by Anin Luo
Felix A. Jiménez Botta is Assistant Professor at George Mason University Korea. His research focuses on global and transnational history, modern Germany, contemporary Latin America, and the history of human rights. His work has appeared in Contemporary European History, Journal of Transatlantic Studies, Zeithistorische Forschungen, and several book chapters. He is the editor of a special issue entitled “The Multiple Meanings of Human Rights in Germany” in the Journal of Contemporary History (2025). His current project is on the global history of the concept of cosmopolitanism since the late eighteenth century.
Jiménez Botta’s first book, Latin America and Human Rights Politics in West Germany, 1973–1990 (Cambridge University Press, 2025), analyzes the rise and decline of a market-critical interpretation of human rights and the triumph of a market-friendly counter-vision of human rights. The book argues that these conflicting interpretations of human rights arose in the context of West Germany-based solidarity movements with Chile, Argentina, Nicaragua, and El Salvador. The book demonstrates that Cold War human rights were not inherently conservative and minimalist, but could coexist with more radical visions of economic redistribution, social justice, and revolution.
Anin Luo (AL): Your book stresses the protean nature of human rights claims to uncover a “market-critical” strain of human rights in 1970s and 1980s West Germany. As you show so compellingly, in this period human rights were championed by a heterogeneous coalition of “market-critical” activists in West Germany who were sympathetic to the visions of social justice and democratic socialism that the Chilean president Salvador Allende (1908–73) brought to life. But human rights were also championed by “market-friendly” activists who vilified the redistributive Latin American state and separated human rights from social justice.
In the past fifteen years, historians such as Samuel Moyn and Stefan-Ludwig Hoffmann have emphasized the contingent origins of human rights. Moyn has influentially argued that the contemporary understanding of human rights against the state only emerged in the 1970s, leaving behind more ambitious dreams of collective societal transformation to embrace a minimalist program of social change. To begin, could you talk about how your framing of “market-critical” versus “market-friendly” human rights challenges this now-dominant narrative? What does it mean for the political or moral potency of human rights if, as you argue, different groups with opposing agendas can all latch onto human rights claims?
Felix A. Jiménez Botta (FJB): My book is indebted to the books that you mention, which are part of a revisionist project that successfully challenged the teleology of an earlier scholarship that portrayed human rights as an inexorable force rising through the ages. These revisionist scholars took a genealogical approach to emphasize sharp ruptures. For example, Moyn argued that the 1970s were a turning point for human rights because activists, intellectuals, and politicians abandoned the state-centric notion of rights as citizenship rights to embrace anti-statist and “minimalistic human rights,” largely on behalf of distant strangers. Stefan-Ludwig Hoffmann, more of a conceptual historian indebted to Reinhart Koselleck, argued that a narrow focus on the 1970s, and even the twentieth century, does not accurately reflect the richly layered history of human rights.
Recent scholarship has largely superseded the debate about origins, as I have argued elsewhere. Nonetheless, having this ongoing debate in the background was very productive for my project. It soon became clear to me that the activists advocating on behalf of Chilean and Argentinean political refugees I was encountering in the archives did not fit into the narrow mold of “minimalistic human rights.” I developed the concept of “market-critical” to elucidate the manifold exponents of a fragmented West German left that employed human rights to oppose the Chilean, and later the Argentinean, Nicaraguan (until 1979), and Salvadoran regimes. Many of them—for instance, New Leftists and Social Democrats—would probably object to being lumped together. However, this concept offers a means to distinguish them from the far more homogeneous “market-friendly” conservatives, who used human rights to mobilize against the left-wing solidarity movement in the 1970s. These conservatives did not always agree with each other either—some sided with the Pinochet regime in Chile, while others came to reject it. Yet they all prioritized a limited assortment of negatively defined rights compatible with capitalism and saw the left as a threat to human rights. Market-critical and market-friendly human rights map well onto the positive versus negative rights dichotomy, which pits expansive state-supported rights such as healthcare and education against a narrower vision of rights laser-focused on personal freedoms against the state.
