Rights, Reports, and Regionalism: The Chilean Coup and the Inter-American Narrowness

Abstract

The Allende symposium aims to reclaim the (international) legal ideas and imagination that underpinned some of the Unidad Popular government’s initiatives and ambitions, elucidate how these projects were thwarted, and unearth enduring lessons that could illuminate our path forward today. This contribution by Francisco-José Quintana explores the response of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) to the coup and the extraordinary violence of Pinochet’s dictatorship. Against conventional accounts, he argues that the IACHR’s actions in Chile did not merely inaugurate a new era of human rights protection in the Americas. While the IACHR played a central role in denouncing the worst abuses of the dictatorship, Quintana contends that there was a politics behind the veneer of anti-politics, and one that exposes inter-American regionalism as a highly limited framework for political reform.

Keywords: Inter-American Human Rights System, history of international law, Allende, human rights