United Nations

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United Nations

At the founding conference of the United Nations, which was held in San Francisco in 1945, the Latin American states had two primary concerns: protecting their sovereignty as small powers and protecting the autonomy of their regional system, the Inter-American System. Since 1933, President Franklin D. Roosevelt's Good Neighbor Policy had facilitated the peaceful settlement of disputes in Latin America through its principle of nonintervention. After World War II, the Latin American states sought to ensure their continued autonomy in regional affairs by taking an active role from the outset in the formation and operation of the new world body that became the United Nations.

Proposals for the creation of the United Nations were first discussed at the Dumbarton Oaks Conference in Washington, D.C., in 1944. The Latin American states had resented their exclusion from this conference and distrusted the five major powers meeting there, who were known to favor the primacy of the international organization over regional bodies. Seeking to work out a united front for protecting their interests at the upcoming San Francisco Conference, representatives of the Latin American states met at the Inter-American Conference on Problems of War and Peace in Mexico City in February-March 1945. The resultant Act of Chapultepec put forward a Latin American pro-regional consensus in its provision calling for collective action against aggressors.

At the San Francisco Conference, from April through June 1945, the twenty Latin American states, which constituted two-fifths of the fifty-one attending states, did indeed attain their objective of preserving the autonomy of their regional system. A prime mover in their success was Colombian foreign minister Alberto Lleras Camargo, who chaired the relevant subcommittee. Another important subcommittee member was Senator Arthur Vandenberg, a member of the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee. He was the author of the Vandenberg Amendment, an important provision for Latin America. It became UN Charter article 51, which provided for the "inherent right of individual or collective self-defense" of states. Of special importance to Latin America was chapter 8 of the UN Charter, particularly article 52.1, which states that "nothing in the present Charter precludes the existence of regional arrangements or agencies for dealing with such matters relating to the maintenance of international peace and security as are appropriate for regional action," and article 53.1, providing that a regional "enforcement action" required "the authorization" of the Security Council.

The unity and influence of the Latin American bloc at the San Francisco Conference worked in Latin America's favor with regard to representation in the UN. Two seats were assigned to Latin America among the six nonpermanent seats in the Security Council (the Big Five—England, France, China, the Soviet Union, and the United States—had permanent seats and the veto) and among the fifteen judges of the main judicial body of the United Nations, the International Court of Justice. The Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC), originally an eighteen-member body, had four seats designated for Latin America. Subsequent enlargements of the council resulted in increases for Latin America: in 1973, when membership reached fifty-four, the region garnered ten seats. The first Latin American UN secretary-general, Javier Pérez de Cuéllar of Peru, was selected over three decades after the founding of the organization and served from 1982 to 1991.

During the cold war, the primacy of the Organization of American States (OAS) over the United Nations (via article 52 of the UN Charter) in regional disputes well served the security interests of the United States, which converted the OAS into an anti-Communist alliance against Cuba and the Dominican Republic. When the United States intervened militarily in the Dominican Republic in 1965 and won ex post facto OAS approval of an inter-American peace force to be sent there, some Latin American states turned to the United Nations, seeking its involvement to counter the United States. This event was significant in establishing the legitimacy of the United Nations, in the view of Latin America, as a neutral arbiter in regional disputes.

One of the more important manifestations of the UN's role in Latin America has been the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC). First established in 1948 as the Economic Commission for Latin America (ECLA, or CEPAL in Spanish), the commission changed its name to include the Caribbean in 1984. It is headquartered in Santiago, Chile. Since the 1950s the ECLAC, a subsidiary of the ECOSOC and one of five UN regional economic commissions, has addressed key issues in the socioeconomic development of the region. The organization's first director, the Argentine economist Raúl Prebisch, mapped Latin America's economic problems in his book The Economic Development of Latin America and Its Principle Problems, which was published in 1950 by the UN's Department of Economic Affairs. Along with the German economist Hans Singer, Prebisch theorized that the region's place in the world economy as an exporter of raw materials, or primary products, was the determining factor of underdevelopment. Thus, the ECLA promoted industrialization and protectionism (import-substitution industrialization, or ISI) during the 1950s. The commission encouraged industrial growth during the 1960s; addressed issues of export diversification in the 1970s; grappled with the debt crises of the 1980s; and addressed issues of socioeconomic equity during the 1990s, when neoliberalism was paradigmatic. With the rise of numerous populist, center-left governments in Latin America since the turn of the twenty-first century, there is talk of a new wave of developmentalist economics, or cepalismo, in the region.

In the mid-1960s, the Latin American states joined other UN developing states in forming a caucusing group to bargain more effectively with the developed states on economic issues. The Group of 77 (G-77), referring to the number of developing states in the UN at the time, presented a united front before the first meeting of the UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD I), in Geneva, Switzerland, in 1964. UNCTAD became a permanent organ of the UN General Assembly. In 1974 the G-77 states were successful in passing a General Assembly resolution calling for a New International Economic Order (NIEO) to replace the existing system, which these states believed was dominated by the Western capitalist and former colonial powers. In late 1974 another resolution provided for the Economic Charter on the Rights and Duties of States (CERDS), first proposed by Mexican President Luis Echeverría in 1972.

