This post is also available in: Español

For many Latin Americans, President Carter was the leader who best managed to harmonize the democratic values of the American people with the principles and actions of United States foreign policy.

At different times in my political life, I admired his virtues firsthand. The first time was after the military coup in Chile and my political imprisonment. When I began my forced exile by returning to Harvard University, I told my experience to several friends who would later work closely with President Carter.

Knowledgeable about Chile and shocked by the 1976 assassination of former Chilean foreign minister Orlando Letelier in Washington by a commando of the dictatorship, Carter acted firmly, confronted Pinochet, condemned him in several international organizations, ordered measures to protect the human rights of Chileans and Latin Americans, and accelerated FBI investigations. He radically changed the logic that had guided the Nixon administration. The Carter presidency was a hopeful parenthesis; with Reagan, there was a return to the Nixon approach to foreign policy.

The delivery of the Panama Canal to its people was a demonstration of trust in Latin America and of unity of the Americas.

Years later, I had the opportunity to accompany President Carter on a Carter Center mission to observe the elections in Palestine. I was a senator in Chile at the time, and I was struck by his ability to seek paths to peace, to generate respect and trust from all participants, and by his honesty and seriousness. These roles made him an outstanding international figure.

In 2014, while I was at the Inter-American Dialogue in Washington, I had the opportunity to participate in a meeting with President Carter to pay tribute to one of his close advisors, Robert Pastor, my friend, who suffered from an incurable disease and who died shortly after. I appreciated President Carter’s affection for his collaborators and his human warmth, rare in politics, which in my eyes raised his moral stature even further.

For many of us, Carter is a symbol of a democratic leader in whom we Latin Americans could trust. He reaffirmed this in 2024, at the end of his life, in the face of Maduro’s electoral fraud in Venezuela. For all of this, I consider his imprint unforgettable.