Foreign Relations of the United States, 1977–1980 Volume XXIV, South America; Latin America Region

92. Memorandum From Jessica Tuchman Mathews of the National Security Council Staff to the President’s Assistant for National Security Affairs (Brzezinski)¹

Washington, September 25, 1978

SUBJECT

• Thoughts on the Attached

I share some of Bob’s frustration,² but I cannot agree that our policy towards Argentina has been “disastrous”. It has certainly been difficult, uneven and tense, but given the conflicting interests at stake I’m not sure exactly how it could have been improved. Consider:

—The human rights record of President Videla’s administration is horrible. Reports of vicious and institutionalized torture are well documented. On the other hand, neither we nor Videla can control the indisputable terrorist threat, and Videla is probably better than anyone who would replace him on the right or the left.

—The GOA is caught between wanting to continue its long and close relationship with the US and wanting to prove its pride and strength by thumbing its nose at us—as Brazil has done.

—The GOA wants to pursue (or at least keep alive) a nuclear weapons option. We don’t want them to.

—Argentina has been the site of heavy foreign investment, while the Congress, over Administration opposition, enacts linkages between trade/investment and human rights. On the merits, if these restrictions apply anywhere, they apply in Argentina.

—There is a very high sensitivity to Argentine events in Congress. The Kennedy Amendment which takes effect next week is unique.

Given all these crosscurrents, both between the two governments and within the GOA, I don’t know what an overall “strategy” would look like. Our actions haven’t been as random as they might seem. I see two threads as having shaped our behavior toward Argentina. First, reaction to conflicting signals from the GOA—promises of progress, short term progress then regression, a forward and back pattern repeated over and over. Not just on human rights, but equally on proliferation. Secondly, implementing the law—the impending deadline of the Kennedy amendment, and the Harkin amendments, particularly on Ex-Im.

At one point an effort to explicitly define a “strategy” was made—with bad results. That was Newsom’s instructions for his visit there last spring.³ To a certain extent, that approach was repeated in Mondale’s recent meeting with Videla,⁴ in that we tried to define an explicit tradeoff for the GOA—you do this and we’ll do that. While that approach seems tight and neat, it doesn’t work because when the GOA doesn’t do what it promises we cannot be flexible without appearing to “blink”. When we change the conditions or give the quid without the quo, I suspect that we strengthen the hands of the hardliners within the GOA and further weaken the credibility of the moderates.

I have only two prescriptions and neither has to do with Argentina—they are of general application. The first is that we devote considerable effort to an education project to convince Congress that linking certain trade and investment policies with human rights does not further the cause of human rights. This would be a long, slow process without a new “accomplishment” at the end, but I suspect it would be well worth the effort. The second is that we try, in administering the human rights programs, to avoid judging trends—positive or negative—at less than annual intervals. This would be hard to apply on visits from the Presidential level down to the Assistant Secretary, for it is on these occasions that we most often look for some hook on which to hang a positive action—gift, loan, agreement or whatever. But there are other artificial deadlines to which we frequently react—an impending IFI vote for example. The truth is that in reacting to short term changes we inevitably condemn ourselves to follow a jerky and inconsistent policy, for change that is lasting and meaningful on a societal scale seldom occurs in less than a year’s time, and generally in much longer (obviously there are exceptions—a revolution, etc.). Making this change in policy would require a Presidential decision since it would alter established ways of doing business. It also obviously carries the risk of being overly rigid, but at least it seems to me worth a serious look—a study of its pluses and minuses.

RECOMMENDATION:

That you approve my drafting a Dodson-Tarnoff memorandum directing an interagency study of the advantages and disadvantages of a policy that would explicitly seek to avoid any US evaluation of positive or negative trends in human rights observance at less than annual intervals.⁵

1. Source: Carter Library, National Security Affairs, Staff Material, North/South, Pastor, Country Files, Box 1, Argentina, 9–12/78. Confidential. Copies were sent to Pastor, Albright, and Renner.
2. In a September 25 memorandum to Brzezinski and Aaron, Pastor described a September 19 meeting, “chaired by Newsom, which I hoped would deal with the general strategic question. Instead, it dealt with only two decisions: IMET training and $17 million worth of spare parts. We were informed at the beginning of the meeting that State had recently decided to release a large number of military and safety-related items, to clear all of the FMS in the pipeline, and a large number of the commerce-related items.” Pastor continued: “This is just the latest set of decisions in a disastrous policy. We are exactly back where we hoped we wouldn’t be: dribbling out decisions rather than agreeing to a strategy.” (Carter Library, National Security Affairs, Staff Material, North/South, Pastor, Country Files, Box 1, Argentina, 9–12/78)
3. See Document 80.
4. See Document 90.
5. Brzezinski underlined the words “advantages” and “disadvantages.” He checked the approve option and wrote, “but only after further in-staff discussion. Won’t it lock us in? ZB.”