From the American People

On April 28th, the Senate voted to confirm Ambassador Samantha Power as the nineteenth Administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID).¹ By Washington standards the confirmation was relatively uncontentious, with Power—who served as U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations during the Obama administration—receiving praise in particular for her work on human rights. On the day of her confirmation hearing, Sen. Ben Cardin (D-MD), chair of the subcommittee that oversees USAID, praised Power’s “deep expertise, integrity, and commitment to the promotion of human rights.”²

But the appointment of a leading activist, lawyer, and intellectual in the field of human rights to the agency responsible for U.S. development policy begs a historical question: how did human rights and development—two distinct concepts with unique histories—come to be so intertwined in U.S. foreign policy?

Marilyn Zak in 1970, when she was a USAID Assistant Program Officer/Junior Officer Trainee stationed in Jakarta, Indonesia. Photo provided by Zak.

Part of the answer lies in the under-examined story of Marilyn Zak, a young USAID official who became the agency’s first Human Rights Coordinator in 1978.³ The convergence of U.S. development policy and human rights ideas in the late 1970s unleashed a new form of foreign policy activism that envisioned the United States as responsible for supporting grassroots efforts to realize those rights—a change in repertoire which continues to shape the agency’s work today. Then and now, USAID aims to promote socio-economic improvement in other societies by channeling money and expertise into projects with tangible social benefits—updated infrastructure, increased literacy rates, or improved agricultural techniques for example. Through a series of interviews, Zak explained to me what happened when legislators expanded USAID’s authority to incorporate human rights into the U.S. development model.

For USAID, founded in 1961 and the United States’ primary method of dispensing civilian foreign aid and development assistance, a Cold War ideology that saw the promotion of U.S. liberal democratic development as an important tool in the struggle against communism guided the organization’s work. During the 1960s, counterinsurgency aid became a critical resource in order to protect against revolution in strategically important countries.⁴ Zak’s first postings, after joining USAID in 1966,  were to some of the countries that exemplified these Cold War imperatives: Indonesia as a junior officer and Paraguay as a program officer before moving to the Latin American Affairs Bureau in 1973. Over time, Zak became the State Department’s first female foreign assistance inspector, working in the Inspector General’s office responsible for oversight of the State Department, USAID, and other foreign policy programs. “I traveled all over the bloody world,” Zak told me.⁵

Poster by Rachael Romero and Wilfred Owen Brigade.“Fascism in Chile could not survive without US aid,” 1975. (Library of Congress).

Meanwhile, in the mid-1970s, U.S. development policy was adrift. In the wake of the Vietnam War and Watergate, a growing number of critics saw foreign assistance as serving political or imperialistic aims.⁶ These criticisms coincided with the explosion in global interest in human rights driven by the grassroots activism on behalf of victims of state repression, from Chile to Cambodia. U.S. lawmakers concerned with ensuring that the United States was not abetting human rights abuses—legislators like Reps. Tom Harkin (D-IA) and Don Fraser (D-MN)—pushed the Ford and Carter administrations to incorporate human rights principles into U.S. foreign policy, including development. In 1975, Congress amended the 1961 Foreign Assistance Act, adding Section 116, which barred the United States from providing development assistance to governments found to be “consistent pattern of gross violations of internationally recognized human rights.”⁷ The amendment’s focus on conditionality suggested that the effect of human rights ideas on development would be restrictive; human rights could best be achieved with the leverage that came from withholding foreign assistance, rather than increasing it.

But that wasn’t the case thanks to another, more obscure amendment to Section 116 of the Foreign Assistance Act proposed in 1977 by Don Fraser, which gave USAID the legal authority to expand its support for human rights work.⁸ Fraser’s amendment inserted new language in Section 116(e) authorizing a budget of at least $750,000—steadily expanded to more than $3 million over subsequent years—to fund “programs and activities which will encourage or promote increased adherence to civil and political rights, as set forth in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.”⁹

This was the moment that brought Marilyn Zak to the forefront of USAID’s first human rights efforts. After Congress adopted Section 116(e), Assistant Administrator for Program and Policy Coordination Alex Shakow tapped Zak to oversee the human rights program, charged with coordinating among newly-appointed human rights officers within each of the five regional bureaus. In 1978 she became USAID’s first Human Rights Coordinator, a position she would occupy until 1985.¹⁰

