Hillary at the OAS: No majority, no veto
By Jorge Gómez Barata
I don’t know how many “politically active” people have ever read the Charter of the Organization of American States. There is reason to suspect that they are not many and it seems that Hillary Clinton is not among them. If she had, she would behave with greater propriety.
On May 20, apropos the OAS meeting set for Honduras in early June, the newly installed Secretary of States of the United States declared that her administration would oppose any resolution to revoke the exclusion of Cuba until the island carries out reforms that make it compatible with the Democratic Charter. Hillary forgot three details: 47 years have elapsed since 1962, Latin America has changed, and the OAS does not allow for vetoes.
In fact, the OAS Charter — signed in Bogotá in 1948 at the start of the Cold War, a time when there were still remnants of the spirit of unity that led to victory in World War II and the founding of the United Nations — is not a bad document. It does not contain scandalous arbitrariness and, although it imposed a pan-American concept different from the Latin-Americanism advocated by Bolívar, Juárez and Martí, it can hardly be invoked against any country.
Because she didn’t consult with experts in her own department, Clinton failed to learn that — in the letter and the spirit of the Charter, article after article, letter after letter — there was and is no provision that provides legal, political or moral arguments or cover for the exclusion of Cuba.
Due to that circumstance, and inasmuch as the OAS Charter has no clause whereby a state may be separated from the organization, those who wished to sanction Cuba had to search beyond the framework of legal process, ignore the Charter, and appeal to the Inter-American Treaty of Reciprocal Assistance, a military pact. There, they found a legal subterfuge that says:
“ARTICLE 6: If the inviolability or the integrity of the territory or the sovereignty or political independence of any American State should be affected by an aggression which is not an armed attack or by an extra-continental or intra-continental conflict, or by any other fact or situation might endanger the peace of America, the Organ of Consultation shall meet immediately in order to agree on the measures which must be taken in case of aggression to assist the victim of the aggression or, in any case, the measures which should be taken for the common defense and for the maintenance of the peace and security of the Continent.”
Notwithstanding the appearance that Article 6 was written by Cantinflas, and aside from other considerations, such as the fact that no treaty or accord can prevail upon or replace the Charter because the Charter is the highest-ranking document, I shall quote only the provisions in the Charter that confirm that Cuba never should have been punished.
“ARTICLE 1: The American States establish by this Charter the international organization that they have developed to achieve an order of peace and justice, to promote their solidarity, to strengthen their collaboration, and to defend their sovereignty, their territorial integrity, and their independence. Within the United Nations, the Organization of American States is a regional agency.
The Organization of American States has no powers other than those expressly conferred upon it by this Charter, none of whose provisions authorizes it to intervene in matters that are within the internal jurisdiction of the Member States.”
“ARTICLE 3(e): Every State has the right to choose, without external interference, its political, economic, and social system and to organize itself in the way best suited to it …”
“ARTICLE 19: No State or group of States has the right to intervene, directly or indirectly, for any reason whatever, in the internal or external affairs of any other State. The foregoing principle prohibits not only armed force but also any other form of interference or attempted threat against the personality of the State or against its political, economic, and cultural elements.”
“ARTICLE 20: No State may use or encourage the use of coercive measures of an economic or political character in order to force the sovereign will of another State and obtain from it advantages of any kind.”
The fact that Mrs. Clinton invokes an instrument other than the Charter, such as the so-called Inter-American Democratic Charter, after a group of countries, as part of their struggle to end their subjugation to the United States, demanded the revocation of sanctions against Cuba, is another subterfuge that today’s Latin America surely will not accept.
It won’t take long to find out what will happen at the next meeting of the OAS, to be held in San Pedro Sula, Honduras. At that meeting, any country can ask for the revocation of the sanctions against Cuba adopted in 1962 and call for a vote that will require 75 percent of the ballots to annul those sanctions. Because there is no veto power in the OAS, a majority of votes could defeat the United States.
We are curious to see what happens when — without votes to buy or with no subservient presidents, in San Pedro Sula or anywhere else — Hillary Clinton sees all hands rise in favor of repairing a historical injustice and the United States is left all alone. Cuba will not return to the OAS, but Latin America will win a great battle and create a precedent. From then on, nothing will be the same.
Jorge Gómez Barata is a Cuban journalist living in Havana.
