budding critiques of U.S. foreign policy.
Senator Frank Church’s initial 1971 hearings on U.S. policies vis-à-vis Brazil were
informed by the antitorture activist Brady Tyson at American University (Tyson was
a founding member of the ACIB). The hearings foretold a broader critique of the
United States as too coddling of repressive regimes, in contradiction of supposed U.S.
values, which was especially amplified in post-Vietnam and post-Watergate Wash-
ington and manifested in Church’s additional hearings in 1975 and 1976 on nefarious
intelligence-gathering by U.S. agencies (239–48). Similarly, and often overlooked,
some of the first proposals for ‘‘linkage’’ between a country’s human rights record and
U.S. aid came about as a result of campaigns against repression in Brazil by members
of Congress such as Representative Ron Dellums and Senator John Tunney. These
efforts would culminate after the Chilean coup of 1973 with the 1974 amendment to
the Foreign Assistance Act that tied military aid to a country’s human rights record
(248–54).28
We Cannot Remain Silent also smartly contextualizes the growing publicity wars
over the veracity of human rights abuses taking places in the Southern Cone in the
1970s. Green shows how activists put pressure on opinion makers at the New York
Times and Washington Post to lambast Brazil for its use of torture. Foretelling the
propaganda efforts of Pinochet’s Chile or the Argentine junta’s hiring of Burson-
Marsteller to sell a positive image of itself to the world, Green unpacks the efforts of
Brazilian diplomats to influence foreign journalists to paint a more positive picture of
Brazil as an economic ‘‘miracle’’ and a safe place to invest.29 He explains how the
government drafted a ‘‘White Book’’ that justified internal repression of ‘‘terrorism’’;
these black-and-white justifications would be replicated by the Chilean government’s
Plan Z and the Argentine junta’s National Reorganization Process (209). Likewise,
Brazilian diplomats proved equally effective at delaying any intervention by the Inter-
American Commission on Human Rights at the Organization of American States
(IACHR, which only began to earnestly investigate abuses after the Chilean coup of
1973).30 Although Green is careful never to claim that any of these efforts met with
complete success, his work reveals the dueling nature of human rights and promilitary
campaigns. And his study poses the question: did Chileans and Argentines learn from
their Brazilian neighbors? The contours of transnational media campaigns are a rich
topic for future scholars.
The vast majority of media and activist attention centered on torture in Brazil. As
some scholars have recently argued, concern with the very act of torture itself rose in
the 1970s, in part building on Amnesty International’s global Campaign Against
Torture (1972–74).31 Yet what is most striking about the concern over torture in Brazil
is the ways in which it was not always conceived explicitly as a ‘‘human rights’’ abuse.

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From a contemporary perspective, it may seem odd to decouple human rights and
torture. But not to do so is to read into the past our contemporary understandings of
these concepts and ignore the historical relationship between them. Opposition to the
Brazilian military junta, both in Brazil and in the international sphere, focused first
on torture and not prominently on human rights as an overarching umbrella category
from which activists drew inspiration. How torture became so closely associated with
human rights in the 1970s remains an important and understudied historical question.
If activists lacked a fully formed conception of ‘‘human rights,’’ Green is
undoubtedly right in pointing to Brazilian opposition movements as initiating a
number of processes and practices that would come to shape the world of transna-
tional human rights activism (e.g., 202, 363). Most obviously, his work reveals how a
disparate group of activists from a variety of different ideological and political back-
grounds could come together if united by a transnational moral cause. Green’s
attention to religious activists in the United States and in Brazil is important, as their
critical roles have gone unexplored in much of the new human rights history; in fact,
even Green himself underplays the efforts of Brazilian archbishops Hélder Câmara
and Paulo Evaristo Arns on behalf of victims of violence in Brazil. He also touches on
but does not deeply delve into how Amnesty International cut its Latin American
teeth in Brazil. Amnesty chose Brazil as the target of its first hard-hitting country
report, and the resultant Report on the Allegations of Torture became a standard-setting
document. And while not discussed by Green, Amnesty’s first Urgent Action—a tech-
nique developed by Amnesty researcher Tracy Ulltveit-Moe to quickly respond to
prisoners in the first forty-eight hours of their detention—was made on behalf of Luiz
Basilo Rossi, a trade unionist and professor of economics at the University of São
Paulo. The diversity and transnational reach of these different social activists are truly
astounding, especially so if one considers the small total number of activists involved.
