But Carter wasn’t out of office yet. Montas was put on a plane to Miami, one of a list of prominent Haitian prisoners U.S. diplomats presented to the dictator’s staff.
Carter had been briefed by outgoing Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, whose “realpolitik” approach meant covertly cozying up to autocrats as they terrorized their citizens. But Carter sought a new approach to winning the Cold War. Carter also expanded the State Department’s report on human rights in each country, an annual document authoritarians loathed and feared. His Foreign Corrupt Practices Act aimed to abolish bribery by multinational corporations. And his embassies welcomed victims of state terror, documenting 15,000 disappearances in Argentina alone.
“They came to the cells, they called the names, and we never saw them again. And later on we learned from other people that they had been killed outside. That took place throughout 1976. And at the end of the year, they no longer killed people that way,” said Reati. Carter hadn’t focused on human rights until it proved to be a potent campaign issue. As president, he framed it in terms of civil and political rights, avoiding the more difficult rights to food, education and health care, and applied its principles selectively, reflecting pragmatic calculations about U.S. interests, according to historian Barbara Keys, who wrote “Reclaiming American Virtue - the Human Rights Revolution of the 1970s.
Carter also stuck with his predecessors’ support for Indonesia’s authoritarian President Suharto, who used U.S. weapons and aircraft to crush an independence movement in East Timor. Hundreds of thousands died there in a quarter-century of conflict.
Law Law Latest News, Law Law Headlines
Similar News:You can also read news stories similar to this one that we have collected from other news sources.
Source: AP - 🏆 728. / 51 Read more »