Organization of American States (OAS

The Organization of American States (OAS) was created in 1948 when the OAS Charter was signed in Bogotá ( Colombia ), which entered into force in December 1951, with the objective of achieving in its member states, as stipulated in Article 1 of the Charter, an order of peace and justice, to promote their solidarity, strengthen their collaboration and defend their sovereignty, their territorial integrity and their independence. ^[1]

The organization’s statement says it works to strengthen peace and security, consolidate democracy, promote human rights, support social and economic development and promote sustainable development in the Americas , although it became a space for U.S. domination on the continent.

The official languages ​​of the organization are Spanish, Portuguese, English and French. Its acronyms in Spanish are OEA and in English OAS (Organization of American States). The OAS is based in Washington DC , United States of America . The OAS is the oldest and largest regional organization in the world, but it has been losing ground in the Americas to proposals such as UNASUR (Union of South American Nations), ALBA (Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America) and CELAC (Community of Latin American and Caribbean States).

History

Since its inception as a nation, the United States of America has always contrasted the ideal of Latin American unity and integration with its claim to continental domination, an ambition embodied on December 2, 1823 in the well-known Monroe Doctrine , summarized in the phrase “America for the Americans.”

It was not until the last quarter of the 19th century that this philosophy was able to unfold, when American industry grew like no other to the point of becoming a rapidly rising power, thereby seeking not only domination of the continent, but also creating the conditions for launching into the struggle for a new redistribution of the world.

At the end of 1889, the US government convened the First Pan-American Conference, which was the starting point of “Pan-Americanism,” seen as the economic and political domination of America under the supposed “continental unity.” This implied an update of the Monroe Doctrine at the time when US capitalism was reaching its imperialist phase. José Martí, who was an exceptional witness to the rise of the imperialist monster, asked himself about that Conference: Why go as allies, in the prime of one’s youth, in the battle that the United States is preparing to wage with the rest of the world? And he was right.

Between 1899 and 1945, during eight similar conferences, three consultative meetings, and several conferences on special topics, the progress of the United States’ economic, political, and military penetration in Latin America was established .

Rise of Monroeist Pan-Americanism

At the end of World War II , from which the United States benefited, a period of growth of Pan-Americanism and the inter-American system began, from the Chapultepec Conference in 1945, through the creation of the OAS in 1948, to the invasion of the Dominican Republic in 1965, consolidating the subordination of the continent’s governments to the foreign policy of the United States.

The Inter-American Conference on Problems of War and Peace, held in Chapultepec in March 1945, had a defined political objective: to align the countries of the region to face the process that would come with the creation of the UN .

As a result, at the San Francisco Conference in April 1945, where the UN was founded, US diplomacy, supported by Latin American countries, defended “autonomy” for the Inter-American System and succeeded in having Article 51 of the Charter of the world organization preserve the solution of controversies through “American” methods and systems. The interpretation given by the Directing Council of the Pan American Union is that said Charter was born compatible with the Inter-American System and the Chapultepec Act.

In August 1947, the Pan-American Conference in Rio de Janeiro approved a resolution that gave rise to the tool that would give life to the permissiveness clause extracted from the UN: the TIAR (Inter-American Treaty of Reciprocal Assistance), which reaffirmed the principle of continental “solidarity” put forward by Washington, in order to confront any situation that endangered “its peace” in America and to adopt the necessary measures, including the use of force. With the TIAR, the Yankee will was imposed on the continent, constituting a permanent threat to the sovereignty of Latin American countries.

As a culmination, between March 30 and May 2, 1948, the International American Conference of Bogotá gave birth to the Organization of American States (OAS). In the midst of this meeting, the Colombian liberal leader Jorge Eliécer Gaitán, with great popular support, was assassinated, an event that motivated a great insurrection known as the Bogotazo, brutally repressed and that served to manipulate the course and the results of the Conference, as the United States promoted the threat that the “rise” of the Soviet Union and communism posed to democracy, which they blamed for the deaths of the Bogotazo.

But both the Rio and Bogota Conferences coincided with a worsening of economic problems in Latin America, whose countries – enthusiastic about the Marshall Plan for Europe – began to demand an aid plan for the region. But Secretary of State George Marshall himself was responsible for disappointing them.

The discussion and adoption of the OAS Charter produced a lengthy document of 112 articles, signed without reservation by the twenty-one countries participating in Bogotá. The Charter adopted some of the cardinal and just principles of international law, but at Washington ‘s request , provisions were introduced that transferred the main postulates of the TIAR to the OAS, which is why, from its inception, the OAS is the ideal legal instrument for US domination on the continent.

His diplomatic rhetoric regarding the postulates of independence and sovereignty of nations and the rights of man and peoples have remained a dead letter.

