Following the Vietnam-related dissolution of the Cold War consensus in the 1960s, the Democratic Party divided between “hawks” who favored an emphasis on force to achieve U.S. aims and interests, and “doves” who favored softer strategies. The split allowed Richard Nixon to take power in 1968, and this, as is well known, had important implications for Latin America. Nixon joined with the hawks in supporting the coup that brought General Augusto Pinochet to power in Chile, leading the doves to look for ways to gain leverage against Nixon’s aggressive foreign policy.
Doves, themselves linked to the U.S. legal establishment, formed an alliance with their counterparts in Chile—Socialists, Christian Democrats and others ousted by the military coup—and found support as they called attention to the disappearances and tortures taking place in Chile and elsewhere in the region. Strategies to counter these atrocities were assimilated into an emerging human rights expertise. Amnesty International, just coming into its own, capitalized on the events in Latin America to place human rights protection on a global political agenda. Human rights discourse and the proliferating human rights NGOs—funded generously by the Ford Foundation and other institutions close to the U.S. liberal establishment—gained stature in both the North and the South. The defense of human rights was used effectively against the foreign policy of Nixon and later of Ronald Reagan, and against the Latin American dictators they supported.
The human rights movement grew, gained credibility and finally reached a point where it could play an important role in forcing Pinochet to submit to an election that would remove him from power. At the same time, the Reagan Administration itself became convinced not only of the legitimacy of human rights but also of the idea that the issue could be turned to U.S. advantage in the struggles against the Soviet Union.
The human rights movement then began to focus more on democratization—building of the rule of law, and enhancing the role of the courts and civil society. The shift was defined as an emphasis on good governance. It emerged from the Ford Foundation and the concerns of human rights activists, and it ultimately became orthodoxy even at such establishment pillars as the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the United States Agency for International Development (USAID). It became part of the U.S. recipe of reforms for countries around the globe, and Latin America became a laboratory for imported ideas consistent with U.S. academic orthodoxy in political science, law and economics.
But these developments did not result from Washington simply “deciding” what to do. U.S. policies have not resulted from a one-sided effort to come up with programs that will “be good for Latin America.” There are active “importers” as well as “exporters” of ideas, people, institutions and resources. For many years, for example, a key means of gaining power and influence within Latin American countries has been to deploy foreign social capital—ideas, influences, foundation grants, foreign degrees and the like. While these foreign imports may simply serve as a kind of veneer that is used for show in particular countries at specific times, this continuation of colonial processes has often transformed domestic political and economic landscapes.
Until the end of World War II, Latin American importers looked mainly to Europe for such social capital. In the 1950s and 1960s, however, the import and export market shifted dramatically in favor of the United States. The shift has had important implications for the model of the state promoted within Latin America, since ideas associated with European social democracy lost value in relation to ideas associated with the relatively laissez-faire and market-oriented U.S. state. The major point, however, is that the influence of the United States on Latin American institutions and ideas is not just about what the dominant power imposes on Latin America but is also about what Latin American elites seek to import. The history of the human rights movement in Latin America is thus instructive about the workings of these kinds of import-export processes in general.
“Cutting-edge ideas” relating to democracy, as well as markets, have been promoted with pressure from the North, but also bought—imported—by both idealists and mercenaries in the South. This process is the “soft” mechanism for promoting “rules of the game” in the South that are consistent with orthodoxies in the North. With the human rights movement coming of age, the transformation of the U.S. government’s foreign-aid programs and changes at the World Bank and other institutions in favor of formal democracy and the rule of law—as well as neoliberal economics—the 1990s became a kind of golden age for idealists of democracy reform. The stars were aligned for the import and export of democracy and the rule of law, and the efforts of that period undoubtedly had some impact, even if limited, in strengthening legal institutions.
