This article examines the often contentious role that human rights promotion has played in US foreign policy in Latin America. As a longtime interloper from the North, the United States has employed many different strategies, often resulting in the election to participate in foreign countries' domestic conflicts in aid to one side or another. With regard to human rights, the fact of the matter is that the United States has failed to adopt as many human rights treaties as many other South or Central American nations have. In a globalized world more closely linked than ever before, nations are adopting human rights practices that promise to prevent injustices from occurring as they did in the past, a welcome break from the violent past in Latin America. For myriad reasons, including domestic pressures and belief in "American Exceptionalism," the United States has dodged full participation in many international legal and human rights documents, but this practice has already started to harm international cooperation with and perception of US goals abroad. The author concludes his analysis by suggesting that the United States reconsider its earlier defiance against making human rights a fully fledged tenet of its foreign policy in favor of a new, more cooperative stance.
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Does US military aid buy recipient state compliance? In this study, we systematically investigate the effects of U.S. military assistance on recipient state behavior toward the United States. We present and test three different models—Arms for Influence, Lonely Superpower, and Reverse Leverage—that might capture the relationship between military aid and recipient state cooperation. Using innovative events data that measure cooperation between the United States and recipient states between 1990 and 2004, we test seven hypotheses using a combination of simultaneous equation, cross-sectional time series, and Heckman selection models. We find, with limited exceptions, support for the Reverse Leverage model: increasing levels of US military aid significantly reduce cooperative foreign policy behavior with the United States. U.S. reaction to recipient state behavior is also counterintuitive; our results show that recipient state cooperation is likely to lead to subsequent reductions in US military assistance, rather than proving the theory of success based on a carrot and stick approach.
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The June 2009 military coup that ousted democratically elected President Manuel Zelaya resulted in the international isolation of the interim successor government of Roberto Micheletti and months of political turmoil that did not subside until after the election of current President Porfirio Lobo in November 2009. Honduran politics have stabilized in some important respects since Lobo's inauguration: The economy has slowly recovered, and the 2011 Cartagena Accord signed by Lobo and Zelaya has politically reintegrated the leftist former president via his new Liberty and Refoundation Party (LIBRE) and reinstated Honduras in the Organization of American States (OAS). However, Honduras' reconstructed democracy is fragile. Rising crime and unrelieved poverty have decimated President Lobo's approval ratings and encouraged widespread distrust of democratic institutions. To the extent that Zelaya's LIBRE is able to capitalize on this discontent in the upcoming 2013 elections, these institutions will be seriously tested.
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The Perry Center has published a fiscal year (FY) Annual Report since 2011. Each report covers the educational programs, outreach activities, and achievements of the Center that occurred throughout the year. The Annual Reports serve as a foundational primer on who we are, what we do, and the impact we have in the Western Hemisphere.
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In the last two years, the violence and visibility of the conflict between the Paraguayan State and the Paraguayan People's Army (EPP) has escalated significantly, due to the appearance of new weapons, tactics, and increasing involvement of foreign advisers on both sides as each has adapted to gain advantage over the other. Although the nature of the EPP has become somewhat clearer, many areas still need to be better understood in order for the Paraguayan state to effectively defeat this threat, which it can still do at relatively low cost if it adopts the right strategy and takes appropriate action. This article provides some of that understanding by identifying the events and breakthroughs which occurred in roughly two phases: government offensive (2010) and EPP adaptation (2011). The author concludes that groups such as the EPP are not merely police/justice problems, but state problems, and the most successful states are those that recognize this early and employ all the elements of national power to deal with the problem not only to reduce or eliminate the violence, but to prevent its regeneration.
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