Lurking in the subtext of We Cannot Remain Silent is an implicit question: why
did not more people care about torture in Brazil? But maybe the better question is:
why did anyone care at all? The scale of the repression and its historical context matter
just as much for evaluating the movement’s relative success. Set against the far higher
numbers in Chile and Argentina, the total death toll of around four hundred in Brazil,
in addition to the torture and exile of a few thousand people—while not to be
dismissed—pales in comparison. Placed against the spectrum of atrocities committed
in the twentieth century, or placed in historical real time against the backdrop of early
1970s atrocities in Vietnam, what is more striking is that such activism caught anyone’s
sustained attention. Green discusses Brazilian president Emı́lio Médici’s visit to meet
President Nixon, who later toasted Brazil as a ‘‘giant’’ that had ‘‘awakened.’’ And
although Green notes it must have been awkward for Médici and Nixon to stare across
the White House lawn at posters in Lafayette Park reading ‘‘Stop American
Complicity in Torture’’ (276), not stated by Green is that the Washington Post esti-
mated the protest to consist of merely six to eight people (who carried three times as
many posters).32 Green reveals as much when he notes in the final chapter that the
number of activists discussed in his work ‘‘numbered only in the dozens’’ (363). But
small numbers have sometimes yielded transformative results, especially in pioneering
some of the ‘‘naming and shaming’’ techniques for future human rights activists.

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 Green can also help us appreciate how the antitorture campaigns prompted a
partial redefinition of national sovereignty in the Americas. ‘‘How Brazilians organize
their own affairs and how they treat each other are no proper concern of the U.S.
Senate,’’ Senator Church would declare during his 1971 hearings (244). But after the
1973 Chilean coup, Senator Edward Kennedy immediately denounced human rights
abuses in Chile.33 If stymied in Brazil, the IACHR would conduct a series of in loco
studies in multiple locations throughout the Americas, culminating in the landmark
1980 report on Argentina. Their reports would be further supported by a slew of on-
the-ground investigations conducted by Amnesty International, the International
Commission of Jurists, and the Commission on Human Rights at the United Nations.
Even if state sovereignty remained a primary defense to ward off international investi-
gators until the end of the twentieth century, the 1970s marked a defining moment
when human rights activists worked to renegotiate the limits of that sovereignty. In
outlining the antitorture campaigns against the Brazilian military dictatorship, Green’s
We Cannot Remain Silent is the best book for understanding how many of these
processes initially got off the ground in Latin America.

Conclusion
Why has the field of Latin American human rights history yet to take off ? In part
human rights history itself is very much in its infancy. But there may also be some-
thing particularly insular about Latin American historiography in the
postindependence period that precludes a supple discussion of the transnational
dimensions of human rights history and its entanglements with the local in Latin
America. Many historians of the United States, Europe, and the Global South have
welcomed the methodological turn to the transnational. That modern Latin American
historians have been so hesitant to take the transnational turn is a surprise, given how
open historians of the Atlantic world are to transnational methods (when the Latin
American ‘‘nation’’ had yet to be invented) and how such distinguished Latin Ameri-
canists as Friedrich Katz, Stephen Topik, and Paul Gootenberg all wrote multinational
studies long before the current vogue of transnational history.34
There are signs of an increasing receptivity in the field. Tanya Harmer’s recent
Allende’s Chile: The Inter-American Cold War, for instance, provides a fascinating inter-
national diplomatic history of the Cold War.35 By shifting attention to Chile, she
triangulates between Chilean, Cuban, and U.S. sources to narrate a much more
complicated story of Allende’s Chile than was previously known. A new generation of
Latin American historians increasingly concerned with human rights history will need
to undertake a similar rethinking of existing historiographic frameworks. Is it useful
to speak of a specific Latin American ‘‘tradition’’ of human rights?36 Or was there a
particular Chilean vision of human rights? Perhaps. But the focus on the regional and
the national can obscure what was a transnational conversation in real historical time.
