Is U.S. Aid Really Linked to Human Rights in Latin America?

In their recent article on U.S. foreign assistance to Latin America, Cingranelli and Pasquarello (i985) report that rights considerations have become a more important determinant of distribution of U.S. foreign aid in this region during same period that U.S. dominance has been severely threatened (p. 562). While such a conclusion is normatively appealing and applies more to economic assistance than to military aid, it stands in sharp contrast to results reported by Carleton and Stohl (i985), Schoultz (X98i), Chomsky and Herman (1979), and to expected priorities of Reagan administration. Cingranelli and Pasquarello draw attention to distinctive character of their results and defend them. They point to their research design which employed a systematic measure of human rights and which simultaneously evaluated several alternative explanations for U.S. foreign aid policy. Despite evident rigor of their research, several important problems raise doubts about their major conclusion. One involves decision on what Latin American states to include in analysis; another involves operationalization of human rights. As we shall show, reanalysis of data with a different design decision undermines confidence in their results for positive relationship between respect for human rights within Latin American countries and level of economic assistance. First of all, Cingranelli and Pasquarello (1985) decided to exclude El Salvador from their analysis, even though El Salvador received approximately 27 percent of all U.S. bilateral aid for FY i982 to Latin America (the year of their analysis) in order to counter a severe threat to U.S. dominance. They justified this decision on grounds that the inclusion of El Salvador . . . would have distorted findings. The more general patterns of relationships emerged only after El Salvador was removed from sample. In this way, Cingranelli and Pasquarello argued, We are, in effect, focusing on more routine decisions affecting distribution of U.S. foreign aid among Latin American nations (P545). The obvious difficulty with such a research design decision is: What are