Human Rights and U. S. Foreign Assistance From Nixon to Carter

7/28/2019 Human Rights and U. S. Foreign Assistance From Nixon to Carter

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Human Rights and U. S. Foreign Assistance from Nixon to CarterAuthor(s): Michael Stohl, David Carleton, Steven E. JohnsonSource: Journal of Peace Research, Vol. 21, No. 3 (Sep., 1984), pp. 215-226Published by: Sage Publications, Ltd.Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/424023 .

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ISSN 0022-3433 Journal of Peace Research, Vol. 21, No. 3, 1984

HumanRightsandU.S. ForeignAssistanceromNixon to Carter*MICHAEL STOHL, DAVID CARLETON & STEVEN E. JOHNSONDepartment of Political Science, Purdue University

This paper reports some preliminaryfindings on the relationships between United States policies towardshuman rightsas it is expressedin Presidentialpolicy and U.S. militaryand economic assistance to nationswhich have a substantial record of human rights threats and abuses. It examines these relationships fromthe start of the Nixon presidency through the end of the Carter administration. The statistical findingsindicate that under Presidents Nixon and Ford foreign assistance was directly related to levels of humanrights violations, i.e. more aid flowed to regimes with higher levels of violation, while under PresidentCarter no clear statistical pattern emerged. It is concluded, therefore, that the Carter administrationdidnot implement a policy of human rights which actually guided the disposition of militaryand economicassistance.

'I alwayssuspected the UnitedStates wouldn'tstay with human rights too long. It never didplay in Peoria.' Art Buchwald1. IntroductionThis paper reports some preliminary findingson the relationships between United Statespolicies towards human rightsas it is expressedin Presidential policy and U.S. military andeconomic assistance to nations which have asubstantialrecord of human rightsthreats andabuses. Assertions by President Reagan andhis first Secretary of State, Alexander Haig,provided the impetus for this study. Theyinitiated their joint management of Americanforeign policy with a call to reassertAmericanstrength so as to provide protection from theincreasingthreatsto national securitythat theyperceived the Carter administration had al-lowed to go unchallenged.The United States,

they claimed, had been weakenedby the Carteremphasis on human rights at the expense ofnationalsecurity.This, combinedwith Carter'sunwillingness o confront directly he resurgentSoviet threat,severely hreatenedU.S. interestsat home and abroad. They proposed a simpleand straightforward olution. The administra-tion would continue to emphasize the tradi-tional American concern with human rights,but would properly identify the real threat tohuman rights in the contemporary world,internationalterrorism,and striveto eliminateit as a source of trouble for the United Statesand its allies in the fight against communismworldwide(Haig 1981, p. 5). Further,by iden-tifying the Soviet Union as the chief source ofinternational errorism tself, the whole humanrights, national security, and internationalterrorism package was very nicely bundledtogether. What remains to be seen is whetherclever packaging is actually useful in gainingpolicy ends and, of course, if it actuallyincreases our understanding of the relation-ships among the variables in the nationalsecurity-humanrights package.In this paper we examine the relationshipsthat the President and Secretary of Statesuggest characterized the Carter era. Inaddition we will step back to the Nixon-Kissinger-Fordera to examine if a change in

* This paper was presented at the Joint Sessions ofWorkshops, European Consortium of PoliticalResearch,Freiburgim Breisgau,FRG, March20-25,1983. An earlier version entitled 'National Security,National Interests, Human Rights and InternationalTerrorism: From Nixon to Reagan' was presentedto the Annual Meeting of the International Studies-Association, Midwest November 11-13, 1982, St.Louis, Missouri as part of an Indiana Consortiumfor Security Studies Panel.


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216 Stohl, Carleton & Johnsonpolicy was actually introduced during theCarter years. While we recognize that humanrights considerations may actually be onlya component of domestic internationalactivities, we will focus on the relationshipsbetween human rights violations and U.S.economic and militaryassistance.We examinethese relationships from the start of theNixon period through the end of the Carteradministration.2. Human rights and United States foreignpolicyMost Americans have been socialized tobelieve that the United States is a consistentproponentof humanrightsin the internationalsystem. However, the past two decades havebeen particularly difficult years for bothrespect for and the practice of human rightsby Americans, their chief executivesand theirallies around the world. The launching ofRealpolitik by the Nixon-Kissingerteam wasa challenge to the already embattled positionof previous American presidents accused ofhypocrisy with regard to the U.S. ideals andactions on humanrights.Mr. Kissingerand thePresident he served were clear in their beliefthat human rights were made possible bysecurity and were of secondary priority tothe pursuit of the American national securityinterest. The tenure of Jimmy Carter in theWhite House was marked by a consciousattempt to re-elevate human rights to arespected principle and a priority componentof American foreign policy. Human rights asa part of foreign policy consideration wasplaced on the internationalagendaand humanrightswas made a legitimateconcern of inter-national politics. But, as with many of thepolicy initiativesof the Carterera, the tensionsthe rhetoric created, combined with the ap-parent inability of the President and hisadministration to translate their ideas andideals into consistent and workable policies,produced U.S. actions that appeared to be atleast hypocritical. To many the policy ap-pearedat once both ineffectual and threateningto America's 'true' national securityinterests.Ronald Reagan came to office with the

