Page 90 - Encyclopedia Of World History Vol IV

organization of american states 1391

Vansina, J. (1985). Oral tradition as history. Madison: University of Wis- still tied to the British Commonwealth. In subsequent
consin Press.
years, fifteen countries have joined the original twenty-
one signatories, the last being Guyana in 1991.
The OAS has clear goals, including working with the
United Nations to promote hemispheric peace, support-
Organization of ing economic development, encouraging cultural and

social interactions, and protecting the sovereignty and
American States independence of American states. There certainly have
been tensions and differences in the organization and
he Organization of American States (OAS), head- among member states, reflecting in part differences
Tquartered in Washington, D.C., is an international between the United States, caught up in Cold War bipo-
organization and successor to the Pan-American Union larization, and Latin American nations, who feared
(PAU), which was founded in 1889–1890 at the First American power and interference.
International American Conference and originally The OAS has enjoyed some success in maintaining
called the Commercial Bureau of the American peace in the Americas. For example, it helped end border
Republics. The conferences sought to deal with com- fighting between Costa Rica and Nicaragua in 1948–
mercial and legal issues in the Americas. The OAS is 1949 and 1955 and resolve the 1969 “Soccer War”
organized into the Office of the Secretary General, the between Honduras and El Salvador.
General Assembly, a Permanent Council, and the Inter- But there have been challenges as well. In 1959,
American Council for Integral Development.There are Fidel Castro led a movement that overthrew the corrupt
specialized organizations and agencies to deal with regime of the dictator Fulgencio Batista. Three years
such varied issues as drug control, telecommunications, later, after Castro announced he was a Marxist-Leninist,
human rights, and agriculture. the United States moved to have Cuba expelled from
In the spring of 1948 in Bogotá, Colombia, at the the OAS on charges of subversion, and in 1964 the
Ninth International American Conference, delegates OAS imposed a trade boycott. However, by the 1990s,
representing twenty-one American countries signed the virtually every OAS member state save for the United
OAS Charter and the American Declaration of the States had restored diplomatic relations and resumed
Rights and Duties of Man, the first international trade with Cuba.
expression of human rights principles.The OAS, which For the United States, the Monroe Doctrine and the
built upon the Inter-American Treaty of Reciprocal Cold War challenge from the Soviet Union mattered as
Assistance, reflected the onset of the Cold War, which much as the sovereignty of nations in Central America
remained America’s preoccupation for more than a and the Caribbean. The OAS did approve American
quarter century. That is, the OAS was part of a broad intervention in Santo Domingo in 1965, but opposed
American effort, along with the Truman Doctrine, the U.S. action in Nicaragua in 1979, since OAS delegates
Marshall Plan, and NATO, all in Europe, to organize concluded that there was little threat of Soviet interven-
friendly countries to work together, to better the lives of tion developing from the Sandinista regime that over-
their respective peoples, and to resist the Soviet Union threw Anastasio Somoza in that country, a view at odds
and international Communism. The transition from with that of the U.S. government.
PAU to OAS went smoothly, and the PAU director gen- For a brief period, the United States seemed commit-
eral, Alberto Lleras Camargo, became the first secretary ted to active involvement in the Americas. In 1961, Pres-
general of the OAS.The non-signers were mostly British ident John F. Kennedy pledged American aid to help
dominions and British crown colonies in the Americas promote Latin American economic development, land