Kathryn Sikkink, the Ryan Family Professor of Human Rights Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School, discusses the 50th anniversary of the Sept. 11 coup in Chile and why the coup still matters.
June Carolyn Erlick:
Kathryn Sikkink is the Ryan Family Professor of Human Rights Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School. She works on international norms in institutions, transnational advocacy networks, and the impact of human rights, law and policies, as well as traditional justice and the laws of war. Today on Faculty Voices, we're talking about the 50th anniversary of the September 11th coup in Chile and why it matters on a global level. Welcome, Kathryn.
Kathryn Sikkink:
Thank you. Pleasure to be here.
June Carolyn Erlick:
Could you please tell us very, very briefly why we're even talking about the 50th anniversary of the September 11th coup in Chile?
Kathryn Sikkink:
Well, first it was an incredibly important event in Chile itself and important for Chileans, many of whom were imprisoned, tortured, and suffered as a result of the dictatorship and its repression. But also it had international repercussions. And that's what I'd like to talk about today. I'm an international relations scholar, so I look at the international effect of the Chilean coup, but I don't want us to forget that the first and primary victims were Chileans.
June Carolyn Erlick:
Thank you. Some people think about the coup of this democratically elected government as a kind of watershed in terms of human rights law. Could you explain to us a little bit about that?
Kathryn Sikkink:
Well, first to pick up on what you just said, Chile was one of the oldest democracies in Latin America when the coup happened. So there was just a shock that Chileans felt, Latin Americans felt, that the world felt in seeing this old and well-established democracy in Latin America fall to a coup. But second, it was a particularly violent and brutal coup. So it had a big impact because of the brutality. And then thirdly, the Chileans, many of whom went into exile, thousands and thousands of Chilean activists and leaders and politicians, went into exile and they helped make the world aware of what was happening in Chile and the importance for people everywhere.
June Carolyn Erlick:
So why is this important for people everywhere? Why can't we just say this is a terrible tragedy that happened in Chile 50 years ago and leave it at that?
Kathryn Sikkink:
Because the Chilean coup served like a spark, if you wish, to activate a whole series of global processes that were already underway, that were beginning to make human rights a more important part of our world.
June Carolyn Erlick:
Could you explain a little bit about that?
Kathryn Sikkink:
So I'm going to have to backtrack here, because human rights didn't begin in the seventies, right? The efforts to craft instruments for the international protection of human rights started really after World War II, with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, with the [foreign language], the first Intergovernmental Declaration of Rights is the Latin American Declaration of Rights and Duties of Man.
So human rights started earlier, but it took a long time for those declarations, those were non-binding declarations, to get translated into treaties, legally binding treaties, like the Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, and the Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. Those treaties then in turn had to be ratified by the corresponding number of states in order to bring them into effect and in order to bring to life institutions that could try to enforce them. So that process was well underway, but it had not culminated yet. It was not until 1976 that the covenants, that those two covenants I mentioned, go into effect. So you can imagine that in 1973, this process is well underway but not quite finalized yet. It was like this spark to the system to realize how important human rights law was and human rights movements were in order to protect people like the Chileans whose own government had become their main repressor.
June Carolyn Erlick:
So did this just happen kind of like self combustion? What went on there?
Kathryn Sikkink:
The Chileans weren't the first and so for those of us in Latin America, there was a lot that happened after the coup in Brazil that created some precedent. In the coup in '64, the Brazilian military government became particularly repressive in the late sixties. And activists, human rights activists, religious groups, academics and others already were learning how to start working to see if they could do anything to help protect Brazilians.
So the early use of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights was already existence since 1959, but it was really only put to use by NGOs that discovered that they could file complaints with the Inter-American Commission. So that was happening already in the late sixties, in the early seventies.