In that position, Zak’s duties included how Section 116(e) funding would be spent among USAID’s regional bureaus, each of which were responsible for developing their own initiatives. But first she would have to determine what it looked like for AID to provide development assistance to the human rights community, especially when many of the groups advocating for global human rights protections “didn’t want anything to do with the government,” she remembers.¹¹ Her response was to convene a conference of USAID officers, congressional staffers, and human rights groups, asking each side: “what do you want to do?” The first policy guidance Zak wrote outlined the objectives of the human rights programs: to encourage contact among human rights activists, to promote information dissemination, and to draw attention to the relationship between human rights and economic development.¹² Section 116(e) was designed “to stimulate USAID to go beyond activities which we have . . . normally carried out in our regular programming,” Zak wrote in a 1980 document summarizing the human rights initiative.¹³

This image was captured during protests against Apartheid in South Africa in the 1980s. Paul Weinberg, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

And to be certain, these did not look like typical USAID programs. Zak highlighted her experience with the Human Rights Fund for Africa, a fund set up for U.S. ambassadors in participating African countries to draw on in support of timely or short-term human rights-related activities. When Zak sent out the first diplomatic cable to U.S. embassies soliciting proposals in 1978, she remembers that the embassy in Pretoria, South Africa was the first to respond, requesting a grant of less than $20,000 to finance the creation of a compendium of apartheid laws. “How can this really help?” Zak remembers thinking. But two years later, on a visit to South Africa, Zak received her answer. Aided by the compendium, human rights lawyers were better able to respond to the legal tactics of apartheid jurists, achieving better results in court. “For the first time, everything was out in the open. The magistrates and defenders would come to court with the same binders.”¹⁴

Although USAID’s policy guidelines were supposed to focus on the intersection of human rights and economic development, in reality most of the funded projects eschewed economic aims and instead focused on legal assistance and information exchange. Because of USAID’s extensive work and links to civil society in the region, Latin American countries received a majority of the funds. Zak told me, “anyone who wanted to pilot a program would do it in the Latin America bureau.”¹⁵ Typical of the funded projects during the Carter administration (1977-1981), the American Society of International Law received $380,580 for a three-year grant to establish an Inter-American Legal Services Association that would bring together lawyers and legal reformers working locally in the Western Hemisphere. Another example was a three-year grant of approximately $135,000 to the Paraguayan League for Women’s Rights—a long-established women’s rights organization in Paraguay—was designed to “inform rural women of their legal rights and to provide legal services.”¹⁶

Despite the fact that Reagan’s USAID Administrator, M. Peter McPherson, emphasized a more market-driven approach to development, Zak’s work continued to expand in the 1980s. A 1984 USAID policy determination on the agency’s human rights programs found that “Such activities are appropriate for a developmental organization because the United States recognizes that the engine of economic growth is personal liberty.”¹⁷

USAID’s human rights authorities also helped underwrite the Reagan administration’s (1981-1989) foray into democracy promotion. “Everything was democracy,” Zak told me when I asked about human rights during the Reagan years.¹⁸ USAID funding helped pay for the study that led to the creation of the National Endowment for Democracy, a quasi-non governmental institute which (to this day) provides U.S. funds to political parties and civil society organizations aimed at promoting democracy. In 1983, Zak approved a grant that helped create the Inter-American Institute for Human Rights (IIDH), based in San Jose, Costa Rica. IIDH in turn created an organization named CAPEL (Center for Electoral Advising and Promotion), which trained poll watchers and facilitated links among Latin American electoral commissions.¹⁹ Although USAID did not directly fund the creation of CAPEL, CAPEL received USAID grants for multiple projects, including assisting with the administration of Guatemala’s 1985 presidential election—the first since a 1983 coup unseated General Efraín Ríos Montt—and the 1988 Chilean plebiscite that unseated General Augusto Pinochet.²⁰

Zak departed the human rights coordinator position in 1985 but continued to have a successful career with USAID, culminating with posts as the Mission Director in the Dominican Republic (1994-1998) and Nicaragua (1998-2002). Along the way, she continued to break down barriers for female officers, becoming the Agency’s first nominee to attend a prestigious training course at the Naval War College and also serving in the Women’s Action Organization, a network of women diplomats that combated sexism in the State Department. “I’ve had a very unusual and interesting career with USAID,” she told me.²¹

A U.S. Marine Corps UH-1Y Venom with Joint Task Force 505 is loaded with relief supplies from the United States Agency for International Development at Tribhuvan International Airport, Kathmandu, Nepal, May 19 during Operation Sahayogi Haat. U.S. Marine Corps photo by MCIPAC Combat Camera Lance Cpl. Hernan Vidana/Released, via Wikimedia Commons.

