Human rights and the Cold War: the campaign to halt the Argentine ‘dirty war’

In the late 1960s and 1970s, internationally-focused human rights groups in the United States worked to raise public awareness and generate popular opprobrium of repressive regimes overseas, and lobbied policymakers for more stringent congressional control over foreign aid funding to regimes violating human rights. By the mid-1970s, non-governmental human rights advocates and their sympathisers in Congress had created a strong grassroots base, established a powerful presence in Washington, and could effectively mobilise on behalf of human rights issues, as evidenced by the successful 1978 congressional cutoff of all US arms transfers to Argentina.