Region - CELAC convenes in Mexico

Systemic integration failures continue to cloud regional cooperation in the Western Hemisphere.

Mexico hosted a meeting of the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC). Years after its creation, CELAC is still defined more by who attends than anything the group does. Cuba and Venezuela are there. The US, Canada and Brazil are not. CELAC’s mission appears to be to occasionally bring together presidents from the hemisphere to talk about how amazing it is that they can meet without the US present and then they promptly forget that the group exists for another year.

CELAC is an exaggerated and absurd example of the challenges that the Western Hemisphere has with integration. In the past two decades, UNASUR rose and fell. Hugo Chavez’s funeral was also ALBA’s. The Central American Parliament largely exists to grant immunity to officials who would otherwise be jailed for corruption. The Lima Group has lost Lima. Mercosur’s trading rules are violated by every member state of the trading bloc. Even the Pacific Alliance, probably the most promising group making progress in the past decade, is now seeing its momentum fade.

The hemisphere just faced the challenges of COVID largely by shutting down borders and having each country go its own way. When the crisis hit, nobody in the hemisphere chose an integrated response.

While CELAC and others fail to provide a useful alternative to the OAS, the OAS has had its own integration challenges in recent decades.

Last week, the Inter-American Democratic Charter turned twenty years old. Measured on the status of democracy in the hemisphere, the Charter is largely a failure. Democracy has gradually fallen in Venezuela and Nicaragua and has weakened in many other countries. Honduras post-2009 coup is a glaring example of what can go wrong long term, even if the charter is successfully invoked immediately after a break in democracy. 

Part of the problem of the Inter-American Democratic Charter is that it only has one recourse, removal from the OAS. That means that like CELAC, the Charter is more focused on deciding who is in and out of the club at any given moment than on becoming an effective mechanism to promote a specific policy.

The point of the Charter shouldn’t be to kick countries out of the OAS. It’s supposed to help defend democracy. Suggesting that the Charter is effective because it has been invoked a few times as countries lost their democracies is like suggesting that a sprinkler system worked because it turned on while a building burnt to the ground. In its two decades of existence, there isn’t a success story in which we can point to the Charter as returning democracy to a country that had lost it.

On the other hand, supporters of the Charter and its efforts would argue “what’s the alternative?” Moments in which the charter’s invocation should be obvious have turned into divisive fights. While I think the charter has been ineffective due to a lack of actions and options to counter rising authoritarianism, many in Latin America feel the OAS overreaches with its authorities on the charter and should do even less.

This is why integration efforts have failed and why meetings like CELAC that claim they may serve as an alternative to the OAS are such a farce. True integration requires countries to lose just a bit of sovereignty and occasionally lose an argument in the name of reaching a more important goal. The OAS may not always succeed, but successfully replacing the OAS would require an organization that does more, not less, to make countries uncomfortable and push them towards action. Anything else is just an excuse for a presidential photo op.