Instead of a ‘‘Brazilian’’ or ‘‘Latin American’’ notion of human rights, it might be
more analytically productive to think of other containers that crossed national bound-
aries, competing visions of human rights, none of which was monolithic and all of
which were transnational: Christian, Marxist and leftist, antipolitical and non-
governmental (Amnesty International), intergovernmental (United Nations and the

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IACHR). Ultimately, the very capaciousness of the concept of human rights offers the
possibility of historically recovering a tremendous variety of mutually enforcing and
sometimes conflicting local and global vernaculars.
‘‘The assumed common history [of] Latin America,’’ writes Mauricio Tenorio,
‘‘indeed is a bit tautological.’’ And, he suggests, often of little historiographic use:
‘‘There is much more, and more important, shared history between México, Canada,
United States, and the Caribbean, than the history shared between México, Brazil,
and Argentina’’ (to take only one example).37 This is certainly the case for any intel-
lectual, political, social, and cultural history of human rights, whose history is blurred
if Latin America is isolated as a region. The surge of human rights in the last third of
the twentieth century makes far more sense if viewed through a transnational, North-
South lens, one that includes the Americas—both the United States and Latin
America—and Europe.
The transnational lens has its limits, of course, and in the years after the 1970s
human rights cultures thickened in various national and local contexts. Historians, in
conversation with anthropologists and ethnographers, will surely embark on projects
to flesh out these regional particularities. But they too are likely to be inflected by
transnational and global understandings of human rights talk and practice. It is in the
careful study of these entanglements—not merely in gestures to the transna-
tional—that the complex histories of human rights in Latin America and beyond can
begin to come into better view.

NOTES

For initial thoughts and ideas, I appreciate the advice of Mauricio Tenorio and Diana
Schwartz. For a close reading of this review, and many thoughtful suggestions, I thank Mark Philip
Bradley, Tanya Harmer, Alexander Wilde, and the editors at Humanity.
1. For the best recent work in English, see Stefan-Ludwig Hoffmann, ed., Human Rights in
the Twentieth Century (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011); Akira Iriye et al., eds., The
Human Rights Revolution: An International History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012).
Both volumes, it should be noted, continue to focus attention on pre-1970s history. For an alter-
native framing that stresses the novelty of the 1970s, see Samuel Moyn, The Last Utopia: Human
Rights in History (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2010); Moyn, ‘‘Substance, Scale,
and Salience: The Recent Historiography of Human Rights,’’ Annual Review of Law and Social
Science 8 (2002): 123–40; see also Jan Eckel and Moyn, eds., The Breakthrough: Human Rights in
the 1970s (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013), especially Eckel’s tour de force
concluding essay. See also Sarah Snyder, Human Rights Activism and the End of the Cold War: A
Transnational History of the Helsinki Network (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011); and
Barbara Keys, Reclaiming American Virtue: The Human Rights Revolution of the 1970s (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 2014).
2. To be clear, I principally mean Latin America as a place dealt with by historians of human
rights who write for an English-language audience. But this argument generally holds for studies
in Spanish and Portuguese as well, with a few exceptions: Samantha Viz Quadrat, ‘‘A emêrgencia
do tema dos direitos humanos na América Latina,’’ in Ditadura e democracia na América Latina:
Balanço histórico e perspectivas, ed. Carlos Fico et al. (Rio de Janeiro: FGV, 2008), 361–95; Hugo

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 Frühling et al., Organizaciones de derechos humanos de América del Sur (San José: Instituto de
Derechos Humanos, 1991). See also the literature cited in notes 9–13.
3. Mary Ann Glendon, ‘‘The Forgotten Crucible: The Latin American Influence on the
Universal Human Rights Idea,’’ Harvard Human Rights Journal 16 (Spring 2003): 27–39; Susan
Eileen Waltz, ‘‘The Role of Small States in the Construction of the Universal Declaration of
Human Rights,’’ Human Rights Quarterly 23, no. 1 (2001): 44–72.
