When a world leader comes to call

Yesterday I asked myself a rhetorical question on Twitter: “Wonder what motivated an American president, any American president to come to Argentina on the 40^th anniversary of the 1976 coup d’état?”

I think it was a fair question. Surely, sufficient evidence has come to light over the last four decades of both early and later US complicity with the bloody military regime that came to power in 1976 and ruled Argentina until 1983—first, under the administration of US President Gerald Ford and, later, under that of President Ronald Reagan, with the conspicuous exception to this policy of tacit support being the four years of the Jimmy Carter administration, which openly confronted the military junta over its human rights abuses.

Clearly, I wasn’t the only one to ask myself that question, although others asked it less rhetorically. One was Obama’s fellow Nobel Peace Prize laureate Adolfo Pérez Esquivel, who was reported to have contacted the US president asking him to pick another date for his visit to Argentina since doing so on the 40^th anniversary of the coup would be considered provocative.

Publicly, the 84-year-old Argentine human rights advocate recalled that US military academies (the infamous School of the Americas, for example) trained military men from Argentina and other Latin American de facto regimes in effective torture techniques. Pérez Esquivel added that “It would be good to have a public recognition of United States interventionism.”

And, in answer to his question, my question and the questions of numerous other human rights supporters who were at least dubious about Argentine President Mauricio Macri’s standing shoulder to shoulder with a US president on such a politically and emotionally charged date in the country’s history, Obama did just that—went to a park built in memory of the victims of the former military regime and admitted to the past and committed to the future.

The park, known as Parque de la Memoria(Remembrance Park) opened in 1997, almost a decade and a half after the return of democracy to Argentina, following the Falklands (Malvinas) War. Similar in concept to the Vietnam War Memorial in the United States, the park, built on the shore of the sprawling River Plate estuary east of the Buenos Aires neighborhood of Belgrano, centers on a long, high wall called the Monument to the Victims of State Terrorism. The wall bears the names and ages of 20,000 confirmed fatal victims of state terror under the military regime known as the National Reorganization Process, or more colloquially as simply El Proceso. There are another 10,000 blank plaques on the wall representing Argentina’s other “missing” victims of the regime who have yet to be found or identified. Extending beyond the wall out into the tawny waters of the River Plate is a pier representing victims cast into the vast river or the ocean beyond—a preferred method for doing away with those clandestinely held who were no longer considered of any use to military intelligence.

President Obama described the experience of being at the memorial as “humbling” and “poignant”. While he recalled that former President Carter’s administration had been the exception to the rule during the Argentine reign of terror—underscoring the work of “diplomats, like Tex Harris, who worked in the U.S. Embassy here to document human rights abuses…And like Patt Derian, the Assistant Secretary of State for Human Rights for President Jimmy Carter, a President who understood that human rights is a fundamental element of foreign policy”—he also admitted that, “There’s been controversy about the policies of the United States early in those dark days, and the United States, when it reflects on what happened here, has to examine its own policies as well, and its own past.”

These words can only be seen as a bold and clear admission, and Obama went a step further by adding that “Democracies have to have the courage to acknowledge when we don’t live up to the ideals that we stand for; when we’ve been slow to speak out for human rights.  And that was the case here.” As if to further emphasize his sincerity and the interest of the United States in mending the fences of the past with Argentina, Obama made a peace offering, saying, “Today, in response to a request from President Macri, and to continue helping the families of the victims find some of the truth and justice they deserve, I can announce that the United States government will declassify even more documents from that period, including, for the first time, military and intelligence records,  because I believe we have a responsibility to confront the past with honesty and transparency.”

I find it telling, nonetheless, that President Obama included another admission in his Parque de la Memoria speech. He said, “What happened here in Argentina is not unique to Argentina, and it’s not confined to the past.  Each of us have a responsibility each and every day to make sure that wherever we see injustice, wherever we see rule of law flouted…we’re speaking out and that we’re examining our own hearts and taking responsibility to make this a better place for our children and our grandchildren.”

I’d like to take the president at his word on this topic and hope that he means for it to be a new starting point for the United Sates, hopefully one that he’ll be able to pass on to his successor, come next year. Because while this seems to be a true and laudable sentiment, Obama is clearly not ignorant of the fact that the United States continues to be friendly with, and indeed to support, flagrantly abusive and autocratic regimes: Saudi Arabia, for instance. In January, of last year when Saudi King Abdullah died, Obama praised him as a great leader and underlined the importance of “US-Saudi relationship as a force for stability and security in the Middle East and beyond.”

But the Saudi regime is, in fact, autocratic and often unconscionably cruel. Opponents are regularly persecuted and/or jailed.  Detainees, including children, commonly face systematic due process violations, including arbitrary arrest, torture and other mistreatment while detained. Judges routinely sentence defendants to severe, life-threatening floggings, and can order arrests and detentions, even of children, at their discretion. Women, furthermore, are considered to be under the “guardianship” of men. And this is just one—if very prominent—example.

If the United States is sincere about the human rights question—and clearly, President Obama has sought, in difficult times, to reach greater understanding between the United States and the rest of the world—then it really needs to stop defending its support for “friendly” dictatorships and other authoritarian regimes based solely on political pragmatism and expediency. As Obama said of former President Carter’s stand, it’s time that all US presidents understand that “human rights are a fundamental element of foreign policy,” and they should make full respect for human rights and the rule of law the ultimate test of whether any country qualifies to be considered “a friendly nation” by the United States as the much-touted “leader of Western democracy”. Doing so would make an enormous difference in the lives of millions worldwide, as leaders began to realize that the fate of their links to the West was tied to US acceptance of their human rights performances.

In short, when it comes spreading the practical concepts of democracy and human and civil rights throughout the world, it’s time for Western leaders as a whole to start putting their money where their mouth is.