USAID looks different today than it did in the 1970s. But the legacy of the human rights programs of the 1970s and 1980s lives on most directly in USAID’s expansive work on rule of law, governance, and anti-corruption initiatives pursued under both Republican and Democratic administrations. With factions in both parties increasingly questioning the U.S.’ role in promoting liberalism abroad, Samantha Power’s appointment as administrator is all the more interesting: not just a reflection of USAID’s initial experience with human rights, but—as it was when Marilyn Zak was appointed coordinator in 1978—a juncture at which the connection between rights and development in the future of U.S. foreign policy will be clarified.

1. Pranshu Verma, “Senate confirms Samantha Power to be U.S.A.I.D. administrator,” New York Times, April 28, 2021.
2. Press release, “Cardin Praises Samantha Power Nomination at SFRC Hearing,” March 23, 2021.
3. Created as a result of the 1961 Foreign Assistance Act, USAID serves as the foreign aid arm of the State Department.
4. For a recent and comprehensive survey of development in the history of U.S. foreign policy, see Stephen Macekura, “Remaking the World: The United States and international development, 1898–2015,” in Christopher R.W. Dietrich, ed. A Companion to U.S. Foreign Relations: Colonial Era to the Present, Volume II, First Edition (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell, 2020). On the relationship between development and Cold War goals, see Michael E. Latham, Modernization as Ideology: American Social Science and “Nation Building” in the Kennedy Era (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003).
5. Marilyn Zak interview with Author, April 8, 2021.
6. Graham Hovey, “Foreign Aid Loses Friends in Congress,” The New York Times, July 30, 1978.
7. Section 116 was inserted into the Foreign Assistance Act of 1961 by amendment in The International Food and Development Assistance Act of 1975, Sec. 310, “Human Rights and Development Assistance,” (P.L. 94-161, 94th Congress) <https://uscode.house.gov/statutes/pl/94/161.pdf> See also a compendium published by the Committees on International Relations and Foreign Relations, Legislation on Foreign Relations Through 2002 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 2003), p. 59 note 76.
8. Subsection 116(e) was added to the Foreign Assistance Act of 1961 by amendment in The International Development and Food Assistance Act of 1977 (P.L. 95-88; 91 Stat. 537). See Legislation on Foreign Relations Through 2002, p. 59 note 79.
9. Subsection 116(e) was added to the Foreign Assistance Act of 1961 by amendment in The International Development and Food Assistance Act of 1977 (P.L. 95-88; 91 Stat. 537), sec. 111. See Legislation on Foreign Relations Through 2002, p. 59 and 62-63.
10. Marilyn Zak interview with Author, March 9, 2019.
11. Zak interview, March 9, 2019.
12. Cyrus Vance, “Section 116(e) – Human Rights Initiatives,” State Department circular to posts, January 1979, shared with author by Zak.
13. Marilyn Zak, “Section 116(e) Purpose and Standards,” USAID memorandum, September 25, 1980.
14. Zak interview, March 9, 2019.
15. Zak interview, March 9, 2019.
16. Marilyn Zak, “FY 1979 Section 116(e) Activities” USAID memo, September 25, 1980 and Marilyn Zak, “FY 1980 Section 116(e) Activities” USAID memo, September 25, 1980.
17. M. Peter McPherson, “Human Rights Policy Determination No. 12,” September 1984.
18. Zak interview, March 9, 2019.
19. Marilyn Zak, “Section 116(e) Projects and Obligations FY 1984” shared with author by Zak.
20. See Evan D. McCormick, “Breaking with Statism: U.S. Democracy Promotion in Latin America, 1984-1988,” Diplomatic History, vol. 42, no. 5 (November 2018)
21. Zak interview, April 8, 2021.

Evan D. McCormick

Evan D. McCormick is an Associate Research Scholar at Columbia University’s INCITE (the Interdisciplinary Center for Innovative Theory and Empirics (INCITE), where he works on the Obama Presidency Oral History project. His writing has appeared in Diplomatic History, Journal of Cold War Studies, and Foreign Affairs Latinoamérica.