Mixed signals : U.S. human rights policy and Latin America /

Sikkink (Univ. of Minnesota), an academic and human rights activist, traces the effort to incorporate consideration of human rights into US policy toward Latin America over the past four decades. Based on both extensive interviews with American foreign policy officials and on-the-ground experience in Latin America, she presents a convincing case that the State Department's human rights bureau has increasingly weighed in the determination of American policy to counter only a national security realist viewpoint. She surveys US human rights policies during the Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush, and Clinton years and finds that human rights issues have been an integral part of US policy and of international and regional institutions. She concludes "a major accomplishment ... has been to discipline and change US foreign policy and subject its impact on human rights to scrutiny." Thereby, US human rights policy has helped create conditions for a democratic and relatively stable hemisphere to the benefit of the whole region, including the US. Sikkink is troubled by the current administration's "mixed messages." Analytically rigorous and well written, this volume belongs in all academic libraries with significant holdings in Latin American and American foreign policy. ^BSumming Up: Highly recommended. All levels. J. A. Rhodes Luther College