4. Cf. José A. Cabranes, ‘‘Human Rights and Non-Intervention in the Inter-American
System,’’ Michigan Law Review 65, no. 5 (1967): 1147–82; Glendon, ‘‘Forgotten Crucible’’;
Glendon, A World Made New: Eleanor Roosevelt and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights
(New York: Random House, 2002); Johannes Morsink, The Universal Declaration of Human
Rights: Origins, Drafting, and Intent (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999); and
Paolo G. Carozza, ‘‘From Conquest to Constitutions: Retrieving a Latin American Tradition of
the Idea of Human Rights,’’ Human Rights Quarterly 25, no. 2 (2003): 281–313. For a longer
perspective on Latin America, see Greg Grandin, ‘‘The Liberal Tradition in the Americas: Rights,
Sovereignty, and the Origins of Liberal Multilateralism,’’ American Historical Review 117, no. 1
(2012): 68–91.
5. By the late 1980s, Peru and Colombia, although electoral democracies, had also caught the
attention of international observers as each country turned to repressive tactics to squelch political
insurgencies. International efforts, of course, were aided by a rather robust national human rights
movement in each country. On Peru, see Coletta Youngers, Violencia polı́tica y sociedad civil en el
Perú: Historia de Coordinadora Nacional de Derechos Humanos (Lima: Instituto de Estudios
Peruanos, 2003). On Colombia, see Winifred Tate, Counting the Dead: The Culture and Politics of
Human Rights Activism in Colombia (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007).
6. See the classic Emilio Mignone, Iglesia y dictadura: El papel de la Iglesia a la luz de sus
relaciones con el régimen militar (Buenos Aires: Ediciones del Pensamiento Nacional, 1986).
7. For example, how should we think of the relationship between the 1960s partial Catholic
rhetorical embrace of human rights and the tremendous growth in a Catholic praxis of human
rights in the 1970s? I suggest the two periods might best be separated on the analytical level of
rhetoric and praxis. See Patrick William Kelly, ‘‘ ‘Human Rights and Christian Responsibility’:
Transnational Christian Activism, Human Rights, and State Violence in Brazil and Chile in the
1970s,’’ in Religious Responses to Violence: Human Rights in Latin America Past and Present, ed.
Alexander Wilde (South Bend, Ind.: Notre Dame University Press, forthcoming). On the World
Council of Churches and human rights, see Charles W. Harper’s personal account in O Acompan-
hamento: Ecumenical Action for Human Rights in Latin America, 1970–1990 (Geneva: WCC
Publications, 2006).
8. Sikkink’s oeuvre is sizable, but see her Mixed Signals: U.S. Human Rights Policy and Latin
America (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004); as well as ‘‘The Emergence, Evolution, and
Effectiveness of the Latin American Human Rights Network,’’ in Constructing Democracy: Human
Rights, Citizenship, and Society in Latin America, ed. Elizabeth Jelin and Eric Hershberg (Boulder,
CO: Westview Press, 1996), 59–84; and, most recently, The Justice Cascade: How Human Rights
Prosecutions are Changing the World (New York: Norton, 2010). For the main theoretical inno-
vation, see Margaret Keck and Kathryn Sikkink, Activists beyond Borders: Advocacy Networks in
International Politics (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998). See also Mónica Serrano and
Vesselin Popovski, eds., Human Rights Regimes in the Americas (Tokyo: United Nations University

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Press, 2008); Sonia Cardenas, Human Rights in Latin America: A Politics of Terror and Hope (Phila-
delphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010); Alexandra Barahona de Brito, Human Rights and
Democratization in Latin America: Uruguay and Chile (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997);
Luis Roniger and Mario Sznajder, The Legacy of Human Rights Violations in the Southern Cone:
Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999); Edward L. Clearly, The
Struggle for Human Rights in Latin America (Westport, CT: Greenwood Publishing, 1997); Darren
G. Hawkins, International Human Rights and Authoritarian Rule in Chile (Lincoln: University of
Nebraska Press, 2002); Katherine Hite and Mark Ungar, eds., Sustaining Human Rights in the
Twenty-First Century: Strategies from Latin America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press,
2013).
9. Peggy Levitt and Sally Merry, ‘‘Vernacularization on the Ground: Local Uses of Global
Women’s Rights in Peru, China, India, and the United States,’’ Global Networks 9, no. 4 (2009):
441–61; Sally Engle Merry, Human Rights and Gender Violence: Translating International Law and
Local Justice (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006). On Colombia, see Tate, Counting the
Dead. Alexander Wilde contrasts the historical response to human rights in Chile and Colombia
in ‘‘Human Rights in Two Latin American Democracies,’’ in Hite and Ungar, eds., Sustaining
Human Rights, 35–71.
10. Vania Markarian, The Left in Transformation: Uruguayan Exiles and Latin American
Human Rights Networks, 1967–1984 (London: Routledge, 2005).
11. On the large and growing literature on transitional justice, see Ruti G. Teitel, Transitional
Justice (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000); Cath Collins, Post-Transitional Justice: Legal
Strategies and Human Rights Trials in Chile and El Salvador (University Park: Pennsylvania State
University Press, 2010); Naomi Roht-Arriaza, The Pinochet Effect: Transnational Justice in the Age
of Human Rights (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005); Rebecca J. Atencio,
Memory’s Turn: Reckoning with Dictatorship in Brazil (Madison, Wisc.: University of Wisconsin
Press, 2014). For one of the sharpest critiques of truth and reconciliation commissions as political
bodies that often shy away from politics, see Greg Grandin, ‘‘The Instruction of Great Catas-
trophe: Truth Commissions, National History, and State Formation in Chile, Argentina, and
Guatemala,’’ American Historical Review 110, no. 1 (2005): 46–67; similarly, see Leigh Payne,
Unsettling Accounts: Neither Truth nor Reconciliation in Confessions of State Violence (Durham, NC:
Duke University Press, 2008).
12. See Patrick William Kelly, ‘‘ ‘Magic Words’: The Advent of Transnational Human Rights
Activism in Latin America’s Southern Cone in the Long 1970s,’’ in Eckel and Moyn, eds., Break-
through, 88–106. Other pioneering work tends to take the form of country-specific case studies,
many of which have been retroactively uplifted as human rights histories. See Steve Stern’s trilogy
on Chile, notably the volume Battling for Hearts and Minds: Memory Struggles in Pinochet’s Chile,
1973–1998 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press); Pamela Lowden, Moral Opposition to Authori-
tarian Rule in Chile, 1973–90 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1996); Jan Eckel, ‘‘ ‘Under a Magnifying
Glass’: The International Human Rights Campaign against Chile in the Seventies,’’ in Hoffmann,
ed., Human Rights in the Twentieth Century, 321–41; Peter Winn, ‘‘The Furies of the Andes:
Violence and Terror in the Chilean Revolution and Counterrevolution,’’ in A Century of Revo-
lution: Insurgent and Counterinsurgent Violence during Latin America’s Long Cold War, ed. Greg
Grandin and Gilbert M. Joseph (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 239–75. On Brazil,
in addition to James N. Green’s work discussed at length in this review, see Thomas E. Skidmore,
The Politics of Military Rule in Brazil, 1964–1985 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990);

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 Lawrence Weschler, A Miracle, a Universe: Settling Accounts with Torturers (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1990). On Argentina, see Marcos Novaro and Vicente Palermo, La dictadura militar
(1976–1983): Del golpe de estado a la restauración democrática (Buenos Aires: Paidós, 2003); Emilio
F. Mignone, Derechos humanos y sociedad: El caso argentino (Buenos Aires: Ediciones del Pensa-
miento Nacional, 1991); Alison Brysk, The Politics of Human Rights in Argentina: Protest, Change,
and Democratization (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994); Iain Guest, Behind the Disap-
pearances: Argentina’s Dirty War against Human Rights and the United States (Philadelphia:
University of Pennsylvania Press, 1990); Marguerite Feitlowitz, A Lexicon of Terror: Argentina and
the Legacies of Torture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999); and Lynsay Skiba, ‘‘Shifting
Sites of Argentina Advocacy and the Shape of 1970s Human Rights Debates,’’ in Eckel and Moyn,
eds., Breakthrough, 107–24. One early important journalistic account is Penny Lernoux, Cry of the
People: The Struggle for Human Rights in Latin America: The Catholic Church in Conflict with U.S.