promiseof restoringthe prestigeof the UnitedStates, and for Reagan and many of his staffthis meant eliminating the perceived Carterpriority on human rights and establishing amore 'realistic' human rights policy. Un-fortunately, for both Mr. Reagan's supportersand the victims of humanrightsabusesaroundthe world, the Reagan administration choseinternational terrorism (defined as anti-stateattacks) as the chief threat to human rightsin the world of the 1980s. Then SecretaryofState Haig proclaimed the new stand in hisfirst news conference following the inaugura-tion of Mr. Reagan as President (see Haig1981).Of course, if we were taking SecretaryofState Haig's position on human rightsseriously,we would ask by what measurementone may conclude that internationalterrorismis the greatest threat to human rights in theworld today. If we focus on deaths causedby internationalterrorism,as compiled by theCIA over the past two decades, we would findthat since Richard Nixon took office in 1969there have been less than four thousandfatalities from international terrorist actions.By contrast, the total number of fatalitiesresulting from state terrorism in Guatemalaalone between 1979-81 surpassed 5000 (seeAmnesty International:Guatemala:A Govern-ment Program of Political Murder, 1981). Inshort, and without belaboring an importantpoint, international terrorism as defined bythe CIA has been a far less deadlythreat to theworld'scitizens than has been state sponsoredterrorism(see also Duvall & Stohl 1983 for afullerdiscussion).The tradition in the United States is todefine human rights in what we wouldcharacterize as a narrow manner. TheAmerican liberal tradition tends to definehuman rights as 'the rights to liberty andthe integrity of the person in the sense thatthey cannot be denied without the impartialapplication of due process of law' (Schoultz1981b,p. 3fn).Thismaybecompared o broaderdefinitions of the concept of human rightssuch as the UniversalDeclaration of HumanRights (for which the U.S. cast an official


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U.S. oForeign Assistance( 217

vote), which also includes the right to thebasic necessities of life, employment, healthcare, education and the like. While we believethe Universal Declaration to reflect moreaccurately the meaning of human rights, inthis paper we will simply focus our attentionon threats to the person - particularlyexecution, disappearance,torture and politicalimprisonment- because that is the standardused by the Unites States Departmentof Stateand the U.S. Congress in their considerationsof foreign assistance.'3. Researchdesign: data collection andindicatorsTo investigatethe connections betweenhumanrights violations and U.S. interactions withStates which have a consistent pattern ofhuman rights violations, a number of quitedifferent data and conceptual problemsemerge. Simply put, there is no adequatedata source currently available from whichto draw. The data available are unsystematicand of dubious quality. Further, while all ofthe problems that are associated with eventsdata collection are present, these importantproblems are overshadowed by the ability ofmost states to control the flow of informationregarding human rights violations and stateterroristic activities that occur under theirauspices. Unlike virtually all insurgentterrorists, state terrorists are not necessarilyconcerned with informing large worldwideaudiences of their acts. As a result stateterrorists are not so careful to make certainthat the media record the facts surroundingthe event or even the occurrenceof the eventitself. Many of the events come to publicattention only long after the fact, oftenthrough interested third parties exposingthe acts and thus further complicating theissue by adding the possibility of systematicdistortion and invention, as is the case quiteoften with wartime atrocity stories, for ex-ample. However, even when the source col-lecting the information is recognized aspolitically neutral, there are problems. Let usillustrate. Amnesty International, perhapsthe most widely respected privateinternational

organizationin the field of identifyinghumanrights violations, has created no aggregatedata file. The organization has been con-sistently unsystematic in its presentation ofdata from year to year, consciously over-lapping its reporting on gross violations soas to dissuade any possible 'counting' andstatistical comparison of their data. TheCentral Intelligence Agency of the UnitedStates, whichhas beenvery carefullycompilingstatistics on International Terrorism (actsof terrorism which are undertaken acrossnational boundaries or which are consideredby agency coders to have internationalsignificance) for the past fifteen years, hasnot yet considered acts of terrorism andother human rights violations by governmentsecurity forces to fall within their purview.The United States Departmentof State, whichbears responsibilityfor collecting informationon human rightsconditions to use as the basisof an Executive Branch determinationof theworthiness of possible recipients for U.S.foreign assistance, or support in developmentbanks and internationalorganizations, makesno attempt at systematic data collection.Rather it relies on reports which are not onlyclearly political in nature, but also ignoreobvious social science canons of data collec-tion and presentation.We areleft withouta dataset thataccuratelypresentsa compilation of events data on suchagreed-upon measures of state terrorism andhuman rights violations as deaths, disap-pearance, torture,arbitrary mprisonmentandthe like. Thus, out of necessity we fall backon somewhat cruder measures. Schoultz(1981a) provides one starting point. Toestablisha measureof what he refers to as thelevel of human rights violations, Schoultzrequestedselectedexpertsto judge, on a scaleof 1-4, ascending levels of human rightsviolations for the year 1976. TakingSchoultz'sscores for ten Latin American nations in1976, we examined the Amnesty InternationalReport for 1976 for each of these ten countriesto create an anchor by which to assign scoresfor an additional ten countries.2 Thesecountries, eight Asian U.S. aid recipientsand


