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Council On Hemispheric Affairs
Monitoring Political, Economic and Diplomatic Issues Affecting the Western Hemisphere
COHA Opinion
Word Count: 800
Friday, 10 June 2005
For the OAS, Fort Lauderdale was No Great Success
Foreign ministers from 34 of the 35 countries in the Americas met this week in Fort Lauderdale, Florida at the 35th
General Assembly of the Organization of American States (OAS), to discuss what they can collectively do to strengthen
democracy throughout the region. Despite their best efforts to avoid a serious treatment of the subject being featured,
the question was forced onto the agenda by the letter of resignation that Bolivian President Carlos Mesa tendered to the
national congress on the evening of June 6th, which was accepted by the Bolivian Congress on June 10th. Discussion of
this latest crisis in democracy was relatively brief, despite a spirited attempt at a detailed treatment of the
ramifications of the Bolivian crisis for the rest of the Americas. After Bolivian foreign minister Juan Ignacio Siles
provided credible assurances that his country was not facing a constitutional crisis, Panamanian foreign minister Samuel
Lewis Navarro asked his colleague the provocative and potentially explosive question of what the OAS should do to be of
assistance in situations such as this one. This dangerous possible segway into a discussion of concrete action was cut
short by means of an act of closure of the General Assembly’s debate on the subject. The matter was subsequently
referred to newly installed OAS General Secretary Jose Miguel Insulza, who was charged with drafting the boilerplate
declaration of support for democracy in Bolivia.
It was not helpful that Siles was prevented from taking up Navarro’s question, even if only to artfully dodge the
substance of the issue with impromptu diplomatic virtuosity. Throughout the three days of the Inter-American meeting,
delegates were engaged in a fierce debate over what the final draft of the U.S.-pushed Declaration of Florida should
say. Should it, as Washington wished, call for a strong OAS to act as a regional democratic policeman, judging the
quality of hemispheric democracy and levying sanctions upon those countries judged to be governing undemocratically? Or,
as countries such as Bolivia, Brazil, Canada, Chile, and Panama suggested, should the OAS instead act as a watchdog that
would merely express concern when the democratic prospects of a given member state were judged to be in jeopardy? As the
events in Bolivia and the understated text of the Declaration of Florida revealed, such questions tend to flirt with
irrelevance.
A common theme running through the hours of official statements made by the assembled foreign ministers before the four
plenary sessions was a strong sense that a democratic police force is not the answer to the region’s fundamental
travails. The real challenge afflicting democracy, ministers obliquely noted, is not so much a hemispheric proclivity
for authoritarianism, but the U.S.-encouraged widespread, if not at all scientific belief that democratic governance
will beget immediate economic growth, thus inexorably increasing a nation’s democratic contents. Indeed, the U.S. team
led by President Bush and Secretary of State Rice held true to this leitmotif throughout the General Assembly gathering.
The problem for hemispheric democracy is that this has in some places created unrealistic expectations of immediate
material improvements after elections; in other countries, such as Bolivia, it has engendered serious frustration that
representative participation in the policy process more often than not has only resulted in a decline in living
conditions for the majority.
The problem facing hemispheric leaders that became fully apparent in Florida is frightening in its simplicity: how are
regional governments to preserve democracy when democracy is patently not delivering the promised socio-economic
benefits that have been repeatedly promised since the early 1990s? Disagreements over the answer to this question point
to a growing conceptual divide in the Americas, one that is colored by an increasing insistence on social equity and
inclusion and not the U.S.-promoted and often specious neoliberal economics, as the key to preserving democracy and
providing the political stability needed for the growth and increased trade desired by all. The growing Latin American
insistence on a socially equitable basis for economic and policy reforms, demonstrated in market friendly terms by the
Lula government in Brazil and in a more fustian fashion by Chávez in Venezuela, is a slow and extremely complicated
undertaking. The question for the upcoming 4th Summit of the Americas in Argentina and future General Assemblies
inevitably will be whether the Bush administration will have the perspicacity to recognize this feat, reject simplistic,
ideologically-driven answers, and join with the rest of the hemisphere in the sort of open partnership that will
genuinely address the authentic sources of the kind of political tensions now being unleashed in Bolivia.
Sean Burges is a Senior Research Fellow with the Council on Hemispheric Affairs and a Research Fellow with the Norman
Paterson School of International Affairs at Carleton University in Canada. He led the COHA contingent in attendance at
the 35th OAS General Assembly.
June 10, 2005
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