Bloody file

In 1954, Guatemala was invaded by mercenary troops organized by the CIA, which overthrew the government of Jacobo Arbenz. The OAS had previously agreed to approve a resolution that introduced the variant of collective regional intervention, in express violation of its own Charter and that of the UN. Faced with the fait accompli, the organization limited itself to “letting the United States do as it pleases” and delayed the examination of the situation, ignoring the interests of the attacked country.

The actions taken with respect to Cuba after the triumph of the Revolution , the support for the Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961, the actions carried out in the political-diplomatic order to isolate us, which concluded with the expulsion of Cuba in January 1962 and the breaking off of diplomatic relations between the countries of the region and the Greater Antilles, signified a level of cruelty such that it called into question the organization even more.

In April 1965, the Yankee marines landed in Santo Domingo to prevent the imminent victory of the popular constitutionalist movement over the forces of militarist reaction. The OAS sent its Secretary General, the Uruguayan José A. Mora , to the Dominican capital with the apparent purpose of obtaining a truce between the belligerents, while the Consultative Body delayed a decision to facilitate the Yankee military forces taking control of the situation. After multiple efforts, the United States managed by a narrow margin of one vote to approve a resolution that provided for the creation of an Inter-American Peace Force, producing, for the first time under the seal of the OAS, a collective intervention in a country in the area.

The OAS, which had among its basic principles the principle of non-intervention by any State in the internal affairs of others, continued to suffer from a credibility crisis.

On April 2, 1982, the Argentine attack to recover the Malvinas Islands, which had been in the hands of the British Empire since 1833, marked the beginning of the Falklands War . In the face of the first aggression by an extracontinental power against a country in the inter-American system, the TIAR (Inter-American Treaty of Reciprocal Assistance) required the continental solidarity with the attacked country to be called for. However, the United States supported Great Britain politically and militarily and imposed economic sanctions against Argentina. The OAS delayed its reaction, adopted a lukewarm resolution calling for an end to the conflict, and only a month later condemned the armed attack and urged the United States to immediately lift the measures applied against Argentina. Chile, during the Pinochet era, supported Great Britain.

In October 1983, a military coup overthrew the Prime Minister of Grenada, Maurice Bishop , who was assassinated by the coup plotters. The US also sent an invasion force of 1,900 marines to Grenada , who took control of the island. The principle of non-intervention was once again invalid. In the OAS, the majority approved this action as a “preventive measure,” while others rejected it. Finally, the invasion was condemned as a violation of the Bogotá Charter.

Bankruptcy of Pan-Americanism

The end of the so-called Cold War and the disintegration of the USSR changed world geopolitics and the OAS, at the urging of the United States, attempted to realign itself with the aim of being more loyal to the oligarchies, so in 1991 it began to promote the precepts of bourgeois representative democracy and neoliberalism. Under these banners, the Summits of the Americas were born, at the initiative of the United States, which granted renewed mandates to the organization.

At this time, the creation of the Inter-American Democratic Charter in 1992 stands out, which brought the imposition of unipolarism to the level of a treaty in the region. In other words, the OAS did not change its face, so much so that in the face of the military coup in Haiti , which deposed President Jean Bertrand Aristide , it displayed the same degree of incapacity and putrefaction. It delegated the issue to the UN Security Council, which approved a multinational military force led by the US.

Discredited and devalued, in the midst of the twilight of the empire, it found its salvation in an initiative by President William Clinton , who in 1994 proposed summit meetings with all the heads of state and government of the hemisphere, whose organization, management and follow-up he entrusted to the Organization of American States, in order to rescue it from the poverty into which it had fallen.

After the IV Summit of the Americas ( Mar del Plata -2004), where the Free Trade Area of ​​the Americas, ALCA , was buried , the OAS received another slap in the face that would only add to its disastrous legacy. Then, its silence in the face of the Colombian incursion in Ecuador on March 1, 2008, also shook it and, as so many times before, the Yankee government protected the event, while the Rio Group responded for the impoverished and old lady, leaving her forever without a voice.

During the Fifth Summit in Port of Spain , Trinidad and Tobago , last April, the OAS also failed to rise to the occasion in the events that led to the massacre of peasants in Pando, Bolivia, in September 2008. It was the young UNASUR that was the new, vigorous voice that vindicated the rights of those who had always been ignored. Once again, the voice that the sharp-witted “Chancellor of Dignity,” Raúl Roa García , described as the “Ministry of Colonies” of the United States was silenced.

Now in the 21st century, no one has any doubts about the irrelevance, obsolescence and discredit of an organization that has been complicit in the main state crimes that occurred in Latin America and the Caribbean in the second half of the 20th century. Although the United States has sometimes relegated it, it has never discarded it. It needs it alive to influence and divide the region and to stop the consecration of its only, inevitable and true historical destiny: the Martí and Bolivarian integration of its peoples.

Cuban Revolution and the OAS

On March 18, 1959, just two and a half months after the popular victory of January 1 , the new Cuban ambassador to the Organization of American States (OAS), Raúl Roa García , outlined the position that would henceforth define the relationship between the triumphant Revolution and the hemispheric organization: