Shows how Latin America was the crucible of the global human rights revolution of the 1970s.

Patrick William Kelly is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Buffett Institute for Global Studies at Northwestern University. He is currently writing a global history of AIDS.

List of figures; Introduction; 1. Torture in Brazil; 2. The emergency in Chile; 3. Transnational solidarity; 4. Redefining sovereignty; 5. The origins of American human rights activism; 6. The global specter of Argentina's disappeared; 7. Argentina and the inter-American system; Epilogue: the promise and limits of the human rights cascade; Index.