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218 Stohl, Carleton & Johnson

Table I. Human Rights Violationsand U.S. ForeignAssistance 1971-75 and 1977-81;Selected U.S. Aid Recipients.Based on Schoultz Scale

Total U.S. Aid U.S. MilitaryAid1976 1981 1971-1975 1977-1981 1971-1975 1977-1981Human Rights Violations (Thousands of Dollars) (Thousands of Dollars)Argentina 4 4 108,498 800 74,052 700Bolivia 3 4 188,232 155,850 27,684 7,000Brazil 3 3 342,879 5,200 138,351 0Chile 4 3 149,562 35,000 47,775 0Colombia 2 3 496,744 50,200 48,363 13,600Equador 2 2 85,925 43,300 15,600 8,000El Salvador 2 4 62,315 224,300 8,665 41,400Guatemala 3 4 116,766 55,600 11,682 0Paraguay 4 4 58,508 19,300 7,874 0Uruguay 4 4 63,703 300 16,898 0Indonesia 4 4 1,029,895 617,800 133,526 100,100Malaysia 2 2 59,225 31,400 39,951 25,600Pakistan 3 4 657,421 296,300 1,648 500Philippines 3 3 490,592 433,800 186,685 182,800Singapore 2 2 1,278 0 1,059 0S. Korea 2 3 2,763,194 630,300 1,362,198 531,600Taiwan 2 2 504,153 500** 327,700 0"*Thailand 3 3 618,429 209,100 517,198 125,100Egypt 2 2 265,522* 5,233,600 258,000+ 2,052,000Israel 2 2 3,524,956 7,840,100 3,290,164 5,600,000** - '80 and '81 only + - '74 and '75 only * - '73 to '75 only

Egypt and Israel, allowed us to explore if therelationships that Schoultz found wereregionally bound. We also extended theanalysis to the year 1981 using the samemethod. We were both unhappy and uncom-fortable with the scores that Schoultz hadachieved from his averaging of the expertjudgement and that we had used to developour own similar scores. A score of 3.69appears to imply far greater precision thanis warrantedby the method and seemed to usrather indefensible. To allow for some initialcomparison with Schoultz's study, we did,however, replicate some of his analyses. Inthese analyses, Schoultz treated these ag-gregated ordinal rankings as interval dataand employed Pearson product moment cor-relations.We do not feel that the data warrantthis statistic. We resolved the problem byrecoding the data as simple ordinal measuresrangingfrom 1-4. We were still uncomfortablewith the data, but were satisfiedthat as ordinalmeasures they were far more defensible thanas they were originally presented. We arereasonably confident that the nations that

have the highest rankings have been respon-sible for higher numbers of deaths, dis-appearances, and political prisoners thanthose nations that are ranked below them inthis manner. It should also be noted that weweighted more negatively nations that killedtheir populations rather than imprisonedthem (see Table I). We subsequentlyemployedthese measuresin a simple rank ordercorrela-tion procedure.3A second analysis was drawn from datasupplied by Freedom House. Each yearFreedom House scalesthe nations of the worldon civil and political rights. We applied thesescaled ratings to U.S. Latin American aidrecipients between 1969 and 1981, and, usingthe same rank order correlation procedure,correlated these scores with the U.S. aiddata (see Table II).Freedom House also published a terrorscale in its 1980 yearbook. Unfortunatelyfor our purposes, this scale was for 1979.We thus needed to apply the scale for theyears under study. Since the data upon whichone draws are in themselves controversial,


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U.S. Foreign Assisitance 219Table 11. Freedom House Ratingsof Violations of Civil and Political Rights and U.S. Assistance; Selected U.S. AidRecipients.