But we have to look more closely at the way these processes work. Who, for example, imports the foreign ideas, and why do they do it? Investigating these questions brings us face-to-face with another colonial dimension of the process: It is most often local elites—often the descendants of European colonists who became the landowning class—who import and take advantage of the programs of exchange. Those with privilege in local society tend to speak English and are able to travel and acquire the credentials necessary for the exchange (to obtain a foundation grant from abroad, for example). These individuals tend to be linked to powerful families, to political strongholds and to traditional Latin American elites more generally.
It is not easy to sort out the implications of this process. On the one hand, local elites are investing in and importing cutting-edge ideas—including progressive ones such as representative democracy, the rule of law and an independent judiciary. But they also bolster their power by identifying themselves with these ideas. It should not be surprising that when they take these ideas and reinvest them on behalf of their own careers in Latin American countries, they do not rock the domestic boat too seriously. They hesitate to invest in such a way that they disrupt their own world and the world from which they came.
The process at its best has led to moderate, controlled change. It has helped create U.S. friends like Fernando Henrique Cardoso in Brazil, for example, and, for better or worse, has led to reforms producing compatibility with U.S. institutions—including reforms to protect intellectual property rights. It has also meant that leaders in Latin America have bought in to U.S. rules of the game in order to gain legitimacy. The process has not produced wide-open democracy, but elections have certainly become at least somewhat more fair and open.
My collaborator Yves Dezalay and I have tracked some outcomes of U.S. investment in law in four countries in Latin America—Argentina, Brazil, Chile and Mexico. The traditional institutions of public legal education and the courts essentially have not changed much despite the U.S. efforts, but we have seen a kind of trickle into other arenas where there have been some successes in promoting law and legal institutions. Examples include the establishment of private law schools in many countries in Latin America, the work of a human rights ombudsman in Mexico, the reform of public prosecution in Brazil and the creation of public interest law firms in Argentina. We can conclude that results of efforts to strenghten the rule of law have been mixed. Thus, while we see some progress in specific areas, overall change in the major institutions has been, at best, very slow.
If we are impatient with the results of the soft pressures for reform put on this elite in the 1980s and 1990s, we should think about the alternatives. This soft approach has its enemies in the United States—and not just those from the left who denounce it as colonialism. If we trace the legacy of Cold War divisions between U.S. doves and hawks, we can see a hawkish side committed to an aggressive engagement with the rest of the world to suit U.S. interests. This approach can be seen in the war on drugs, the war on terror and the war to protect oil. It involves more use of force and more alienating approaches than those that prevail under the export-import approach. And while it may employ democratic rhetoric, this form of aggressive democracy promotion is perceived as force on behalf of U.S. interests by most observers outside the United States.
One message here is that the soft domination of exported and imported ideas—admittedly involving a hierarchy based on a colonial power relationship—should be contrasted with the more forceful domination that undermines the values of democracy and the rule of law at home. This “hard” domination may also undermine the progress of reformist local elites in their mission to establish democratic ideas as the basis of their legitimacy.
There is an irony here that is worth noting. When specific U.S. policies lead to polarization in particular countries, they may also fan the flames of an anti-U.S. populism that brings more poor people into the process, but that leads them away from these reformist elites. The balance of power among local political forces appears to depend, at least somewhat, on the legitimacy of U.S. policies—and by extension the legitimacy of those local politicians whose careers and approaches are associated with the United States. The forces mobilized by anti-U.S. rhetoric may lead to reforms that many in the United States might favor, but the sequence of events will necessarily be less predictable than the more controlled soft colonial processes that rely on and strengthen a moderate reformist establishment.
The basic point with respect to the role of the United States in democracy promotion is simple. The approach Washington takes to foreign policy will inevitably affect how the United States is perceived, which ideas are imported and who gains power and legitimacy in particular Latin American countries. It is not simply a matter of the United States deciding that it wishes to promote democracy in Latin America and then working benevolently to make that happen.
Bryant G. Garth is Dean of Southwestern Law School in Los Angeles. He is author of, among other publications, The International-ization of Palace Wars: Lawyers, Economists, and the Contest to Transform Latin American States and Global Prescriptions: The Production, Exportation, and Importation of a New Legal Orthodoxy.