The coup in Uruguay happened before the Chilean coup, really, in June of 1973. But the Uruguayan coup was not as clear cut, not quite as obviously violent in the early ways of the Chilean coup was, so it wasn't taken quite as seriously. And the Chilean experiment in socialism through elections had captured the imagination of the world. So first people were watching Chile very carefully ever since the election of Salvador Allende. And so the Chilean coup had a much broader global repercussions because the world was watching Chile so carefully, and also it had more global repercussions because many parts of the world mobilized around Chile, parts that did not mobilize on either Brazil or Europe.
June Carolyn Erlick:
Could you talk about that mobilization in terms for what it meant, for lack of a better word, of the ecology of human rights organizations?
Kathryn Sikkink:
So now we take for granted human rights organizations, but there weren't that many human rights organizations back in 1973. So Embassy International was funded in 1961, but in the early seventies it was still a pretty small organization. Human Rights Watch didn't exist yet, only Helsinki Watch exist. America's Watch, the second part of Human Rights Watch wouldn't be founded until 1980, and so there were fewer human rights organizations. Some important precursors started as a result of the Chilean coup.
As you know, in Chile, the church was very active on human rights, and it's set up an extraordinary organization called Vicaría de la Solidaridad, the Vicariate of Solidarity. Lawyers and church leaders and social movement leaders worked with that to try to protect the victims. I interviewed people at the Vicaría one time and they told me, "We're in touch every day with Amnesty International London," because it was so hard to document and get out information. Repression was so great in Chile, they couldn't publicize information in Chile, so they had to get outside into the world through their links with groups like Amnesty.
And there were really incredible leaders and individuals. Pepe Zalaquett had worked with the Allende government, then he worked with the Vicaría in Chile, then he was imprisoned, and then he was sent into exile. Leading Chilean leaders like Pepe Zalaquett went and became very involved in the board of directors of Amnesty International USA, and then was elected onto the board of Amnesty International. And so those leaders were models.
There were also church people, like a guy named Joe Eldridge who was a Methodist minister in Chile when the coup occurred. I interviewed him later and he said, "I learned about human rights on September 11th, 1973." He had to leave Chile, he went to Washington, DC. He set up a small human rights organization called the Washington Office on Latin America or WOLA. It was an organization where I worked for almost two years before I went to graduate school. But that organization was set up directly as a result of the coup in Chile, though it also was very interested and worked on Uruguay, and then later on Central America and other parts of Latin America.
June Carolyn Erlick:
That's really interesting. You see, you're sort of having an explosion of human rights organizations. But at the same time, what's happening with international norms and institutions?
Kathryn Sikkink:
So as I said earlier, we had these human rights treaties. The United Nations was starting to be able to do more work on human rights. The UN had a human Rights Commission, as it was called then. It's now called the Human Rights Council. It had a commission, but the commission was very weak. You couldn't even mention the name of a state when you were denouncing human rights violations. So diplomats would stand up and say there are countries in Eastern Europe where people are being held as political prisoners. They wouldn't even mention the name of the state. And Chile was very important for that United Nations Human Rights Commission because one of the earliest country specific mandates to study a country by name and write a report was to work on Chile.
June Carolyn Erlick:
I'm wondering how much the Chilean coup has to do with our perceptions of accountability today.
Kathryn Sikkink:
I just want to back up one moment. Why was the UN all of a sudden going to work on Chile? And one of the reasons was that that was the time when we had the first world, second world, third world. And Chile was an issue that all those countries could work on. Because the Soviet Union was very concerned about Chile. There had been an elected member of a government that had the Communist Party as part of the coalition. The Europeans were very concerned about Chile. Eurocommunism was a big deal, democratic socialism, this was a group of countries in Europe that could support it.
The United States still had Kissinger as Secretary of State and Kissinger had helped orchestrate the US involvement in the coup. But in the US Congress, there were voices in the Democratic Party who were beginning to really talk about human rights and insist that human rights should be a part of US policy. So those voices in the US Congress really were very concerned about Chile and used the Chilean case to push for different US foreign policy.