Freedom House Freedom House Total U.S. AidCivil Rights Scale Political Rights Scale (Thousands of Dollars)Country 1976 1981 1976 1981 1971-75 1977-81

Argentina 4 5 2 6 108,498 800Bolivia 5 5 6 7 188,232 100,800Brazil 5 3 4 4 342,879 5,200Chile 5 5 7 6 149,562 35,000Colombia 3 3 2 2 496,744 50,200Costa Rica 1 1 1 1 28,070 48,300Dominican Republic 2 3 4 2 105,950 149,900Ecuador 4 2 7 2 85,925 43,300El Salvador 3 4 2 6 62,315 224,300Guatemala 3 6 4 5 116,766 55,600Guyana 3 4 4 4 20,500 26,920Haiti 6 6 6 6 37,030 87,400Honduras 3 3 6 4 88,930 132,600Jamaica 2 3 1 2 51,010 107,100Mexico 3 4 4 3 27,660 31,000Nicaragua 4 5 5 5 110,470 117,000Panama 5 5 7 4 103,140 35,900Paraguay 5 5 5 5 58,508 19,300Peru 4 3 6 2 136,250 217,400Suriname 2 5 2 7 0 110Trinidad & Tobago 2 2 2 2 5,870 90Uruguay 5 5 5 5 63,703 300Venezuela 2 2 2 1 52,330 100

we used two separate data sources as thebasis of our scale development. The AmnestyInternationaland StateDepartmentreportsforLatin American aid recipients in 1976 and1981 were chosen. We accepted the descrip-tions provided by these organizations andcompared intercoder reliability among thecoders rather than challenge the informationitself. As the scale is quite easy to interpret,intercoderreliabilitywas high (.92). As we willsee below, the assessment of a number ofnations in the Latin American sample is quitedifferent for the State Departmentvs AmnestyInternationalsource ratings(see Table III).Military Aid and Total Aid figures havebeen drawn from the Department of State'sAnnual Reports on Human Rights for theyears 1979-81 and from the House Hearingson Foreign Assistance and Related ProgramsAppropriationsfor the years 1971-77.What we report on below, then, are threeseparate, but obviously related, analyses ofthe relationshipbetween state terror and U.S.

foreign aid in two distinct time periods, theNixon-Kissinger-Ford years and the Carteryears.3.1 Aid and terror:some plausible rivalhypothesesSchoultz in his analysisof human rightsviola-tions and U.S. assistance in twenty LatinAmerican nations (1981a pp. 155-156)found:

These correlations [level of U.S. assistance to LatinAmerica correlated with human rights violations ofrecipient nations] are uniformly positive indicatingthat aid has tended to flow disproportionately toLatin American governments which torture theircitizens.Schoultz (1981a p. 169) concluded:

What they confirm is the validity of the concernsof a broad variety of citizens, interest groupactivists and members of congress, who in the earlyand mid 1970s insisted that the United States aidprogram was serving to identify their governmentwith unusuallyrepressiveLatinAmericanregimes,and


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220 Stohl, Carleton & JohnsonTable Ill. Amnesty International and Departmentof State Ratingsof Human Rights Violations in 1976 and 1981.

Amnesty International Department of StateCountry 1976 1981 1976 1981Argentina 4 4 4 3Bolivia 3 4 4 4Brazil 3 3 3 2Chile 4 4 4 3Colombia 3 3 2 2Costa Rica 1 1 1 1Dominican Republic 3 * 3 1Ecuador 2 * 2 1El Salvador 2 4 3 2Guatemala 4 5 3 4Guyana 2 2 3 3Haiti 3 4 3 2Honduras 2 4 2 2Jamaica 1 * 2 1Mexico 2 3 2 2Nicaragua 4 3 3 4Panama * * 2 1Paraguay 4 4 3 3Peru 2 3 2 1Suriname * 2 * 2Trinidad and Tobago 2 * *Uruguay 4 4 4 2Venezuela 2 2 2 1* No discussion of human rights violations presentedin this year

that there was no obvious humanitarianjustificationfor such a policy.In short, Schoultz's findings confirm thatwhichwe would expect from an administrationwhichconsciously sought to downplayconcernon human rights.Schoultz's analysis covered the years priorto the Carterchallengeto the Realpolitikof theNixon-Kissinger-Ford years. What changesactually occurred in this area of Americanforeign policy during the Carter era? Thisquestion may be explored using the followingtwo plausible, and clearlyrival hypotheses:Hypothesis 1: The (a) cynical, or (b) radicalor(c) null position would argue that Americanrespect for human rights behaviour would beunchanged because (a) human rights is not atruepolicy concernof Americanforeignpolicymakers, and their policy statements merelyreflect that which they believe they shouldsay or (b) human rights concerns are sub-servient to more important concerns such as

'national security'or possible economic gains,or (c) the bureaucracy of modern politicallife makes it difficult to actually implementmajor changes in any policy, and the bestpredictor of this year's policy is last year'spolicy. This hypothesis may thus be summedup in the Frenchmaxim, Plus qachange,plusc'est la meme chose. In short, we shouldexpect no relationship between U.S. foreignassistance and a country's human rightsrecord.Hypothesis 2: (a) The Carter administrationargued that respect for human rights was acornerstone of American foreign policy andthus regimes that did not respect the humanrights of their citizens should find the scarceresources of U.S. foreign assistance deniedto them, or (b) the Reagan administrationargues that the Carter emphasis on humanrights weakened U.S. national interests byconcentrating exclusively on 'friendly'authoritarian regimes, and, further, deniedaid necessaryto make the eventual transition


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U.S. Foreign Assistance 221Table IV. Rank Order Correlation Analyses of U.S. Aid and Freedom House Violations of Political and Civil Rights(Spearman's(Rho)).

