On March 9, 1977, at one of Jimmy Carter’s earliest White House press conferences as president of the United States, the very first question was about Chile.
At a meeting of the UN Commission on Human Rights in Geneva the day before, a State Department official had expressed “profoundest regrets” for the covert U.S. role in undermining Chilean democracy, and the subsequent “suffering and terror that the people of Chile have experienced” under the military dictatorship. Now, the U.S. media wanted to know if those remarks reflected the new President’s unique position on human rights as a criterion for U.S. foreign policy.
President Carter bluntly disavowed the apology. “I think that the remarks made by the delegate concerning our past involvement in Chilean political affairs were inappropriate,” he declared, dismissing them as “a personal statement of opinion” that did not represent the U.S. government.
But Carter did take the opportunity to call attention to human rights, which, until his election, was utterly disregarded as a principle of U.S. foreign policy. “We are still concerned about deprivation of human rights in many of the countries of the world,” Carter noted. “I think Chile would be one of those [places] where concern has been expressed. And I want to be sure that the American people understand that this is a very sensitive issue.”
Jimmy Carter, the peanut farmer from Plains, Georgia, who rose to be the 39th president of the United States, ushered the “sensitive issue” of human rights into the White House. As the first post-Vietnam, post-Watergate President, Carter aimed to restore a righteous decency to a U.S. Government contaminated by the dishonesty and criminality of the Nixon-Kissinger era. Carter also sought to bring a semblance of integrity and morality to the exercise of U.S. foreign policy now known for Henry Kissinger’s imperial abuses of power in smaller countries around the world and embrace of dictatorships in Latin America –most notably the Augusto Pinochet regime in Chile.
Hellbound and Down 