Gaming the Gringos:American Electoral Cycles and Strategic Repression in Latin America

• In Event: Represión, tortura y género

Abstract

Recent research has demonstrated that there is a ‘Latin Bias’ in the Anglo-American media’s disproportionate coverage of human rights repression in Latin America relative to other regions of the world. With this knowledge do regimes in Latin America engage in strategic patterns of repression that are calibrated with the distribution of U.S. counter-narcotic aid during American presidential and Congressional electoral cycles? In answering this question I draw upon and integrate insights from social-phycology’s propinquity theory with ‘surge and decline’ theories of U.S. Presidential and Congressional elections. I define strategic repression as state terror that allows regimes to claim plausible deniability. Since certain patterns of human rights violation, like disappearances, provide no forensic evidence that can directly tie regimes to acts of repression, regimes’ participation or knowledge of such illegal acts can never be confirmed. Consequently, regimes can deny knowledge of and or responsibility for illegal acts and thereby avoid Western media reports of state sanctioned repression from coming to the attention of a sitting President or Congressional incumbent who, in their bid for re-election, would be forced to distance themselves from repressive regimes by cutting counter-narcotics aid. Therefore, it is hypothesized that during U.S. Presidential and Congressional elections disappearances will increase while patterns of repression that does not afford plausible deniability, like torture and extra-judicial killings, will decrease. Using an econometric structural equation model to estimate data for 32 countries in Latin America from 1984 to 2005 my hypothesis found strong statistical support.

Author

• Horace A Bartilow, University of Kentucky