In short, the framework I utilize here highlights how human rights functioned as a capacious political language capable of accommodating sharply divergent ideological projects. The narrative I trace in West Germany reveals this Janus-faced, polysemic quality particularly clearly, as actors holding incompatible political views and moral standards repeatedly mobilized the language of human rights for competing goals. In Germany and elsewhere, this realization has not dented their appeal for groups and individuals seeking redress for abuses.
AL: I would love to hear you walk through your method: the archives you chose to examine and the way you interpreted the materials in the context of broader political debates. You explore the history of human rights not by studying the international human rights system based in the United Nations (UN), but by focusing on grassroots civil society organizations such as the West German chapter of Amnesty International and student groups such as Christian Democratic youth associations. Why focus on West Germany, and how does your attention to grassroots activism in particular offer a different perspective on the history of human rights?
FJB: My approach is part of an important historiographical shift away from normative and deterministic accounts of the history of human rights. Earlier scholars privileged hegemonic understandings of international law and the UN system in formulating their critiques. I focus instead on political struggle, contingency, and the multiple meanings that human rights held for historical actors across time. You are correct in that many scholars of human rights focus on high-level international history and rely primarily on the archives of UN-related organizations. Scholars such as Barbara J. Keys and Mark Bradley have centered their analyses on the nation-state, but they focused on the United States and, to some extent, France. My interest in the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG), or West Germany, lies in two concurrent factors. On the one hand, it was a country that wrestled with international isolation, having only joined the UN in 1973, enduring a territorial partition with East Germany, and grappling with the enormous legacy of the Shoah. On the other hand, it was very successful economically, which gave it significant clout and power in international affairs. I was also struck by the stark contrast between its pro-capitalist, pro-NATO, liberal democratic consensus, and its robust leftist movements that rebuilt after the murderous persecution they suffered between 1933 and 1945. The left-wing milieus in the Federal Republic of Germany reached national prominence between the 1960s and 1980s. With a few notable exceptions, their story has been told primarily from the perspective of domestic politics, and to a smaller extent transatlantic networks with the North American student movement. Many of these studies conclude that transnational ties became weaker in the 1970s and 1980s as the German left turned inward during the “leaden years” of radical left terrorism and state repression.
I started my research at the archives of the German Foreign Ministry, which preserved a wealth of responses to the 1973 military coup in Chile. I found a surprising variety in the language they employed. Human rights were not the primary way in which West German civil society advocates framed their opposition to Pinochet: they utilized more traditional framings of democracy, antifascism, solidarity, and morality, hoping to elicit a positive response from their elected officials. However, only a few short years later, by 1975–76, human rights towered above all framings. This is what led me to seek civil society archives, including grassroots left-wing groups, documented in the Centre for Research and Documentation Chile-Latin America (Forschungs und Dokumentationszentrum Chile Lateinamerika, FDCL), the Archive for Extra-Parliamentary Opposition and Social Movements (Archiv APO und Soziale Bewegungen), and the Ulm Chapter of the West German section of Amnesty International. I sought to understand the internal dynamics of how human rights came to tower above all other languages of solidarity. Moreover, since I started my research with state archives, I remained interested in how bureaucrats and politicians responded to this grassroots advocacy. This meant visiting the archives of the main political parties and government ministries to reconstruct the policy decision-making process and negotiation that went into securing an asylum program for Chilean refugees, the shifting response to the Chilean and Argentinean military regimes, and the transformation in government policy toward human rights in light of the Central American crises that I trace in the later chapters.
AL: I admire how you weave together the specific domestic politics of West Germany with regime shifts and leftist internationalist politics in Latin American countries. As you show, the violent tactics of the Red Army Faction and the electoral push and pull between Christian Democrats and Social Democrats in the 1970s and 1980s structured West German advocates’ response to state violence on both the right and the left in Latin America. How did you think through the different scales of politics at work in your research and writing? Can you expand on what you mean when you say that West German human rights advocacy for Latin America was located in the “interstitial space between domestic and international concerns” (21)?
FJB: This question really goes to the core of the theoretical framework underpinning this book. Latin American military regimes and guerrilla movements evoked responses from individuals and organizations that operated at multiple scales: the local, the national, and the international. This is what I mean by the “interstitial space,” a zone of overlap without a clear border between domestic and international concerns. Amnesty International activists are a great example, as they were locally rooted, nationally organized, but attentive to both their London headquarters and UN and international human rights treaties.