Policy, 3rd ed. (New York: Penguin, 1982). Extant synthetic studies on human rights in Latin
America almost solely rely on secondary literature. See, e.g., Jean Quartert, Advocating Dignity:
Human Rights Mobilizations in Global Politics (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press,
2009); Thomas Wright, State Terrorism in Latin America: Chile, Argentina, and International
Human Rights (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2007).
13. See William Michael Schmidli, The Fate of Freedom Elsewhere: Human Rights and U.S.
Cold War Policy toward Argentina (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2013); and his ‘‘Institu-
tionalizing Human Rights in U.S. Foreign Policy: U.S.-Argentine Relations, 1976–1980,’’
Diplomatic History 35, no. 2 (2011): 351–77; Vanessa Walker, ‘‘At the End of Influence: The Letelier
Assassination, Human Rights, and Rethinking Intervention in U.S.-Latin American Relations,’’
Journal of Contemporary History 46, no. 1 (2011): 109–35. For studies by Latin American scholars,
see, for example, Marina Franco, El exilio: Argentinos en Francia durante la dictadura (Buenos
Aires: Siglo XXI, 2008); Silvina Jensen, Los exiliados: La lucha por los derechos humanos durante la
dictadura (Buenos Aires: Editorial Sudamericana, 2010). Outside the purview of this review essay
are the substantial testimonio and memory literature and first-hand accounts from some of the
pioneering Latin American human rights activists. One of the sharpest is Emilio Mignone,
Derechos humanos y sociedad: El caso Argentino (Buenos Aires: Ediciones del Pensamiento Nacional,
1991).
14. See Greg Grandin and Gilbert M. Joseph, A Century of Revolution: Insurgent and Counter-
insurgent Violence during Latin America’s Long Cold War (Durham, NC: Duke University Press,
2010). For an alternative rendering, but one equally silent on human rights activism, see Hal
Brands, Latin America’s Cold War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010).
15. On ‘‘policide,’’ see Stern, Battling for Hearts and Minds, 52, 61, 75, 155, 239, 312.
16. The Critical Human Rights series seeks interdisciplinary scholarship that ‘‘transcend[s]
simplified accounts of perpetrators and victims, resist[s] triumphalist narratives, emphasize[s] the
importance of local perception, incorporate[s] socioeconomic rights, and anticipate[s] human
rights problems of the future,’’ accessed May 6, 2014, http://uwpress.wisc.edu/series/critical-
human-rights.html. See also Steve Stern and Scott Straus, eds., The Human Rights Paradox: Univer-
sality and Its Discontents (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2014).
17. Patrick William Kelly, ‘‘The 1973 Chilean Coup and the Origins of Transnational Human
Rights Activism,’’ Journal of Global History 8, no. 1 (2013): 165–86.
18. See notes 4 and 5.
19. But that is not to say the terms ‘‘human rights’’ or derechos humanos were never uttered in

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Latin America by activists before the 1970s. Lynsay Skiba’s important and forthcoming dissertation
on the rule of law in Argentina will shed light on earlier invocations of ‘‘human rights’’ by
Argentine actors before the 1970s.
20. The introduction invokes James Sidaway and the ‘‘imagined regional community of the
Global South as a new way to conceptualize ‘Third World’ solidarities’’ (11). That said, if a South-
South framework makes less sense for human rights, Christine Hatzy’s chapter on ties of solidarity
between Cuba and Angola is surely one telling example of such South-South linkages (143–74).