Violation ofTotal Aid Political Rights.38

1971-75 "" "1976.31

1977-81 1981.06

Violations ofTotal Aid Civil Rights.45

1971-75'A 1976.20

1977-81I.01981 .08

to democracy. Thus both the Carter andReagan rhetoric argues that the Carter yearsproduced an inverse relationship betweengross violation of human rightsand a nation'sreceipt of U.S. foreign assistance.4. The analysis4.1 The Schoultz approachThe analysis of the relationship betweenhuman rights violations and both U.S. totalassistanceand U.S. militaryassistance,revealsvery little apparent relationship between thelevel of human rights violations and aid inboth of the periodsexamined(see AppendixI).While there are some differences between thetwo periods, reflecting some level of change,the apparent changes as well as the correla-tions are so small as to be meaningless.This is the case using either Schoultz's scoresor the recoded ordinal rankings which weargued were more credible(see Table I). Thisresult implies that no great changes actuallytook place when we moved from the end of theNixon-Kissinger-Fordperiod to the conclusionof the Carter administration. Hypothesis 1would thus appear to be supported by theseresults.One quite interesting overall relationshipdoes emerge from this analysis, however.When Israel and Egypt are removed fromthe analysis (taking with them the lion's shareof the military and economic assistancegranted by the United States in the 1970s toencourage the Camp David Accords), scatter-plots of the aid and level of human rightsviolations relationship imply that some inter-

esting and unexpectedchanges did in fact takeplace. During the Carter years, the recipientsof aid appear to move up and across thescatterplots to the right. That is, it appearsthat aid recipients with poorer human rightsrecords began to receivean increasingthoughnot a statistically significant or statisticallystrong proportion of the aid package. Thisoccurs despite the fact that aid to the Shah'sregimeis not included in our analysis.44.2 TheFreedom House political and civilrightsscalesOnce again relatively minor correlationsappear between a nation's rating on thepolitical and civil rights scales and theirreceipt of U.S. foreign assistance (see TableIV). The crosslagged panel approach revealsthat aid in the Nixon-Kissinger-Fordera is abetter predictorof aid during the Carteryearsthan a nation's ranking on the political andcivil rights scales. The product moment cor-relation betwen total aid in the 1971-1975and 1977-1981 period is .76. The correlationbetween military aid in 1971-1975 and 1977-1981 is .89. With Egypt and Israel removedfrom the analyses the correlations are .84and .94 respectively. A comparison of theseresults with the correlationresults betweenaidand the scales employed in this and all sub-sequent results reportedhere revealsthe samepattern. In short, aid at time t, is a betterpredictorof aid at t2 than are the scale ratings.Further,the Freedom House politicaland civilrightsindividualscales and the combined scalecorrelate better with U.S. foreign assistance


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222 Stohl, Carleton & JohnsonTable V. Rank OrderCorrelationAnalyses of U.S. Aid and Level of Human RightsViolations Derived from AmnestyInternationalReports (Spearman's Rho).Total Aid State Terrorism.53

1971-75 1976S.40

1977-81~ 1981.39

MilitaryAid State Terrorism.501971-75 1976.26

1977-81 1981.12

during the Nixon-KissingerFord period thanduring the Carterperiod, when there is virtu-ally no relationship.4.3 The Freedom House terrorscalesOnce again previous aid levels are superiorpredictorsof aid in the time period followingthan are the nation's ratingon the terrorscaleduring that period (see Tables V and VI).Perhaps most surprising, the Amnesty Inter-national based terror scale rating is a betterprediction of aid in the Nixon-Kissinger-Fordperiod than in the Carter years, though thecorrelations are still fairly modest. Formilitaryaid, both the State and AI terrorbasedscales are superior predictors for the Nixon-Kissinger-Ford years and not as might beexpected during the Carter years. Aid didflow more clearly and consistently to repres-sive regimes in the Kissinger (as Schoultz1981a,pp 155-56had suggested)period.But thecorrelationsare not strikingly arge. Likewise,previouslevelsof aid and previousscaleratingsare better predictors of themselves than theyare of each other (in short more highlyautocorrelated). It should be recognized thatthe Al and State Department scales are notvery well correlatedconsideringthat they aresupposed to be measures of the same pheno-menon.In short, regardless of the source of ourmeasures of human rights violations, thereappears to be no strong relationshipbetweenscale ratings and foreign assistance, and nodiscernibly positive consistent shift in thedistributionof American assistanceduringtheCarteryears.

