How Jimmy Carter Transformed U.S.-Latin America Relations

BY WILL FREEMAN
APRIL 6, 2023
The former U.S. president’s strategy of tough engagement balanced human rights with national interest.

Reading Time: 5 minutes
Authoritarian regimes in Central and South America. An unprecedented wave of Cuban and Central American migration. Inflation and resurgent geopolitical tensions. The U.S. president had his work cut out for him from the start—no, not Joe Biden, but Jimmy Carter, president from 1977 to 1981.

Carter’s tenure is synonymous in many minds with an oil price shock, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the 1979 Iran hostage crisis. For critics, he weakened the United States’ position in the world. For sympathizers, he was dealt a bad hand.

But Carter, who entered hospice care in February, transformed U.S. relations with Latin America at the height of the Cold War. He put human rights and democracy at the top of his regional agenda—but shrewdly balanced these concerns with U.S. national security interests. His approach never pleased everyone. Critics from the right accused him of abandoning U.S. allies. Human rights activists within his own administration sometimes lamented he did not press the region’s military regimes hard enough.

But it was exactly Carter’s ability to thread the needle and his skill as a negotiator that accounted for his successes in the Western Hemisphere. You could call his Latin America doctrine “tough engagement.” Today more than ever, it merits a comeback.

In From the Cold

When Carter took office in January 1977, U.S. policy towards Latin America was stuck in a myopic rut—and it was costing Latin Americans their lives. Since the 1950s, presidents had prioritized containing Soviet influence, whatever the cost. Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon and Ford kept arms and aid flowing to anti-communist military regimes battling homegrown insurgencies, even as these regimes tore to shreds the political parties, labor unions and student movements that made up the region’s democratic fabric.

More:
https://www.americasquarterly.org/article/how-jimmy-carter-transformed-u-s-latin-america-relations/