The Politics of Human Rights

This edition of NACLA collects a handful of essays on the question of human rights in Latin America as a political weapon used by the U.S. government in concert with its right-wing allies in an attempt to discredit those governments in the region that have most aggressively undermined U.S. hegemony. In this respect, today’s Latin American right and its North American allies have taken up the rhetoric of Reagan’s foreign policy, which adopted human rights as its central trope.