June Carolyn Erlick:
That sort of leads us to the whole question of accountability. Since the US was so involved playing coup, how did that, in terms of international organizations, in terms of international norms, did that cause a shift? Did the coup cause a shift, The reaction to the coup, or was this something that had been transpiring all along?
Kathryn Sikkink:
So it's really interesting because in the US Congress, there were hearings that were being held criticizing US foreign policy for not taking human rights seriously, criticizing US foreign policy for supporting repressive regimes, for exacerbating repression, for funding repression around the world. And those hearings had started. They were looking at cases like Indonesia, for example, where the United States had also played a role of supporting a coup and supporting repression. The first hearings were all being held when the Chilean coup happened. And so the Chilean coup seemed to be the perfect illustration of the point that they were trying to make, that the US foreign policy was exacerbating repression in the world, and human rights had to be integrated in some way into our foreign policy.
June Carolyn Erlick:
So as I hear you, there's a process which started before the Chilean coup, which is being fertilized by the world reaction to the Chilean coup. But we're talking about the kind of immediate aftermath and going through perhaps the Carter Administration with his focus on human rights. If you look at it from today, from 50 years later, what does it matter?
Kathryn Sikkink:
I had mentioned Kissinger, but there's a famous telegram that we see in the archives now where the US ambassador in Chile is writing back reports about human rights violations. And Kissinger scrawls in the margin said, "Cut the political science lectures." Now, what that tells us is not like who Kissinger was, but it also tells us that human rights was not considered an appropriate topic for foreign policy. Those were political science lectures, that wasn't a foreign policy.
What's happening is we're moving from a situation where human rights is considered things that idealists talk about, world federalists talk about, but diplomats don't talk about. And that's starting to change. It's starting to be possible for diplomats to begin talking about it. And the change is happening not just in diplomacy. The change is happening in foundations. For example, this is the point where the Ford Foundation, in Brazil first and then in Chile, moves from being just a really mainstream foundation that's funding universities and funding other projects, development projects. And the Ford Foundation begins to be an organization that funds human rights work and other foundations follow in that path. So same thing. Foundations are not funding human rights. And this all starts to change.
In my book, activists Beyond Borders, I have a chapter where I talk about some of these processes and I talk about the Ford Foundation, for example. So it's in Brazil, it's in the late sixties, and they're saying we funded all these universities, we funded all these great academics. Now these guys are in jail or they've been thrown out of their jobs in the university. We can keep funding universities, but why should we wasting our money when they are imprisoning or firing the very academics we've been funding? The foundation has to take a stand, and one of the things that's doing is it's funding these think tanks like CEBRAP in Brazil where the academics who have been thrown out of the universities are going into these think tanks. And so the Ford Foundation is funding those think tanks, for example. In Brazil where it was more possible for people to stay in the country and continue to do research. In Chile, the academics literally had to leave. They were thrown out of the university. University was completely intervened and people could not continue doing their research.
June Carolyn Erlick:
So what became the role of foundations when that happened?
Kathryn Sikkink:
So these human rights organizations are beginning to bubble up, also start getting foreign funding. One thing is because they were not getting domestic funding. Obviously they were embattled, the government was trying to shut them down, the government was trying to persecute them. There was not a source of domestic funding for these groups at the time. And so the foundations started to step in and provide support.
Now, this was always a controversial topic. Because then, as now, repressive governments want to say that NGOs and human rights groups are foreign agents. But it was seen as necessary to sustain the work of these groups who were constantly facing being shut down or being just killed. In Guatemala, for example, the government just got rid of all the human rights organizations and killed the people working with them. And so there was a time in Guatemala where there were not human rights organizations because they couldn't even sustain themselves.