In April 1982 Argentina attempted to reclaim the Falkland Islands, which the British had controlled since 1833. At the outset of the conflict, most Latin American states were critical of Argentina for violating the nonintervention principle and supported the efforts of the United States, which announced its neutrality, to settle the dispute by serving as a mediator. However, when the United States sided with England, its NATO ally, and maintained that the United Nations, not the OAS, was the proper forum for resolution of the dispute, the Latin American states turned against the United States and supported Argentina in the OAS.

In the 1980s, a major struggle developed between the United States and the Sandinista government of Nicaragua, which came to power after a Sandinista-led popular insurrection overthrew dictator Anastasio Somoza in July 1979. The United States resorted to intervention, first covert and then overt, by aiding the Contras, Nicaraguan exiles operating out of neighboring Honduras. Fearing United States military intervention, four Latin American states—Colombia, Mexico, Panama, and Venezuela—formed the Contadora Group, which became the Contadora Process, an effort to negotiate a settlement. (The states involved in the process expanded to include Argentina, Brazil, Peru, and Uruguay in 1985; the Rio Group in 1987 included the eight states' foreign ministers in addition to the secretaries-general of the OAS and the UN.) In 1984 Nicaragua brought a case against the United States before the International Court of Justice (ICJ), accusing it of intervention. In 1986 the ICJ handed down a decision against the United States.

After negotiating a Central American accord, the Central American presidents requested that the UN oversee the accord's implementation. In 1989 the UN Security Council approved the creation of the UN Observer Group in Central America (ONUCA), which, jointly with an OAS body, disarmed the contras and escorted them from Honduras into Nicaragua. At the request of the Nicaraguan government, the UN created the UN Observer Group for the Verification of Elections in Nicaragua (ONUVEN) to oversee the March 1990 elections. In 1990 the UN Security Council approved the creation of the UN Observer Group for El Salvador (ONUSAL), which negotiated a settlement in the civil war in December 1991. The UN also negotiated a settlement in Guatemala between the government and a guerrilla movement in June 1994.

The role of the UN in Latin America with regard to peacemaking and peacekeeping is significant in that it marks a willingness on the part of the Latin American community to risk its autonomy in regional affairs in favor of international monitoring. Although ONUCA acted jointly with the OAS, ONUSAL acted alone, as did the group that achieved settlement in Guatemala in 1994. Since the 1980s, the UN has also institutionalized its election-observer role in Latin America, one that the region has welcomed. Moreover, Latin American states have been active in UN peacekeeping missions around the world since 1948. Since the late 1990s Latin Americans have been involved in peacekeeping in Angola, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ethiopia and Eritrea, East Timor, Liberia, the Ivory Coast, and Sudan, not to mention UN and OAS peacekeeping missions within Latin America, including ongoing peacekeeping operations in Haiti.

In 2003, as the United States and Britain sought a UN Security Council resolution in favor of military action against Iraq, Chile and Mexico drew international attention for their efforts to achieve a diplomatic solution. Chile, on the verge of finalizing a free-trade pact with the United States at the time, was subjected to rather intense diplomatic pressure by the U.S. State Department. The United States ultimately withdrew the resolution before a final vote, abandoning its efforts in light of opposition from permanent members Russia and China.

Since the UN's founding in the wake of world war, its Latin American member states have maintained a strong presence in all areas of the international institution's operation. As economic globalization and regional and global crises unfold over the next decades, Latin American governments will undoubtedly continue to do so.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

John A. Houston, Latin America in the United Nations (1956), chaps. 1 and 2.

J. Lloyd Mecham, The United States and Inter-American Security, 1889–1960 (1961), chaps. 9, 10, and 14.

Charles G. Fenwick, The Organization of American States: The Inter-American Regional System (1963), chap. 12.

Samuel G. Inman, Inter-American Conferences, 1826–1954: History and Problems (1965), chap. 15.

Harold E. Davis and Larman C. Wilson, Latin American Foreign Policies: An Analysis (1975), chap. 3.

G. Pope Atkins, Latin America in the International Political System, 2d rev. ed. (1989), chaps. 8 and 9.

Jack Child, The Central American Peace Process, 1983–1991: Sheathing Swords, Building Confidence (1992).

Additional Bibliography

Santa Cruz, Hernán. "The Creation of the United Nations and ECLAC." CEPAL Review 57 (December 1995): 17-33.

United Nations, Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean. Cincuenta años de pensamiento en la CEPAL: Textos seleccionados. Santiago, Chile: CEPAL, 1998.

United Nations, Secretary General. Cooperación entre las Naciones Unidas y la Organización de los Estados Americanos. New York: United Nations General Assembly, 1996.

Larman C. Wilson

Patrick Barr-Melej

Encyclopedia of Latin American History and Culture