Redefining Sovereignty: The Chilean Coup of 1973 and the Explosion of Transnational Human Rights Activism

This paper unpacks the impact the 1973 military coup in Chile had on the explosion of transnational human rights politics in the 1970s. In the coup’s aftermath, activists from Western Europe, Canada, the United States, and parts of Latin America, cobbled together coalitions to express solidarity with the victims of violence in Chile. Solidarity committees worked with more institutionalized organizations like Amnesty International, the latter of which turned the coup into a cause célèbre for its work against torture.  Armed with information about torture, summary executions, detention without due process, and widespread disappearances, many began to identify as human rights activists and strenuously worked to ameliorate such state practices.  To foreground the transnational nature of this activism, this paper draws on archives and interviews from South America (Brazil, Chile, Argentina), North America (U.S., Mexico), and Europe (London, Amsterdam).

Of particular importance to this paper is how transnational activists worked to redefine prevailing notions of sovereignty in the 1970s.  For one, NGOs like Amnesty International challenged the Chilean Junta’s sovereignty by conducing on-site investigations that would lay the template for a world redefined by international external monitors.  But after the coup intergovernmental organizations, such as the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights at the OAS and the Commission on Human Rights at the UN, stopped shuffling around papers and for the first time in their history started to direct their energies toward exposing human rights abuses.  This paper traces debates over the shifting ideas of sovereignty, especially as the Chilean Junta found itself caught off-guard, defending itself on sovereign grounds that no longer held the same weight in international politics. In so doing, these bodies strengthened the inchoate networks of transnational human rights activists by lifting the veil of state sovereignty on which nation states had historically relied.