Larry Birns is the director of the Council on Hemispheric Affairs

Council on Hemispheric Affairs

The Council on Hemispheric Affairs is a Washington, D.C.-based non-governmental organization founded in 1975. In its own words, it was established to "promote the common interests of the [Western] hemisphere, raise the visibility of regional affairs and increase the importance of the...

, a liberal, not-for-profit organization monitoring human rights

Human rights

Human rights are "commonly understood as inalienable fundamental rights to which a person is inherently entitled simply because she or he is a human being." Human rights are thus conceived as universal and egalitarian . These rights may exist as natural rights or as legal rights, in both national...

 and political developments in Latin America

Latin America

Latin America is a region of the Americas where Romance languages  – particularly Spanish and Portuguese, and variably French – are primarily spoken. Latin America has an area of approximately 21,069,500 km² , almost 3.9% of the Earth's surface or 14.1% of its land surface area...

. Birns grew up in New York City

New York City

New York is the most populous city in the United States and the center of the New York Metropolitan Area, one of the most populous metropolitan areas in the world. New York exerts a significant impact upon global commerce, finance, media, art, fashion, research, technology, education, and...

 and graduated from Columbia University

Columbia University

Columbia University in the City of New York is a private, Ivy League university in Manhattan, New York City. Columbia is the oldest institution of higher learning in the state of New York, the fifth oldest in the United States, and one of the country's nine Colonial Colleges founded before the...

, eventually doing postgraduate work in the social sciences at Oxford University. Before founding the Council in 1975, Birns taught at Hamilton College and served with a United Nations mission in Chile

Chile

Chile ,officially the Republic of Chile , is a country in South America occupying a long, narrow coastal strip between the Andes mountains to the east and the Pacific Ocean to the west. It borders Peru to the north, Bolivia to the northeast, Argentina to the east, and the Drake Passage in the far...

 during the Salvador Allende

Salvador Allende

Salvador Allende Gossens was a Chilean physician and politician who is generally considered the first democratically elected Marxist to become president of a country in Latin America....

government.

The Boston Globe described Birns as a lobbyist and a liberal critic of U.S. policy, and The New York Times said the Council on Hemispheric Affairs was a liberal research group specializing in United States-Latin America relations, and an organization critical of Reagan Administration policy in Latin America.