Comment: US role in the OAS. (1996, 20 Marks)
The Organization of American States, created by the Charter of Bogotá (1948), is the only regional body in which a superpower sits as an ordinary member among much weaker neighbours. Its design carries two purposes at once: Latin American jurists wanted to bind the United States in law, chiefly through the non-intervention articles, while Washington wanted hemispheric legitimacy for policies it meant to pursue anyway. The US record shows both.
Roots: from Monroe to Bogotá
The Monroe Doctrine (1823) and Theodore Roosevelt’s Corollary (1904) made the hemisphere a US sphere of “police power”. Pan-Americanism, run from Washington from 1889, and the Rio Treaty (1947) of collective defence formed the OAS’s base. Latin American states extracted non-intervention in return, first at Montevideo (1933) and then in the Charter.
The OAS as an instrument of US policy
- Cold War alignment: the 1954 Caracas declaration against “international communism” preceded the CIA-backed overthrow of Guatemala’s Jacobo Árbenz; Cuba was excluded in 1962; an Inter-American Peace Force was created after the US landing in the Dominican Republic in 1965.
- Material weight: headquarters in Washington and about half the regular budget paid by the US.
- Hegemony as consent: in the Gramscian reading of Robert W. Cox, the OAS converted American preferences into apparently shared norms. Cuba’s revolutionary leaders called it Washington’s “ministry of colonies”, and Guatemala’s former president Juan José Arévalo cast the hemisphere as The Shark and the Sardines (1956).
- Lars Schoultz (Beneath the United States, 1998) traces a persistent American belief in Latin American inferiority beneath this institutional surface.
The OAS as a constraint on the United States
- Disapproval without restraint: leading Latin American members condemned the Grenada landing (1983) and the OAS formally regretted the Panama invasion (1989); Washington proceeded, but at a legitimacy cost.
- Human-rights machinery: the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights reported damningly on US-backed regimes in Argentina, Chile and Central America. The US has never ratified the American Convention on Human Rights.
- Democracy after the Cold War: Resolution 1080 (1991) and the Inter-American Democratic Charter (2001) produced collective action on Haiti’s 1991 coup, Peru’s 1992 autogolpe and Honduras, suspended in 2009 after Manuel Zelaya’s removal. The Latin American majority drove these decisions as much as Washington, and on Honduras pressed further than Washington wished.
- Institutional binding: G. John Ikenberry argues that hegemons accept rules to make their power acceptable; the OAS is a hemispheric case, honoured unevenly.
The contemporary picture
Washington’s ambivalence has deepened. In June 2025 Deputy Secretary of State Christopher Landau warned the General Assembly that US membership depended on the OAS proving its relevance. The US paid only about 63% of its assessed dues for fiscal 2025 and requested nothing for the Organization in its fiscal 2027 budget, although the January 2026 memorandum withdrawing from 66 international bodies spared it. The December 2025 National Security Strategy’s “Trump Corollary” to the Monroe Doctrine put unilateral primacy ahead of hemispheric consent. When US strikes on 3 January 2026 ended with Nicolás Maduro’s capture, Secretary General Albert Ramdin called for respect for international law and convened the Permanent Council, but members split. Nicaragua’s withdrawal (2023) and Venezuela’s contested status show its reach shrinking; CELAC exists as a forum without Washington. India meets a milder form of the same asymmetry in SAARC, where one member’s size breeds the neighbours’ suspicion.
Conclusion
The United States has used the OAS when it could control it and bypassed it when it could not. That pattern is itself the verdict: the OAS has never been able to stop Washington, but it has repeatedly made Washington pay in law and legitimacy. It is less an instrument of hegemony than the arena in which American hegemony is negotiated.