21. In a growing literature, see, e.g., Markarian, Left in Transformation; Denise Rollemberg,
Exı́lio: Entre raı́zes e radars (Rio de Janeiro: Record, 1998); Mario Sznajder and Luis Roniger, The
Politics of Exile in Latin America (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009); also Roniger et
al., eds., Exile and the Politics of Exclusion in the Americas (Sussex: Sussex Academic Press, 2012);
Pablo Yankelevich, Ráfagas de un exilio: Argentinos en México, 1974–1983 (Mexico City: El Colegio
de México, 2009); Yankelevich and Silvina Jensen, eds., Exilios: Destinos y experiencias bajo la
dictadura militar (Buenos Aires: Ediciones del Zorzal, 2007); Yankelevich, ed., México, paı́s refugio:
La experiencia de los exilios en el siglo XX (Mexico City: Plaza y Valdés, 2002); Jensen, La provincia
flotante: El exilio argentino en Cataluña (1976–2006) (Barcelona: Fundación Casa Amèrica Cata-
lunya, 2007); Jensen, Exiliados; Thomas C. Wright and Rody Oñate, eds., Flight from Chile: Voices
of Exile (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1998); Rollemberg, ‘‘Debate no exı́lio: Em
busca da renovação,’’ in História do marxismo no Brasil, vol. 6, Partidos e movimentos após os anos
1960, ed. Marcelo Ridenti and Daniel Aarão Reis (Campinas: Editoria de UNICAMP, 2007),
291–339; Katherine Hite, When the Romance Ended: Leaders of the Chilean Left, 1968–1998 (New
York: Columbia University Press, 2000).
22. On examples of this type of scholarship, see Gilbert M. Joseph et al., eds., Close Encounters
of Empire: Writing the Cultural History of U.S.-Latin American Relations (Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 1998); and Gilbert M. Joseph and Daniel Nugent, Everyday Forms of State
Formation: Revolution and the Negotiation of Rule in Modern Mexico (Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 1994). See, for example, the debates in Hispanic American Historical Review 79,
no. 2 (1999): 203–367, especially Stephen Haber’s ‘‘Anything Goes: Mexico’s ‘New’ Cultural
History,’’ 299–319.
23. See, e.g., Hugo Assmann and Noam Chomsky, Carter y la lógica del imperialismo, 2 vols.
(San José: Editorial Universitaria Centroamericana, 1978).
24. See, e.g., Patrick Iber, ‘‘Anti-Communist Entrepreneurs and the Origins of the Cultural
Cold War in Latin America,’’ in De-Centering Cold War History: Local and Global Change, ed.
Jadwiga E. Pieper Mooney and Fabio Lanz (London: Routledge, 2012), 167–86.
25. For a trenchant review of Green’s book in conversation with the testimonio, see Linda
Penna Sattamini, A Mother’s Cry: A Memoir of Politics, Prison, and Torture under the Brazilian
Military Dictatorship (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010); see also Fiona Macaulay,
‘‘Brazil: Never Again?’’ History Workshop Journal 72, no. 1 (2011): 275–82. For other laudatory
reviews, see among others Edward L. Cleary, ‘‘Towards a History of Opposition in U.S. Foreign
Policy in Latin America,’’ A Contracorriente 8, no. 3 (2011): 339–45; Alison Brysk in Human Rights
Quarterly 33, no. 3 (2011): 1182–85; Stephen M. Streeter in Journal of American History 98, no. 1
(2011): 266–67; W. Michael Weis in The Americas 68, no. 2 (2011): 311–12; Philip Crimes in
International Affairs 87, no. 4 (2011): 1010–11.
26. Skidmore, Politics of Military Rule in Brazil; Maria Helena Moreira, State and Opposition
in Military Brazil (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1985); Lucas Figueiredo, Olho por olho: Os

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 livros secretos da ditadura (Rio de Janeiro: Editoria, 2009). Also see Green’s introduction to
Sattamini, Mother’s Cry. See additionally Elio Gaspari’s works, A ditadura envergonhada (São Paulo:
Companhia das Letras, 2002); A ditadura escancarada (São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 2002);
A ditadura derrotada (São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 2003); and A ditadura encurralda (São
Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 2004).
