Department for the Promotion of Peace

OAS Peace FundOAS | Organization of American States

OAS Charter
 
Inter-American Democratic Charter
 
Pact of Bogota
 
TIAR/Rio Treaty
 
Gondra Treaty
 
Confidence-Building and Security Measures
  • Declaration of Santiago 1995
  • Declaration of San Salvador 1998
  • Declaration of Miami 2003
 
Peace Fund
 
Santiago Commitment
  • Resolution 1080
 
Declaration on Security in the Americas
 

Key Peace Instruments

OAS CHARTER

The principal instrument adopted at the Ninth International Conference of American States, held in Bogota, Colombia in 1948; the Charter of the Organization of American States, which was prepared on the basis of an organic draft pact in accordance with Resolution IX adopted at Mexico in 1945, serves as the basic constitution for the American regional organization. It entered into force on December 13th 1951, after sufficient ratifications had been deposited, although in practice its provisions were adhered to soon after the meeting.

The Charter has been amended four times by the Protocol of Amendment to the Charter of the Organization of American States "Protocol of Buenos Aires", signed on February 27, 1967, at the Third Special Inter-American Conference,by the Protocol of Amendment to the Charter of the Organization of American States "Protocol of Cartagena de Indias", approved on December 5, 1985, at the Fourteenth Special Session of the General Assembly, by the Protocol of Amendment to the Charter of the Organization of American States "Protocol of Washington", approved on December 14, 1992, at the Sixteenth Special Session of the General Assembly, and by the Protocol of Amendment to the Charter of the Organization of American States "Protocol of Managua", adopted on June 10, 1993, at the Nineteenth Special Session of the General Assembly.

RELEVANT DOCUMENTS

Key Peace Instruments

INTER-AMERICAN DEMOCRATIC CHARTER

Adopted On September 11th, 2001, in Lima, Peru, by Special Session of the OAS General Assembly, Inter-American Democratic Charter aims to strengthen democratic institutions in the hemisphere and provides the peoples of the Americas the right to democracy, and their Governments’ obligation to promote and defend it. It further claims democracy as essential for the social, political, and economic development of the peoples of the Americas. The Charter has been invoked two times since its adoption: Venezuela in 2002 and Honduras in 2009.

RELEVANT DOCUMENTS
  • Inter-American Democratic Charter English
  • Carta Democratica Inter-Americana Español

Key Peace Instruments

PACT OF BOGOTA

The Pact of Bogota, also known as the American Treaty on Pacific Settlement, codified the previous eleven instruments for peaceful settlement that appeared in earlier treaties. It imposed a general obligation on the signatories to settle their disputes through peaceful means and required them to exhaust regional dispute-settlement mechanisms before bringing matters before the United Nations Security Council. It conferred jurisdiction on the International Court of Justice. Arbitration would only be obligatory when the court declared to have no jurisdiction in the dispute. The treaty was signed on behalf of twenty-one American States April 30th, 1948 and ratified by fourteen states.¹

RELEVANT DOCUMENTS

¹ Encyclopedia of the Inter-American System (Westport, Connecticut and London: Greenwood Press, 1997) 290.

Key Peace Instruments

TIAR/RIO TREATY

The Inter-American Treaty of Reciprocal Assistance, (often referred to as the Rio Treaty or Rio Pact) signed by all 21 countries, obligates all American states to come to the assistance of any American state subjected to armed attack. In addition, it requires the states to consult and act together in cases of actual or threatened aggression, pending action by the Security Council of the United Nations. It was the formalization of the Act of Chapultepec, adopted at the Inter-American Conference on Problems of War and Peace in 1945. The Rio Treaty went into effect on December 3rd, 1948 and is the basic instrument regulating mutual security and conflict resolution in the Inter-American system.

Between 1948 and 1982, twenty-three cases were considered under the provisions of the Rio Treaty. In nine of these cases, a Meeting of Consultation of Ministers of Foreign Affairs was called. In the remainder of the cases, the Council of the OAS, acting provisionally as Organ of Consultation, handled the matters without calling a foreign affairs meeting. The twenty-three cases are the following:
1) Costa Rica-Nicaragua Conflict 1948-1949, by the Council
2) Dominican Republic-Haiti Conflict 1949-1950, by the Council
3) Dominican Republic Conflict with Haiti, Cuba, and Guatemala, 1950, by the Council
4) Guatemala Situation, 1954, by the Council
5) Costa Rica-Nicaragua conflict, 1955, by the Council
6) Ecuador-Peru conflict, 1955, by the Council
7) Honduras-Nicaragua conflict, 1957, by the Council
8) Panama Situation, 1959, by the Council
9) Nicaragua Situation, 1959, by the Council
10) general situation in the Caribbean, 1959, by the Fifth Meeting of Consultation
11) Dominican Republic-Venezuela conflict, 1959-1962, by the Sixth Meeting of Consultation
12) Cuban situation, 1961, by the Council
13) Cuban situation, 1961-1962, by the Eighth Meeting of Consultation
14) Bolivia-Chile conflict, 1962, by the Council
15) Cuban Missile Crisis, 1962, by the Council
16) Dominican Republic-Haiti conflict, 1963-1965, by the Council
17) Cuban situation, 1964, by the Ninth Meeting of Consultation
18) Panama-United States situation, 1964, by the Council
19) El Salvador-Honduras War, 1969, 1977-1980, by the Thirteenth Meeting of Consultation
20) Cuban situation, 1974, by the Fifteenth Meeting of Consultation
21) Cuban situation, 1975, by the Sixteenth Meeting of Consultation
22) Costa Rica-Nicaragua conflict, 1978-1979, by the Eighteenth Meeting of Consultation
23) Argentina-United Kingdom War, 1982, by the Twentieth Meeting of Consultation
24) 2001

