The Right(s) Strategy: How and Why Mexico Shaped the Inter-American Human Rights Regime 1917-1969

From the Mexican Revolution to the early Cold War, the Mexican government shaped and advanced global human rights theory. After the Mexican Revolution, the framers of the 1917 Mexican Constitution codified social and economic rights, creating the first constitution in the world to contain specific labor and cultural protections. In 1945, Mexico proposed that the countries of North and South America create a human rights declaration. The resulting document, the Bogotá Declaration, predated the more famous Universal Declaration of Human Rights by months. Yet the Mexican government’s domestic behavior did not seem to follow its international proclamations. In 1968, the Mexican government committed severe human rights violations in the student massacre and its ensuing dirty war against dissidents. A year later, Mexico appeared to retreat from its past international commitments when it refused to ratify the 1969 Inter-American Convention on Human Rights. This thesis seeks to explain Mexico’s decision in 1969. Rather than a reversal, this thesis argues that Mexico’s human rights violations and late-60s isolationism were part of a cohesive foreign policy based on Mexican commitment to noninterventionism, state power, and social rights.