Other historical actors similarly worked across these scales. West German left-wing activists, politicians, and government officials responded to local concerns, national pressures, and international politics; Latin American exiles responded to local pressures through their interactions with West German counterparts and the state, as well as transnationally-operating exile networks and the situation in their home countries. I treat human rights politics not as an import or export product, but as something that emerges in this interstitial space. The loyalties motivating political engagement directed abroad were mutually constitutive with those shaping action domestically.
AL: You’re careful not to portray Latin America as a mere projection for market-critical andmarket-friendly human rights advocates in West Germany, in part by stressing the central role of Latin American refugees in shaping West German human rights advocacy. How do you understand exiles as—perhaps to put it too simplistically—both subjects and objects of solidarity politics?
FJB: Despite their relatively small numbers, exiles from Latin America, particularly Chile, played a key role in West German human rights politics. Exiles’ right to receive asylum in West Germany gave left-wing solidarity activists a concrete cause that they were successful in achieving. But once they arrived, exiles shaped the solidarity movement’s focus on human rights, participating in cultural evenings known as peñas, which became essential for spreading the word about abuses and fundraising, and coordinating with transnational exile networks operating across Europe, including behind the Iron Curtain. Some Nicaraguan refugees worked as direct emissaries of the Sandinista guerrilla movement and later the revolutionary state in their homeland. Other exiles were conservatives who opposed both the left and the Pinochet regime and collaborated with young Christian Democrats dissatisfied with their own political party. In short, exiles were not mere objects of solidarity. Nor were all West German leftists simply projecting their own politics onto Latin America. Some surely were—the Maoists are a good example—but they were in the minority in the solidarity movement.
AL: You open the book with Helmut Frenz (1933–2011), the General Secretary of the West German branch of Amnesty International. Later, you detail his development of a market-critical approach to human rights advocacy, starting with his campaign for West Germany to admit refugees fleeing Chile after Pinochet’s 1973 coup. How did you first come across Frenz, and how does focusing on activists like Frenz offer a means of exploring transnational politics distinct from—but perhaps complementary to—international histories that foreground state-based diplomacy and aid?
FJB: I encountered Frenz in several archives: the Foreign Ministry, the Social Democratic Friedrich Ebert Foundation, and especially the Archives of the Protestant Church (Evangelisches Zentralarchiv, EZA) in Berlin, which houses the external affairs office of the German Protestant Church (Evangelische Kirche in Deutschland, EKD). Helmut Frenz is a fascinating character who underwent dramatic transformations during the period covered by the book. He went from an Allende critic and cautious supporter of Pinochet’s 1973 coup to a co-creator of the human rights organization Comité Pro Paz Chile (COPACHI), staunch critic of the Pinochet regime, General Secretary of West German Amnesty International, and market-critical supporter of the Sandinista government in Nicaragua. Frenz spent ten years in Chile as a Lutheran pastor, from 1965 to 1975. His last two years coincided with the beginning of the Chilean military regime in 1973. During this period, Frenz focused on securing political asylum for Latin American exiles in Western Europe, including the FRG, which included providing church asylum, smuggling people into embassies, and loudly denouncing the torture practices of the military regime during trips abroad.
These efforts have led scholars such as Patrick William Kelly to portray Frenz as an example of the rise of “minimalist” human rights in the 1970s. In their view, such “minimalist” advocacy focused on anti-torture advocacy instead of a more expansive program of social welfare linked to citizenship, thus tactically or ideologically prioritizing political and civil rights over economic and social ones. This is a mischaracterization of Frenz: there was nothing “minimalist” about securing political asylum for Latin American refugees in the FRG. Securing political asylum entailed securing funding, living space, and work, which was controversial due to the declining situation in the West German job market, Red Army Faction terrorism, and conservative opposition. This ties nicely to our earlier discussion of the market-critical versus market-friendly divide: market-critical asylum advocacy demanded state-provided services as a matter of right, not charity. Frenz would go on to openly embrace market-critical positions as General Secretary of the West German section of Amnesty International from 1976 to 1985. He was part of a broader trend in 1960s–80s European ecumenical movements that adopted anti-capitalist positions inspired by Global South liberation theologies, particularly in its Latin American iteration. Frenz’s advocacy was disruptive and attracted frequent criticism from government officials, especially in Chile but also in West Germany. Moreover, as an immigrant in Chile, Frenz’s engagement put him and his family in danger, and ultimately cost him his ability to remain in Chile.