Is the Guatemalan coup in 1954, the precursor. So the United States policy of supporting the coup in Chile, of course did not begin in 1973. There was a long history of US covert intervention in supporting military regimes in the world, and particularly in Latin America. So the Guatemala course in '54, we know really set in motion the terrible set of authoritarian regimes, which ultimately led to the genocide in 1980, '81. But also, as I said in Indonesia, of course there was support for the Brazilian coup as well by the US government. Some coups got more support, some coups got less support, for example. But in general, the US saw that supporting these coups was logical part of their anti-communist foreign policy.
June Carolyn Erlick:
So after the September 11th coup, you see the emergence of a consolidation of human rights organizations, of perhaps foundations taking a more human rights or activist approach or transnational advocacy networks. What other sort of changes are we seeing that the reaction to the coup has helped consolidate?
Kathryn Sikkink:
To answer this question, I want to go back to question you asked earlier, which I didn't answer, and that was about accountability. And what's very interesting is, one, the United States was not and has never been held accountable for its involvement in these military coups, number one. Number two, at the time in '73 in Chile, in Uruguay, 76' in Argentina, when we have the military coup that also has a big mark on the human rights movement. But at the time of those coups, we have these human rights groups. They're criticizing human rights violation. They're trying to get prisoners released from jail. They're trying to find the disappeared. No one is talking about accountability. That's something we forget because nowadays accountability is like everyone talking accountability.
But I've done very careful research, and I want to promise you, that in Argentina, in Uruguay, and in Chile at this time in Argentina, as late as during the transition in 1983, they're not talking about accountability. And in fact, I've interviewed the activists who are organizing the demonstrations that now can walk through the streets of Buenos Aires, Chile is still under the dictatorship at this time when Argentina is having a transition. And when they first decide to put up [foreign language]. That's very late.
And so why? Because no one thinks that punishment is possible. And not only that, they're very frightened that demanding accountability, demanding punishment will block the transition. Political scientists at the time, people like Guillermo O'Donnell and these very, very distinguished political scientists are also worried that demands for accountability would blocked transition. So that's the reason. And of course, in Argentina there work who attempts against Alfonsín after the trials of the juntas in 1985, when the government tried to move ahead with more far reaching trials, there were coup attempts against the Alfonsín government.
You're not asking the transition, but we finally get to transition in Chile after the plebiscite in 1988. The Chileans are watching the Argentine situation, and they decide that they are not going to ask for punishment for Castigo, they're going to ask for [foreign language], truth and reconciliation. And they have very important truth commission, the Redding Commission. But everyone knows that truth and reconciliation is a code word for truth and no justice. That's the deal that they strike, is that they're going to get truth but they're not going to get justice. They have an amnesty law, and that amnesty really holds until Pinochet is later arrested in London.
June Carolyn Erlick:
So would you call that a consequence on outgrowth of the September 11th coup?
Kathryn Sikkink:
Well, that's interesting. So I've argued in my book the Justice Cascade that on the justice cascade issue, Greece, Portugal, and then Argentina are by far the more important instigators of the justice cascade. Chile comes quite late, quite reluctantly, to that process. And as I said, only when Pinochet is arrested in London. Based on a arrest warrant sent from Spain for crimes committed in Chile during the dictatorship. So even when Pinochet is arrested in London, the socialist government of Chile does everything possible to get him home and to prevent accountability. The Chilean coup, which was so important for starting this whole cascade of human rights norms, the creation of institutions and organizations is very much behind the trend when it comes to accountability.
June Carolyn Erlick:
How do you see the September 11th coup in Chile and its aftermath, affecting or not affecting the whole issue of accountability of the United States in these coups?
Kathryn Sikkink:
Well, one, we should talk about Orlando Letelier, which I haven't spoken of yet. So Orlando Letelier was a key member of the Allende government and was initially arrested after the coup and later went into exile in Washington, DC where he was very involved with the Institute for Policy Studies, IPS, with a colleague Ronnie Moffitt, and was the main presence working in Washington, DC to lobby against the human rights violations of the Pinochet regime. And as many people listening know, Letelier and Brian Moffitt were killed in a bomb in Sheridan's Circle, right in the midst of Washington, DC. We later knew that it was a bomb placed by members of the Chilean Secret Police, DINA.
