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OAS CONMEMORATES 120 YEARS OF INTER-AMERICAN RELATIONS AND CELEBRATES ACHIEVEMENTS WHILE ANALYZING FRESH CHALLENGES

The Permanent Council of the Organization of American States (OAS) held Friday a Special Session to celebrate the First American International Conference, which began on October 2, 1889, in Washington, D.C., with the objective of analyzing mechanisms for the peaceful solution of controversies between the States of the hemisphere, as well as the rise in commercial traffic and means of communication, and the development of mutual commercial relations.

The session’s main speaker was the Colombian historian and diplomat Álvaro Tirado Mejía, who alluded to the historical process that led to the formation of the OAS, and celebrated the achievements of the Inter-American System while analyzing the fresh challenges faced by the Organization.

“In certain media the OAS is looked upon negatively. The dark times of another epoch and the lack of familiarity with its functions and achievements contribute to that. But it’s necessary to clarify this vision,” said Mr. Tirado Mejía, who previously served as Permanent Representative of Colombia to the OAS, as well as a member and Chair of the Inter-American Commission of Human Rights (CIDH).

“Upon surveying the activities (of the OAS), even superficially, one is struck by the very great number of activities it carries out; by the constant work of the General Secretariat; by the importance of the normative-legal body that it has created over the course of more than a century; by the conflicts it has avoided or has helped solve; by the lives it has saved or the violations it has countered with its System of Human Rights. The OAS has consolidated itself and shaped itself to face new situations,” he stated.

Subsequently, Mr. Tirado Mejía referred to the “great challenges” that the Organization faces today. The first of these, he said, points to the need for the OAS to “look for, as it has been doing, the way to keep its own space and to interact” with other regional and sub-regional bodies that have sprung up in the last decades.

The second challenge, he added, is related to military spending. “Since the founding of the Pan-American Union, the continent’s borders practically have not changed. And, fortunately, international armed conflicts have been sporadic. Nevertheless, tensions have not disappeared and it would seem that in some sub-regions they have instead risen. As President Alan García denounced it, military spending in South America is in crescendo, and this year it will reach 38 billion dollars, at the expense of social spending,” he said.

In third place, Mr. Tirado Mejía said, the Organization faces one of “the most difficult challenges” of its history, especially in light of the recent coup d’état in Honduras: the protection of democracy. To take on this challenge, the Colombian academician proposed enlarging the scope of the Inter-American Democratic Charter.

“It’s necessary to enlarge the scope of the Democratic Charter for, as Secretary General José Miguel Insulza noted in a recent document, it ‘only applies in cases of crisis or threats of crisis to democracy; it does not contain any indications of how to follow-up on the progress of democracy in the member states, nor does it deliver guidelines regarding the follow-up and promotion of its values,’” he paraphrased.

Finally, Mr. Tirado Mejía said that the fourth challenge of the OAS is related to the importance of promoting “social citizenship.”

“The continent has made progress in democracy and in the collective mechanisms to protect it. Nevertheless, we are far from achieving the social citizenship proclaimed in the Democratic Charter, in a continent like ours in which poverty affects 40 percent of the population and indigence about 20 percent, where inequality in the distribution of wealth is huge and discrimination and illiteracy persist,” he concluded.

Following his remarks, the Permanent Representative of Colombia, Amb. Luis Alfonso Hoyos, who assumed Friday the Chairmanship of the Permanent Council of the OAS, thanked the presence of Mr. Tirado Mejía and gave the floor to the representatives of Guatemala, Canada, Brazil, the United States, Guyana, Mexico and Venezuela, who referred to the 120 years of the celebration of the First American Conference and to the relevance of the Organization, founded in Bogotá in April 1948 during the Ninth Conference.

Reference: E-319/09