His career provides a valuable heuristic to trace the emergence of market-critical human rights, deriving from his experiences of neoliberal military rule in Chile, interaction with Marxist refugees, and engagement with liberation theology. In Frenz’s career, the “international” emerges not above or between states, but in the interstitial spaces between multiple scales.
AL: What might this theoretical approach—grounded in the advocacy of figures in these interstices, such as Frenz or Latin American exiles—offer intellectual histories of international politics more generally?
FJB: My book is inspired by recent scholarship in global intellectual history such as Moyn and Andrew Sartori’s seminal volume, which challenges Eurocentric accounts that gave ideas an implicit globalizing logic divorced from local conditions. This work emphasizes the embedding of ideas in political practice rather than textual exegesis alone and encourages intellectual historians to engage more directly with political and diplomatic history. I also draw from the prosopographical methodology that scholars such as Quinn Slobodian and Mira Siegelberg have impressively deployed in recent years and the recovery of alternative international political imaginaries by scholars such as Steven L.B. Jensen, Adom Getachew, or Christy Thornton. Ultimately, my project suggests that these approaches can be fruitfully combined not only to reconstruct transnational intellectual networks or international institutions, but also to reinterpret political transformations unfolding largely within a single national context. The book uses West Germany’s relationship with Latin America not as a niche case study, but as a lens through which to examine broader struggles over the political meanings of human rights, democratization, and international order during the Cold War.
AL: You detail how in the 1980s, conservative Christian Democrats painted the leftist Sandinista government in Nicaragua as a human rights violator to promote a vision of market-friendly human rights. Amid debates over the democratization of the Southern Cone, market-friendly human rights advocates ignored the connections that market-critical activists drew between military dictatorship and capitalism, therefore repressing the Latin American solidarity movement’s market-critical orientation. To end, can you talk about how market-friendly human rights activists successfully suppressed market-critical human rights in the 1980s and 1990s?
FJB: I think that repressing might be too strong of a word here, as market-critical activists were still free to express their views. Rather, what changed in the 1980s was their loss of public and political traction, and even the moral high ground. Human rights advocacy in the 1970s was strongly associated with leftist campaigns against right-wing military regimes such as Pinochet or the Argentinean military regime. In the 1980s, this changed, as market-friendly activists used the mobilization against Sandinista Nicaragua and the guerrilla movements in El Salvador and Chile to enshrine a particular understanding of human rights that detached civil and political rights from political economy. What I am tracing in the second half of the book is not simply the victory of one camp over another, but a structural transformation in human rights advocacy in the FRG.
Market-friendly activists achieved this transformation in several ways. First, they astutely read and shaped the political moment of the 1980s. By criticizing both the Sandinistas and the Pinochet regime, market-friendly advocates could make the case that they rejected authoritarianism in all forms. For example, the jurist Martin Kriele (1931–2020) and the International Society for Human Rights (Internationale Gesellschaft für Menschenrechte, IGFM) focused intensely on abuses in Nicaragua under the Sandinistas, especially accusations that the Sandinistas had engaged in genocide against the indigenous Miskito population on the Caribbean coast. In reality, market-friendly advocates selectively framed human rights violations, relativizing repression under right-wing governments in Chile and El Salvador and largely ignoring repression in Argentina. Yet their attacks did lasting damage to the market-critical advocates, forcing them to defend the actions of the Sandinista state.
Second, market-friendly advocates made an explicit link between democratization and capitalism. They emphasized that Chile and El Salvador were on a clear course to democratization, which was belied by the 1983 protests and subsequent repression in Chile and continuing death squad activity in El Salvador. The nexus between democratization and capitalism included treating the “economic gains” of the Chilean model and the economic recovery under authoritarian market conditions in El Salvador as essential for the success of democratization. This conforms with the neoliberal move to insulate the economy from questions of rights and thus political contestation.