5. Carterand human rightsThese resultsappearto indicatethat the Carteradministration was either far less idealisticin its approach to human rights or far lesssuccessful in the implementationof its humanrights goals than has been suggested by bothcritics and supporters.As the Reagan admini-stration has made clear its intentions andfeelingof responsibility o redress he 'balance'in U.S. aid and human rights policies, wemust wonder in what direction the balanceneeds to be redressed and the implicationsfor policy. No doubt U.S. third world aidrecipientsare already familiar with the actualrelationshipbetweenhumanrights policiesandaid as reportedabove, but as the actual distri-butions are so different from the rhetoric,it is worth pursuingfurther.As numerous observers have commented,Jimmy Carter'spersonal commitment to thecause of human rights was not in doubt (seeGaddis 1982, p. 348; Drew 1977; and Carter1982 for representative omments). The Presi-dent appearedto try and implementhis policyon human rights and spoke forcefully in itsfavor. For example, on the thirtiethanniver-sary of the Universal Declaration of HumanRights, President Carter, after almost twoyears in office, asserted

In distributing the scarce resources of our foreignassistance program, we will demonstrate that ourdeepest affinities are with nations which committhemselves to a democratic path to development.Toward regimeswhich persistin wholesale violationsof human rights we will not hesitate to convey ouroutrage nor will we pretend that our relations areunaffected.(Departmentof State Bulletin 78, Jan. 1979, p. 1)


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U.S. Foreign Assistance 223Table VI. Rank Order Correlation analysis of U.S. Aid and Human Rights Violations derived from DepartmentofState Human Rights Reports (Spearman'sRho).

Human RightsTotal Aid Violations.31

1971-75 19769.31

1977-81 1981.06

Human RightsMilitaryAid Violations.321971-75 1 ,1 1976

1977-81 1981.04

However, nothing better illustrates he reality,rather than the rhetoric of Jimmy Carter'soverall human rights policy than the decision,taken amid great stressand personalagony nodoubt, but taken nonetheless, to restoremilitary aid to the El Salvador regime in thelast days of his administration. And as thedata in Table I make clear, economic as-sistance had continued to flow to El Salvadoreven when militaryaid had been cut. We areforced to conclude that Jimmy Carterdid notactually usher in a new era of United Statesforeign policy with respect to the distributionof U.S. foreign assistance. The sad realityrather than rhetoric of Jimmy Carter'sstewardshipof human rights policies vis-a-visforeign assistanceis clearlybrought out by thefact that his administration, in its first year,only reducedaid to threecountries(Argentina,Uruguay and Ethiopia) of the fifty-sevencountries found guilty of gross violations in1977(see Jensen 1982,p. 103). Duringhis termof office, Carterdenied securityassistanceto atotal of eight countries (Argentina, Bolivia,El Salvador, Guatemala, Haiti, Nicarugua,Paraguayand Uruguay). Cohen (1982, p. 270)has pointed out that '(e)xtraordinarycircum-stanceswere found for all other countriescon-sidered to be gross violators'. Further, JohnSalzberg reports that Brazil, El Salvador,Guatemala, Argentina and Uruguay, re-acting to the negative State Department fin-dings on their internal conditions, protestedagainst the interferencein their domestic af-fairs by deciding 'on their own initiativethatthey would not accept U.S. militaryassistance'

(Salzberg1982, p. 13). The Guatemalagovern-ment subsequently reversed itself. StephenCohen, DeputyAssistantSecretaryof State forHuman Rights and SecurityAssistanceduringthe Carter Administration, has presented thefollowing evaluation of the administrationheserved.... the Carter administrationexhibited a remarkabledegree of tentativeness and caution, so that itspursuit of human rights goals was anything but'single-minded'. Relatively few governments wereconsidered to be 'engaged in a consistent patternof gross (human rights) violations'. Securityassistance was actually cut off to even fewer,because therU.S. interestswereoftenfound ooutweigh human rights concerns under the ex-ception for 'extraordinary circumstances'. More-over, n some nstances,heCarter dministrationadopted a highly strained reading of the statute(502B) which, although not contrary to its literalterms, produceda resultcontrary o congressionalintent. In other cases, the languagewas simplydisregarded, so that decisions violated even theletterof the law (1982, p. 264).

