Challenging the Colossus of the North: Mexico, CELAC, and the Implications of Replacing the Organization of American States with a New Regional Security Organization

Richard J. Kilroy, Jr. Associate Professor

Source Link

In September 2021, Mexican president Andrés Manual López Obrador (AMLO) hosted the sixth meeting of the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC). This regional organization was inaugurated in 2011 by then president of Venezuela, Hugo Chávez, as an alternative to the Organization of American States (OAS) and United States (US) dominance in that regional organization (O’Boyle 2015). As current president of CELAC, AMLO continued to push the separatist agenda established by Chávez, proposing that CELAC model the European Union, with its political, economic, and social integration as a supranational organization (GOB 2021), thus eliminating the need for the continuing alliance of the OAS.1 The OAS was created in 1948, as a collective security alliance in the Western Hemisphere, before the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) in 1949. It had a similar goal as NATO, to serve as a unified front against communism during the Cold War. 

It never formed into a formal military alliance like NATO, but it clearly focused on security relations between states in the region, with the United States as the dominant actor in setting the agenda for the organization.2 Its anti-communist stance solidified in 1962 with the expulsion of Cuba as a member following Fidel Castro’s successful revolution and before the Cuban missile crisis. Throughout the Cold War, the OAS continued to function as a regional security organization to promote democracy and condemn communism (Red Tide). After the Cold War, the OAS led the charge against authoritarianism and Hugo Chávez’s Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America (ALBA) or Pink Tide movements. In fact, on September 11, 2001, the OAS foreign ministers were meeting in Lima, Peru, condemning Chavez’s anti-democratic policies, signing the Inter-American Democratic Charter. They quickly transitioned to condemning terrorism (the first international organization do so) and shortly after on September 21st in Washington, D.C. signed a resolution, Strengthening Hemispheric Cooperation to Prevent, Combat, and Eliminate Terrorism (US Mission n.d.).