“An armed attack by any State against an American State shall be considered as an attack against all the American States and, consequently, each one of the said Contracting Parties undertakes to assist in meeting the attack in the exercise of the inherent right of individual or collective self-defense.” (Article 3)

Signatories must agree by a two-thirds vote before any response can be qualified, and no state is obliged to respond to an attack. Furthermore, signatories commit to achieving a peaceful resolution through the inter-American system before contracting the UN General Assembly or Security Council. In the face of the terrorist attacks against the United States in September 2001, many Latin American nations expressed their solidarity and commitment to peace by reaffirming the importance of the Treaty. In March of 2008, Colombia and Ecuador made reference to the peace-based tenets of the Rio Treaty when coming to a solution for Colombia’s bombing of FARC on Ecuador’s territory.

In his speech at the Inter-American Peace Forum, Secretary General of the OAS Jose Miguel Insulza compared the borders of Latin America to those of Europe. He noted that over the past century, European state borders have expanded, contracted, or experienced some type of dramatic change. Conversely, Latin American borders have generally remained static due to the precedence of peace.

RELEVANT DOCUMENTS

Key Peace Instruments

GONDRA TREATY

The Fifth International Conference of American States, held March 25th to May 3rd 1923 in Santiago, provided signatories with recourse to investigatory and conciliatory measures to resolve a controversy. The Gondra Treaty, proposed by statesman Manuel Gondra of Paraguay, was created to avoid or prevent conflicts between the American States.

The Gondra Treaty, “Treaty to Avoid or Prevent Conflicts between the American States” provided that all controversies and disputes should be submitted for arbitration in cases where diplomacy had failed, and to investigation by two five-member commissions, one in Washington DC and another in Montevideo, Uruguay. The role of the commissions was to receive requests for inquiries, investigate the controversies and issue a report within one year in each case. The parties agreed to make no preparations for war from the time the commission first convened, until 6 months after it issued its report. In essence, the treaty provided a cooling off period for the parties involved. The Treaty entered into force after being ratified by twenty countries in 1924. The Gondra Treaty was the first positive effort to establish, on a contractual basis, a procedure for preventing conflicts.¹

RELEVANT DOCUMENTS

¹ G. Pope Atkins, Encyclopedia of the Inter-American System (Westport Connecticut and London: Greenwood Press, 1997) 446.

Key Peace Instruments

CONFIDENCE-BUILDING MEASURES (CBMS)

With the end of the Cold War, Latin America saw the rise of new types of challenges, emerging from the effects of globalization and the decay of a world order based on West-East tension. The creation of a new hemispheric agenda became a necessary task in order to respond to new threats, tame old ones, and construct a culture of peace in the region. This agenda would be grounded in mechanisms that not only peaceably resolve conflicts, but prevent them before they happen: confidence-building measures (CBMs).

While CBMs come in a variety of forms, their central purpose remains the same: to reduce the risk of tension and armed conflict, simultaneously encouraging national, bilateral, and multilateral cooperation and transparency, especially in the defense and arms sectors. Such measures can include two countries sharing figures of defense spending to a regional dissemination of information on troop size, formation and movement. CBMs also include spreading peace-based knowledge, resources, and skills to academic and pedagogical institutions in the form of conferences, studies, and workshops.

Furthermore, confidence-building measures play an especially important role in border zones, where conflict and tension is more likely to erupt. Pacific prevention, through an adjacency zone, a meeting between two border-zone nation’s defense ministers, or a bi-national soccer game, can serve to reduce tension and halt the escalation of a potential conflict.

Importantly, CBMs need to take into account geographic, political, social, cultural, and economic conditions in order to be successfully constructed and implemented. They also must respect the sovereignty of a nation, take into account historical trends, and be systematized and institutionalized.

Some examples of bilateral success include the nuclear cooperation between Argentina and Brazil and defense spending awareness between Argentina and Chile.

Multilateral success in the form of commitments and treaties can be found in the OAS’ 1995 Declaration of Santiago and 1998 Declaration of San Salvador. In both ground-breaking accords, Member States committed themselves to promoting a culture of peace by agreeing to a wide gamut of CBMs, from previous notification of military exercises to peace-based border zone activities. Subsequently, in the Declaration of Miami of 2003, member countries agreed on military and general measures, which include a program of notification to joint military exercises, participation in arms monitoring and disposal, the exchange of various types of military-related information, the establishment of confidence-building measures in border zones, and the intensification of cooperation within the OAS framework to combat terrorism, drug trafficking, arms distribution, and piracy.

