Amnesty International and U.S. Foreign Policy: Human Rights Campaigns in Guatemala, the United States, and China (Law and Society, Recent Scholarship)

314 Pages·2008·1.44 MB·English

by  Maria T. Baldwin

Law and Society
Recent Scholarship

Edited by Melvin I. Urofsky

A Series from LFB Scholarly
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Amnesty International and U.S.
Foreign Policy

Human Rights Campaigns in Guatemala, the
United States, and China

Maria T. Baldwin

LFB Scholarly Publishing LLC
El Paso 2009
Copyright © 2009 by LFB Scholarly Publishing LLC

All rights reserved.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Baldwin, Maria T.
Amnesty International and U.S. foreign policy : human rights
campaigns in Guatemala, the United States, and China / Maria T.
Baldwin.
p. cm. -- (Law and society, recent scholarship)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-59332-329-5 (alk. paper)
1. Amnesty International. 2. Human rights--Guatemala. 3. Human
rights--United States. 4. Human rights--China. 5. Capital punishment-
-United States. 6. United States--Foreign relations--Guatemala. 7.
United States--Foreign relations--China. 8. Guatemala--Foreign
relations--United States., 9. China--Foreign relations--United States. I.
Title.
JC571.B339 2008
323--dc22

2008043886

ISBN 978-1-59332-329-5

Printed on acid-free 250-year-life paper.

Manufactured in the United States of America.
Table of Contents

Chapter One 1
AI’s Determined Protest for Human Rights
Protection

Chapter Two 45
Human Rights Abuse, Guatemala, and U.S.
Policy

Chapter Three 85
AI v. Political Murder in Guatemala

Chapter Four 123
Evolving Standards of Decency and the U.S.
Death Penalty

Chapter Five 163
AI v. the Machinery of Death in the United States

Chapter Six 205
The Path to Tiananmen Square

Chapter Seven 237
AI and the Forgotten Prisoners of China

Chapter Eight 275
Evaluation of AI’s Human Rights Campaigns

References 289

Index 301

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Completion of this project was greatly assisted by a number of very
generous people who provided helpful suggestions and encouragement;
special thanks to Dr. Gary R. Hess whose interest and insights
improved the final draft. I thank them and acknowledge that any
shortcomings of this project lay solely with the author. Additional
thanks are extended to Ohio University in Athens, Ohio which houses
most of the AI documents used throughout this study.
I am also indebted to the millions of members that have built
Amnesty International over the past forty-seven years. The tireless
work of these human rights advocates have provided more than just a
fertile area of study for academics. It has also highlighted the need to
balance geopolitical and economic considerations with concern for
human dignity and social justice if we are to create a better world.

vii
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CHAPTER ONE

AI’s Determined Protest for
Human Rights Protection

While many in the United States acknowledge the positive attributes of
human rights in general, the appropriate role that they should play in
the construction of foreign policy has been heavily debated. Part of the
problem stems from the ease with which the origin of human rights has
been explained; a person has human rights simply because they are
human. The planet has over six billion people, even with sufficient
political will to protect human rights, how does one ensure the human
rights of over six billion people? Which human rights should be
prioritized: political, civil, social, economic, or cultural? These
questions are argued within governments but also within the human
rights community, proving that these categories of human rights do not
fit seamlessly together. The global acceptance of human rights
ideology by the turn of the century stemmed from the struggle to define
and develop the concept of human rights, which took place over the
course of hundreds of years, and by the dramatic events of World War
II. The modern human rights era is anchored to this long term
development as well as the outrage connected to the events of the war.
The gross human rights violations committed during World War II
gave tremendous impetus to the human rights movement as
governments looked for ways to ensure that human rights would be
protected in the post-war era. To that end they chartered the United
Nations (UN) and created the Universal Declaration of Human Rights
(UDHR) a non-binding human rights document that charged
governments with the responsibility to ensure that human rights were
protected. The ratification of that document while non-binding
strongly suggested that human rights had became a global common in
the aftermath of World War II. Progress, however, in the area of
human rights has not always been consistent. For instance, the
universality of human rights was challenged by the Chinese
Communist government through the 1990s, which asserted that
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