But of course, it was an act of international terrorism and wasn't called so at the time because it took a while to figure out what exactly had happened. But we now know, of course, that the Chileans and the other dictatorships of the Southern Cone had an international cooperation around kidnapping and murder of dissidents, and it went so far as to carry out a bombing in the center of Washington, DC. Eventually, some of the people responsible for that, including a US citizen were held accountable. But the US government has, to this day, never been held accountable for any of its support for state repression in Latin America.
June Carolyn Erlick:
Well, if you had to sum up what is the legacy, we're posting this podcast September 11th, 2023, what would you say are the three most important legacy legacies of the Chilean coup?
Kathryn Sikkink:
Well, as I have said, I think it's important is really being able to get the inter-American human rights system and the United Nations human rights system to be able to take on center front specific country cases around human rights. And then once you did it for Chile, it became hard to not be able to continue to do it for other countries as well. So there was all this consensus. Consensus between the Europeans, the Soviets, and eventually the US under Carter, they were able to agree on Chile. They couldn't agree on other countries. But once you did it for Chile, it was harder to not do it for other countries. And so that started becoming the norm that you're going to have the Human Rights Commission or the inter-American human rights system is going to investigate, is going to issue reports. So that was very essential contribution.
A second is the power of exile groups. The Chileans went into exile and they organized the solidarity around the world. It wasn't like it occurred to the Swedes, oh, let's do something about Chile. It's like the Chilean exiles in Sweden, not to mention there were exile groups, Chilean solidarity groups, I think in 43 countries at one point. It's almost unimaginable. The exile spread out broadly. They organized very effectively, and basically they were able to get all these countries to really take action. So the power of exiles organized into small human rights groups in countries around the world.
I think interesting around Chile is this notion that they were going to do truth and no justice, and that was going to be the new model, and that model didn't work. So it was also the Chilean effort to fight accountability. And it broke down. Why? Not because of Judge Garzón in Spain, again, the Chilean exiles brought the case to Spain, and then when the judges of the law lords in the UK realized that the UK and Spain and Chile had all ratified the convention against torture.
Now, Pinochet ratified the convent against torture during his government. He was going into the plebiscite, and he probably did it thinking, I need to get some legitimacy, human rights, legitimacy. I'll ratify this treaty. And everyone knows it's just cheap talk, doesn't have any consequences. So Pinochet ratifies the Torture Convention, and that's the tool that the law lords use to conclude that the UK can extradite Pinochet to Spain legally. He can be extradited. Jack Straw, who was the home minister, decides for clemency, that's something they can do, and decides to send Pinochet home. He was supposed to be sick, he was supposed to be weak, and Pinochet kind of jumps out of his wheelchair when he arrives in Santiago and everyone thinks there's been a big scam. We later do know that Pinochet is ill, and he does die facing prosecution for corruption and for human rights violations back in Chile, which is ultimately a good thing. A good thing that he faced prosecutions in Chile maybe, and not in Spain.
But the reason he got prosecutions in Chile was because Chile and Exiles brought the case to Spain. They took the case to the UK, they won the case, and the Chilean courts realized that they were going to have to do something about this or else. It's an interesting lesson that there was kind of a backwards boomerang where the Chileans who thought they were going to get out of this accountability stuff. We have a database of human rights prosecutions around the world, and the Chileans are number two or three in the world with most completed cases. They're offering very short sentences, but there is accountability in Chile.
June Carolyn Erlick:
That's a really fine way to end this Faculty Voices podcast on the 50th anniversary of the September 11th coup in Chile. You've been listening to Kathryn Sikkink. She's the Ryan Professor of Human Rights Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School. Thank you very much for your time and wisdom.
Kathryn Sikkink:
Thank you, Jillian It's a pleasure as always to talk to you.