We should not therefore be surprisedto findso little evidenceof change in the Carteryearsor so little relationship between a nation'sforeign assistancereceipts and its position onthe various scales. The policy was boldlyadvocated, much legislationwas proposed andsupported by the administrationbut very littlein the way of actual policy implementationwas accomplished.5 Further, we shouldunderstand that the distribution of aid as awhole was skewed in such a way as to make astatistical relationship tenuous at best. It isalso the case that the relationship between


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224 Stohl, Carleton& Johnsonaid and human rights violations within LatinAmerica was no worse than in the rest ofthe world. As Schoultz (1982, p. 88) reports,three nations (South Korea, Indonesia, Philip-pines) 'with unusually repressiveregimeswereprogrammed to receive more than twice thetotal aid to all of Latin America's twenty-three nations.'The information gathered for this analysisis not appropriate for gaining a completeunderstandingof how a president personallycommitted to a policy of human rights couldhave so little success in the implementationof such a policy. There are some clues,however, that many of Mr. Carter'sinitiativeswere made more difficult by the competinginterests and perceptions of the cast ofcharacters in the human rights arena. Mr.Carter appointed and inherited a diverse setof human rights 'players'. His own nationalsecurity adviser was relatively conservativeand apparently not enamored by a humanrights approach. While appointing a numberof human rights advocates to State Depart-ment positions, he also inheritedState Depart-ment centrist careerists who resented devia-tions from bureaucratic procedures. HisSecretary of State, while sympathetic to theapproach, has also been described as a'managerial type', and he clashed with con-gressional human rights advocates over theissue of maintainingexecutive flexibilitywhenstricter guidelines were attempted on amilitary aid bill sponsored by CongressmenBadillo and Harkin.6While we cannot, at thispoint, discuss the actual internal debates, itis reasonable to conclude that over time theadministration found that public opinionfavored strong responses to foreign policyoptions and that human rights pronounce-ments were not creating increased publicsupport. Mr. Carter never found a formulato lead public support, and as his politicaldifficulties increased, human rightsconsidera-tions lost their place to more 'pressing' con-cerns.

Thus, whether because of ineptness or adecision to recommit to Realpolitik, U.S.foreign assistancecontinued to flow to regimes

that had traditionallyreceived such assistance.It was not a U.S. policy upholding humanrights that best predicted U.S. responsivenesson foreign assistance, but rather a nation'sprevious level of foreign assistance. Whileunder Presidents Nixon and Ford foreignassistance was directly related to levels ofhuman rightsviolations,7under Mr. Carternoclear patternemerged.Perhaps this analysis is unduly harsh toMr. Carter. After all, he did promote theconcept of human rights in a period in whichit had fallen on bad times. Mr. Carterplacedhuman rights considerations on center stagein the international arena. The Coordinatorfor Human Rights and HumanitarianAffairs,Departmentof State (established by the Inter-national SecurityAssistance and Arms ExportControl Act of June 1976 by Congress beforeMr. Cartertook office) was given prominence.Behind the scenes there was great tensionbetween human rights advocates within theDepartment of State, the Congress and theWhite House, and quite often it is apparentthat human rights considerations were sub-verted by perceptions of more pressingnationalsecurityconcerns. But the administra-tion spoke forcefully in public and thus beganthe legitimization of human rights as a con-cern. Further, while Mr. Carter was clearlyinconsistent in his application of the principleand perhapsineffectual as well, it is clear thathe did make a decision that aid to many ofthe repressive regimes of Latin America wasnot crucial to American security, a decisionthat was made simpler by the refusal of the

Argentine, Brazilian and Uruguyan regimesto request aid. Of course, some repressiveregimes did actually receive less aid underMr. Carter than under his predecessors andhe did create a climate in which, at least fora few short years, the question of humanrights had a more important place on theforeign policy agenda.In the end, however, as the statisticalanalyses show, Mr. Carter was not consistentin his application of principle. More im-portantly in the long run, his ineffectivenessin translating principle into policy is now


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U.S. Foreign Assistance 225ignored by Mr. Reagan and his supporters,who focus on theirperceptionsof the weaknessin American policy that Mr. Carter's humanrights prioritieswrought. Mr. Reagan insteadsees his role in terms of the re-assertion ofAmerican strength. In part this is to beaccomplished by no longer accepting thathuman rights violations by 'friendly nations'be allowed to weaken American support forthose nations in the continuing East-Weststruggle in which he is engaged. It will thustake some time before an American foreignpolicy consistent with human rights principleswill again be played in Peoria.

NOTES1. Under certain pieces of the body of human rightslegislation, basic needs of the population are con-sidered, but the question of gross violations ofhuman rights remains primarilyanchored on viola-tions of the person, civil liberties and due process.For example, Section 502B(c) (d) (1) of the ForeignAssistance Act 1976 defines gross violations ofinternationally recognized human rights as in-cluding '... torture or cruel, inhuman or degradingtreatment or punishment, prolonged detentionwithout charges, or other flagrant denial of theright to life, liberty and the security of theperson.'2. We are confident that Amnesty International wouldnot be comfortable with what we have done withtheir data. As we have indicated above, they haveconsciously made statistical use of their reportingdifficult. Nonetheless, within the limitations wediscuss, we feel that this is a legitimate use of theirreports.3. See Appendix I for a comparison of the resultsof the two procedures.

