The US relationship with Guatemala's "Killer President." No, not that one.

Frank Ortiz was the US Ambassador to Guatemala at a time when the Carter Administration (and Democrats in Congress) sought to reorient US foreign policy towards one that emphasized human rights. Michael Cangemi recounts Ambassador Ortiz's difficulties in promoting a human rights-focused policy at a time of escalating government repression in Guatemala and the region. Guatemalan President Fernando Romeo Lucas García (1978-1982) was not interested in what the US was selling, no matter the cost.

Guatemala offers a useful case study for understanding the limits of the Carter administration’s diplomatic influence, especially in Central America. Fundamental differences in how governments in Central America and the United States, as well as different bureaus within the State Department, defined human rights facilitated Central American governments’ suspicion of a human rights-based foreign policy as a form of U.S. interventionism.

This was particularly apparent in Guatemala, owing in part to the United States’ history of direct and indirect intervention in the country’s domestic affairs. Further, Guatemala was able to counterbalance the Carter administration’s arms and economic sanctions more successfully than other Central American states. Successive Guatemalan governments were able to mitigate the absence of U.S. military assistance by purchasing more arms and munitions from other states, as well as from private U.S. manufacturers. Similarly, Guatemala was able to secure large development loans from multinational banks in the late 1970s despite the United States’ criticisms of the Guatemalan government’s human rights record.

These developments ultimately weakened the Carter administration’s diplomatic influence in Guatemala and across Central America, and contributed to its inability to address the region’s political and human rights crises in an effective manner. They also suggest that Ortiz’s recall was part of much larger bureaucratic and diplomatic problems within the Carter administration. Specifically, by the late 1970s the diplomatic apparatus that the U.S. government had utilized throughout the Cold War era was administratively and ideologically unprepared to fully incorporate human rights and smaller states’ emerging diplomatic, economic, and political agency into foreign policy formation and implementation.

Read "Ambassador Frank Ortiz and Guatemala’s “Killer President,” 1976–1980" in Diplomatic History.I wrote related blog posts four years ago - Just what does US-backed dictator mean?,  International involvement in Guatemala's civil war, and NY Times continues debating US role in Guatemala (in particular).