James Earl Carter

Born in Georgia in 1924, he was the U.S. president from 1977 to 1981.

During his electoral campaign and the first months of his term in office, he made efforts to dissociate himself from the crimes of Nixon, Ford and Kissinger in Latin America and the Caribbean. He threatened to suspend aid for oppressive Central and South American regimes responsible for gross human rights violations, opened a U.S. Interests Section in Cuba and made it easier for U.S. citizens to travel to the island.

His administration, however, was accommodating towards the genocidal regimes of El Salvador and Nicaragua and came to arrangements with the bloody dictatorships of Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Bolivia, Paraguay, Honduras and Haiti. The Pentagon maintained close links with military forces in the region, U.S. transnational corporations made juice investments in most of the South Cone and the White House showed itself tolerant towards these dictatorships and the “repressive democracies” of the Dominican Republic and Colombia.

Source:

• Suarez, Luis. Madre América. Un siglo de violencia y dolor (1898-1998) (Mother America: A Century of Violence and Pain (1898 – 1998). Ed. Ciencias Sociales. La Habana, 2002