27. James N. Green, Beyond Carnival: Male Homosexuality in Twentieth-Century Brazil
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001).
28. On the U.S. side, see Keys, Reclaiming American Virtue.
29. Argentina’s media campaigns are documented well in Feitlowitz, Lexicon of Terror; Iain
Guest, Behind the Disappearances, 69–70, 75, 466 n. 18. On Chile, see Stern, Battling for Hearts
and Minds.
30. The revolution in human rights monitoring at the Inter-American Commission on
Human Rights, especially after the 1973 Chilean coup, is a topic equally worthy of more research.
Previously the IACHR had only taken up cases in the Dominican Republic, Haiti, and Cuba; it
would take a sea change in cultural politics, abetted by a global turn to human rights, that trans-
formed the IACHR into a body with any persuasive force. For the best available analysis, see Klaas
Dykmann, Human Rights Policy of the OAS in Latin America: Philanthropic Endeavors or the Exploi-
tation of an Ideal? (Princeton, NJ: Wiener, 2008); see also Cecilia Medina Quiroga, The Battle of
Human Rights: Gross, Systematic Violations and the Inter-American System (Dordrecht: Nijhoff,
1988).
31. For initial efforts to historicize concern over torture, see Tobias Kelly, This Side of Silence:
Human Rights, Torture, and the Recognition of Cruelty (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania
Press, 2012); Kelly, ‘‘What We Talk about When We Talk about Torture,’’ Humanity 2, no. 2
(2011): 327–43; Barbara Keys, ‘‘Anti-Torture Politics: Amnesty International, the Greek Junta, and
the Origins of the Human Rights ‘Boom’ in the United States,’’ in Iriye et al., eds., Human Rights
Revolution, 201–22. For this turn in a domestic US context, see Samuel Moyn, ‘‘From Antiwar
Politics to Antitorture Politics,’’ in Law and War, ed. Lawrence Douglas and Austin Sarat
(Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2014), 154–97; Keys, Reclaiming American Virtue.
32. Dan Griffin, ‘‘President Toasts President as Some Brazilians Protest,’’ Washington Post,
December 8, 1971.
33. Opening statement of Senator Edward Kennedy, Hearing before the Subcommittee to Inves-
tigate Problems Connected with Refugees and Escapes of the Committee on the Judiciary, U.S. Senate,
93rd Congress, 1st sess., September 28, 1973, 1.
34. See Friedrich Katz, The Secret War in Mexico: Europe, the United States, and the Mexican
Revolution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981); Steven Topik, Trade and Gunboats: The
United States and Brazil in the Age of Empire (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996); more
recently, Topik et al., eds., From Silver to Cocaine: Latin American Commodity Chains and the
Building of the World Economy, 1500–2000 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006); and Paul
Gootenberg, ed., Cocaine: Global Histories (London: Routledge, 1999).
35. Tanya Harmer, Allende’s Chile: The Inter-American Cold War (Chapel Hill: University of
North Carolina Press, 2011). On a productive conversation about transnationalism and Latin
America, see Laura Briggs et al., ‘‘Transnationalism: A Category of Analysis,’’ American Quarterly
60, no. 3 (2008): 625–48. Marc A. Hertzman, ‘‘The Promise and Challenge of Transnational
History,’’ A Contracorriente 7, no. 1 (Fall 2009): 305–15.

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 36. Cf. Carozza, ‘‘From Conquest to Constitutions’’; and Grandin, ‘‘Liberal Tradition in the
Americas.’’
37. On the fiction of Latin America, see Mauricio Tenorio Trillo, Latin America: Once More
the Idea (forthcoming); Trillo, Argucias de la historia: Siglo XIX, cultura y ‘‘America Latina’’ (Mexico
City: Paidós, 1999). On alternative models of transnationalism, see, for example, David Scott
FitzGerald, Negotiating Extra-Territorial Citizenship: Mexican Migration and the Transnational
Politics of Community (San Diego: Center for Comparative Immigration: 2000).

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