AMÉRICA PARA LA HUMANIDAD: THE RIGHTS AND DUTIES OF MAN IN THE PAN-AMERICAN CENTURY

Abstract

This thesis traces the intellectual and political history of Pan-Americanism from its origins in the early nineteenth century through the drafting of the American Declaration of the Rights and Duties of Man in 1948, arguing that hemispheric cooperation was not a project invented by the United States but one co-opted from a robust, autonomous Latin American tradition of multilateral diplomacy and international law. Drawing on conference proceedings, diplomatic correspondence, and the writings of Latin American jurists, the study demonstrates that long before the consolidation of U.S. hegemony, Latin American statesmen and intellectuals had developed a sophisticated framework of international law rooted in ideals of sovereign equality, collective security, and proto-human rights discourse, including sustained engagement with abolition and anti-colonialism. The thesis then examines how, beginning with the First Inter-American Conference of 1889, the United States systematically absorbed and redeployed this multilateral legal tradition as an instrument of hemispheric dominance, producing what the thesis characterizes as an architecture of fraternal idealism erected upon a foundation of asymmetric power. In response, Latin American jurists, most notably Alejandro Alvarez at the American Institute of International Law, strategically shifted their legal vocabulary away from state sovereignty and toward the language of individual human rights, a register they understood to be less susceptible to imperial appropriation. Ultimately, the thesis argues that while the 1948 American Declaration represented the culmination of this decades-long Latin American strategy of resistance through law, human rights discourse could not fully escape the hegemonic structures within which it operated, and thus furnished not only a vocabulary of restraint and justice, but also a new avenue through which U.S. power would continue to project itself into hemispheric affairs.