4. The Shah's regime during the Carter years receivedno 'aid' in the sense of grants. It did purchase armsand other military items, sometimes with favorablepurchase terms.5. It should be noted that Congress initiated the mostfundamental of the human rights provisions priorto Jimmy Carter's nomination, viz. Sections 502Band 116 of the Foreign Assistance Act (see Schoultz1981b).6. This is just one example of a behind the scenebattle of which the public was generally unaware.'The Carter administrationdespite its strong publicpitch for human rights fought hard to resist thisbill [Title VII of House Resolution 5262, authorizedincreased U.S. capital subscription to InternationalDevelopment Banks] and indeed to repeal Harkin

language [forbiddingassistance to nations engagedin gross violations of human rights] elsewhere'(Vogelsgang 1980, p. 138).7. This statistical relationship was not the result ofMr. Nixon and Mr. Ford encouraging human rightsviolations. However, Edward Herman has arguedthat U.S. policy towards the National SecurityStates (NSS) of Latin America during this policydid serve to encourage increased repression. SeeHerman 1982.

REFERENCESBuhl, Cindy 1979. 'A Disappearing Policy: HumanRights and the Reagan Administration'. The Coali-tion for a New Foreign and Military Policy.Carter,Jimmy 1979. Department of State Bulletin, vol.78.Close-Up 1982. 'The Coalition for a New Foreignand Mil-itary Policy',Spring/Summer,p. 3.Cohen, S. 1982. 'Conditioning U.S. Serurity Assistanceon Human Rights Practices, American Journal ofInternationalLaw, vol. 76, no. 2, pp. 246-279.Drew, Elizabeth 1977. 'A Reporter at Large: HumanRights', The New Yorker,July 18.Duvall, Raymond& Michael Stohl 1983. 'GovernancebyTerror', ChapterSix in M. Stohl (ed.) The Politics ofTerrorism.2nd edition, Marcel Dekker: New York,pp. 179-219.Gaddis, John Lewis 1982. Strategies of Containment.New York:Oxford UniversityPress.Gwertzman,Bernard 1981. 'Haig FavoursStand AgainstViolations of RightsAbroad', The New York Times,April 21, p. 1.Haig, Alexander 1981. News Conference January 28,Current Policy no. 258, U.S. Department of State.Herman, Edward 1982. The Real Terror Network.Boston: South End Press.Jensen, Lloyd 1982. Explaining Foreign Policy. Engle-wood Cliffs, Cal.: Prentice Hall.Kirkpatrick, Jeanne 1979. 'Dictatorships and DoubleStandards',Commentary,vol. 68, no. 5, pp. 34-45.Lewis, Anthony 1981. 'What Kind of Country are We?'The New YorkTimes, March5, p. 23.Mangilapus, Raul 1981. 'Buttery Toast in Manila', TheNew YorkTimes,July 10, p. 3.Neier, Aryeh 1981. 'Of Reagan and Rights', The NewYorkTimes, November 12, p. 31.Rubin, Barry 1981. Paved wiith Good Intentions. NewYork:Penguin.Salzberg, John 1982. 'The Carter Administration: AnAppraisal: A Congressional Perspective' in Ved. P.Nanda, James Scarritt and George W. Shepherd.Global Human Rights. Boulder, Col.: WestviewPress, pp. 11-22.Schoultz, Lars 1981a. 'U.S. Foreign Policy and Human


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Rights Violations in Latin America: A ComparativeAnalysis of Foreign Aid Distributions', ComparativePolitics.Vol. 13, no. 2, pp. 149-170.Schoultz, Lars 1981b.Human Rights and United StatesPolicy TowiardsLatin America. Princeton: PrincetonUniversity Press.

Schoultz, Lars 1982. 'U.S. Policy Toward Human Rightsin Latin America: A Comparative Analysis of TwoAdministrations',in Ved P. Nanda, James R. Scarritt

and George W. Shepherd. Global Human Rights.Boulder, Col.: Westview Press, pp. 77-91.Vogelsgang, S. 1980. American Dream Global Night-mare. New York: Norton.Weintraub, Bernard 1982. 'Reagan's Human RightsChief, No Liberal Mole', The New York Times,October 19, p. 8.Wilkinson, Paul 1981. 'Can A State be Terrorist?' nter-national Afjairs, vol. 57, no. 3, pp. 467-472.

Appendix I. Comparison of Rank Order and Product-Moment Correlationsbetween Human Rights Violations andU.S. Aid.Rank-OrderCorrelations

(Spearman'sRho)Human RightsViolations Total Aid197649 .01 71-75

1981 0177-81

Spearman's RhoHuman Rights Milit.Violations Aid

.171976 1771-75

1981 77-81

Product-MomentCorrelationsPearsonHuman Rights TotalViolations Aid-.301976 71-75

81r 77-81.03

Human Rights Milit.Violations AidS341976 71-75

19.381 78-14

19 ..81.7 7 - 8 1

-.04

Human Rights and U. S. Foreign Assistance From Nixon to Carter

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