With crucial advances in regional integration and peace based mechanisms like CBMs, the Americas are progressing to times characterized by a lack of conflict and controversy and where regional peace has become the norm.

RELEVANT DOCUMENTS

Key Peace Instruments

FUND FOR PEACE

In June 2000, recognizing the need to strengthen the Organization’s capacity in peace-building and conflict resolution, the OAS Foreign Ministers, meeting at the General Assembly in Windsor, Canada, adopted Resolution 1756 (XXX-O/00) and formally established The Fund for Peace: Peaceful Settlement of Territorial Disputes.

The Peace Fund, as it is most commonly known, consists of a mechanism designed to provide financial resources to OAS Member States that so request in order to enable the Organization to react swiftly to an unforeseen crisis resulting from a territorial dispute, as well as to strengthen the General Secretariat’s knowledge and experience in the field of territorial dispute settlements. The Fund consists of a General Fund, which functions like a seed fund for unanticipated conflicts, and subfunds established for specific disputes. It is open to contributions from OAS Member States, Permanent Observers, other states, as well as other entities, including companies and individuals. The Fund has received contributions ranging from 3,000 to 1 million US dollars, and since its inception, has received over 5 million dollars.

The Peace Fund, however, is more than a simple financing tool. By jointly appealing to the OAS for assistance in peacefully resolving a territorial dispute, the Parties can avail themselves of a range of conflict resolution mechanisms contemplated under the OAS Charter, including direct negotiation, good offices, mediation, investigation and conciliation, judicial settlement, arbitration and any other mechanism which the Parties jointly agree.

The Parties can also access the technical expertise of the OAS in territorial dispute resolution, including expertise in diplomacy; international law, including the Law of the Sea; geographic, cartographic and geospatial expertise, through the membership of the Pan-American Institute of History and Geography; and a range of outside technical experts with whom the OAS General Secretariat maintains relationships.

Recently, at the OAS General Assembly in San Pedro Sula, Honduras, the Foreign Ministers of the Americas adopted Resolution AG/RES.2525 “Fund for Peace: Peaceful Settlement of Territorial Disputes” to acknowledge both the work of the Peace Fund and the Inter-American Peace Forum and in an effort to encourage OAS Member States, Permanent Observers, and other potential donors to continue to support the fund financially in view of its effectiveness in peacefully resolving conflicts.

RELEVANT DOCUMENTS

Key Peace Instruments

SANTIAGO COMMITMENT TO DEMOCRACY AND THE RENEWAL OF THE INTER-AMERICAN SYSTEM

Resolution 1080

June 4th 1991

The Santiago Commitment to Democracy and the Renewal of the Inter-American System, also known as Resolution 1080, was adopted on June 4th 1991, at the Twenty-first Annual Regular session of the General Assembly of the Organization of American States. Resolution 1080 represents established procedures to respond collectively to any disruption of the constitutional order. It gives the Secretary General of the OAS the power to convene the Permanent Council to study and investigate any constitutional breakdown, and if necessary, to convoke an ad hoc meeting of the Ministers of foreign affairs or an extraordinary session of the General Assembly to examine the facts and intervene diplomatically to respond to a threat to representative democracy. Applications: Haiti September 1991, Peru April 1992, Panama 1993, Guatemala 1994

“To instruct the Secretary General to call for the immediate convocation of a meeting of the Permanent Council in the event of any occurrences giving rise to the sudden or irregular interruption of the democratic political institutional process or of the legitimate exercise of power by the democratically elected government in any of the Organization’s member states, in order, within the framework of the Charter, to examine the situation, decide on and convene and ad hoc meeting of the Ministers of Foreign Affairs, or a special session of the General Assembly, all of which must take place within a ten-day period.”

Haiti 1991 Military forces overthrew democratically elected President Jean-Bertrand Aristide
Peru 1992 President Alberto Fujimori illegally shut down the National Congress
Guatemala 1993 President Jorge Serrano suspended the constitution in a self-coup
Paraguay 1996 Army Commander, General Lino Oviedo refused to resign when asked by President Juan Carlos Wasmosy to step down from that position, sparking a constitutional crisis


RELEVANT DOCUMENTS

Key Peace Instruments

DECLARATION ON SECURITY IN THE AMERICAS

The Hemisphere’s Ministers of Foreign Affairs and other high-level delegates from the 34 member countries of the OAS convened at the Special Conference on Security in Mexico City and adopted this wide-ranging document that affirms shared values and outlines commitments and measures for cooperative action in maintaining peace and security. The Declaration also addresses new types of security threats, concerns, and challenges, such as natural disasters and pandemics, as cross-cutting problems that require close cooperation between governments, as well as with the private sector, and civil society.

RELEVANT DOCUMENTS
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