Third, the market-friendly view became better positioned within West German politics after the transition to a Christian Democratic Union (CDU)-led government in 1982. The presence of Christian Democrats in the opposition to both Nicaragua and Chile enabled leaders such as Chancellor Helmut Kohl (1930–2017) and CDU General Secretary Heiner Geißler (1930–2017) to amplify the visibility of market-friendly human rights claims. For example, the Christian Democratic government invited opposition figures from Nicaragua and state officials from El Salvador to West Germany. Technocratic bureaucrats who had rejected grassroots human rights advocacy dropped their reservations to human rights once it was repackaged in market-friendly wrapping. As the Sandinista government showed increasing signs of rigidity and authoritarianism, it did not take long for the attitude of the German state to shift from benefactor to staunch opponent. By contrast, the right-wing Salvadoran state, blacklisted from receiving German development aid due to its involvement in repressive measures in 1979, became a darling of West German development assistance by 1983.
AL: In the epilogue, you bring your history to the present by discussing how human rights have come under assault in countries that had previously held them up as ideals. Germany is not alone in facing the challenges of neo-fascism, anti-migrant sentiment, and anger about the state’s role in the wars in Ukraine and Gaza. What were the limits of market-critical human rights, and what can revisiting this activism offer our understanding of human rights in the present?
FJB: I believe that the success of the market-friendly camp was, in part, contingent on the fact that market-critical activists had little to riposte to their strategy. Market-critical activists’ close identification with the Sandinista project and the Salvadoran guerrilla forced them to defend policies incompatible with elemental human rights. This reflected a shift in their relationship with Latin American revolutionary movements. Whereas, in the 1970s, West German solidarity activists and Latin American exiles from Chile and Argentina had collaborated more or less on the basis of equality, in the 1980s, the dynamic between market-critical activists and the Nicaraguan government and the Salvadoran guerrilla was entirely different. As scholars such as Christian Helm and Eline van Ommen have demonstrated, the Nicaraguan state and the Salvadoran guerrilla movement saw solidarity largely as a one-way street.
At the same time, the market-critical advocates in the 1980s had an uneasy relationship with the language of human rights itself. They only haltingly integrated that language into their advocacy, preferring to rely on idioms of solidarity, antifascism, and class struggle. There was no common front for human rights in the 1980s as there had been in the 1970s, which made it easier for their opponents to claim the terrain of human rights as their own. Revisiting their activism makes clear that the narrowing of human rights to a limited set of civil and political protections was neither inevitable nor uncontested, but the product of a contingent political struggle. This history also underscores that human rights language is malleable and can be mobilized selectively. It can offer a vocabulary to challenge authoritarian capitalism and global inequality but also to support liberal market-oriented visions of global governance. Similarly, it can be invoked to decry external pressure, sanctions, and interventionism, but also to justify them.
Market-critical activism in the FRG did not disappear; as I discuss in the epilogue, the movement continued into the 1990s. But their struggles since the 1980s point to the fundamental challenge of sustaining a notion of human rights compatible with redistribution in a world dominated by economic interests and states inimical to their realization. The populist-authoritarian moment in western democracies combines ambivalence toward neoliberal economics, unprecedented levels of repression against elemental freedoms, and the migration of neo-reactionary ideologies from online niche communities to the public sphere and mainstream political parties. In these contexts, the language of market-critical human rights can be a resource for those critical of international political economy who remain committed to a world in which democracy, humans, and nature can thrive.
Anin Luo is a PhD Candidate in History (Program in History of Science) at Princeton University. Her dissertation, “Immunity, Vulnerability, and the Right to Health in International Politics, 1952–1994” traces immunity as both a biological and political problem to tell an international history of the right to health. Her research on animals and humanism has been published in Isis, East Asian Science, Technology, and Society, and Modern Intellectual History.
Edited by Mrinalini Sisodia Wadhwa.
Featured image: Böhm, Otto u.a. “Menschenrechte ohne Gerechtigkeit. Zu einem Nord-Süd-Ost-Gespräch,” epd Materialie, Zeitschrift Nr: II/91, Jahr: 1991.