suspension of political activity.126 Rockefeller’s report to the president was rather moderate in its recommendation to recast trade and lending to reflect broader national interests rather than narrow business interests. Yet the report’s grim tone accurately reflected the range of problems in the region and the level of hemispheric skepticism about America’s intentions. Rockefeller also provocatively suggested that these nations’ internal security problems had spurred the authoritarian trend. “Governments everywhere are struggling to cope with often conflicting demands for social reform and economic growth,” he wrote. “Subversive forces working throughout the hemisphere are quick to exploit and exacerbate each and every situation.” He recommended continued military aid and increased arms sales to meet these security challenges.127
Some observers have assailed both the Rockefeller mission and the report. The journalist A. J. Langguth asked why Nixon had sent the scion of the Rockefeller steel empire to assess an impoverished region teeming with anti-imperialist and anti-yanqui sentiment. (Riots broke out when Rockefeller visited Colombia and Ecuador, causing Chile and Venezuela to cancel their invitations.) Considering the millions Rockefeller had invested in Latin America, wrote Langguth, it was not surprising that he praised the security forces.128 Walter LaFeber similarly criticized Rockefeller’s conclusion that South American militaries were “the essential force for constructive social change.” The preponderance of military coups in the 1960s seemed to have rendered such a sentiment painfully outdated.129
These observers were correct in pointing out Rockefeller’s liberal capitalist biases. His report emphasized economic and security policies that would strengthen the rule of law, protect property, and stimulate growth—controversial ideas in a region beset by endemic poverty and wealth disparities. But Rockefeller’s critics understated the level of civil violence in the region. Significant rural, leftist, guerrilla insurgencies developed early in the sixties in Peru, Bolivia, Guatemala, Venezuela, and Colombia. The defeat of many of these groups (symbolized by the capture and execution of Ernesto “Che” Guevara in Bolivia in 1967) led rebels to transition to urban guerrilla activity. By decade’s end, several such Cuba-supported groups operated in the Southern Cone, including the Tupamaros (Uruguay), MIR (Chile), FAR (Argentina), and ALN (Brazil). These organizations, which tended to draw young members from the educated urban classes, used bombings, kidnappings, assassinations, and sabotage to undermine what they perceived as bourgeois decadence and elite domination.130 Later, they would focus their acts on repressive military governments.
True enough, these militant groups’ violent acts did not excuse the excesses of which South America’s military governments were guilty. On balance, the region’s authoritarian governments and allied paramilitaries (aka “death squads”) were responsible for more suffering than were terrorist groups. But one cannot comprehend the region’s downward spiral toward authoritarianism without understanding the threat (or at least the perception of such) posed by these groups. Washington policymakers were not alone in fearing another Cuba-like revolution in Latin America; many Latin American citizens had similar fears. Nor can we understand how Americans perceived authoritarianism and human rights matters without understanding the high-profile nature of some insurgents’ crimes. The left-wing FAR in Guatemala killed U.S. Ambassador John Gordon Mein and two U.S. military advisers in 1968. Two years later the group killed the West German ambassador and kidnapped and released the U.S. labor attaché. The Brazilian Marxist group MR-8 kidnapped and later released the U.S. ambassador, Charles Elbrick, in 1969. The following year, Brazilian rebel groups kidnapped Swiss, West German, and Japanese diplomats, and the Popular Revolutionary Vanguard shot the U.S. consul, Curtis C. Cutter, during a botched kidnapping attempt.
The kidnappers asserted that they were acting to undermine oppressive governments and to free imprisoned compatriots. The kidnappings usually involved a negotiation for the release of political prisoners. (In Cutter’s case, the would-be captors had written a false confession in which Cutter “admitted” he was a CIA agent instructing Brazilians in methods of torture. The note also sentenced Cutter to death.)131 Such acts did not endear insurgent groups to foreign publics. Among the most sensational cases was the Tupamaros’ kidnapping and murder of the USAID police adviser Dan Mitrione in Uruguay in 1970. His death has been the source of much controversy because of his possible role in training military and police in torture methods.132 But at the time of his death, Americans heard a simpler story of a public servant whose murder at the hands of Marxist terrorists left his nine children without a father. Simply put, the guerrillas were unlikely to win friends in Washington by killing U.S. citizens. These groups’ other acts of violence against the state, civilians, and businesses got less attention from the American public than did diplomats’ kidnappings, but they were great fodder for military juntas that wanted to justify their repression. Perceptions mattered. Human rights activists saw right-wing governments and militaries as the sources of many South American problems, while conservatives and practitioners of realpolitik pointed out that much of South America was embroiled in undeclared civil wars. How one perceived these civil struggles said much about one’s perception of the human rights movement and of human rights as a goal of American foreign policy.
Nixon followed many of Rockefeller’s recommendations on Brazil. He sought to bolster the relationship by restoring the suspended aid and accepting the generals’ claim that there was no torture. In the meantime, Brazil’s economic growth—upward of 9 percent in 1970 alone—strengthened the regime’s domestic and international legitimacy and deflected some attention from its excesses. Observers began to refer to the Brazilian economic “miracle.” Thomas E. Skidmore has correctly concluded that American policymakers made “at most a half-hearted attempt” to pressure the Brazilians in 1968–1969, during which the generals successfully waited out the bad publicity.133 The Nixon administration routinely argued that Brazilian political evolution would come about with further economic growth, and also claimed to be using private diplomacy to nudge the dictators toward reforms. But since America’s traditional business and security interests were arguably being met, the administration was unwilling to go much further. Not only was there no consensus that Washington must promote political development, but Brazil was merely one among many authoritarian states in the world. Nixon could count on minimal domestic resistance considering the American public’s limited awareness of Brazilian affairs.
A small number of academics, clergy, exiled Brazilians, and liberal Catholics responded by building a network to publicize the junta’s violations. This movement became a groundbreaking part of the human rights push in Latin America and beyond.134 Using information they received from their contacts in Brazil, these activists wrote articles and submitted testimony to congressional committees and the Inter-American Commission for Human Rights (IACHR). They also formed an NGO, the American Committee for Information on Brazil, as a means of collecting and verifying victims’ testimonies.135 Established NGOs also became active. The International Commission of Jurists released a scathing criticism of the junta’s tactics in 1970, and Amnesty International soon had nearly two hundred active prisoner cases in Brazil.136 At a time when torture was not widely reported in the mainstream press, activists’ legwork led to numerous reports on Brazilian torture in 1970–1971, including dozens of articles in the New York Times and Washington Post. Critics highlighted not only the self-evident immorality of the junta’s tactics, but also America’s guilt by association. A Washington Post editorial stated that the United States was “in danger of getting itself caught up on the side of the oppressors, forced to choose wrong.”137 Two syndicated columnists similarly lamented the “tragedy” that America’s support of Brazil was “keep[ing] in unchecked power the most repressive regime in the Western Hemisphere.”138
The burgeoning movement against torture might have had more resonance in Washington had it not been for the November 1970 election of the left-wing reformer Salvador Allende as president of Chile. Not only did this event throw a new wrinkle into Nixon’s approach to South America, but as Tanya Harmer has argued, the 1970–1973 Allende presidency was a watershed in hemispheric affairs in that it augmented the “inter-American Cold War” at a time when the Washington-Moscow relationship
