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Latin America and the Caribbean

Friends for the Week: Members of Congress Critique the OAS

The Hill is reporting that “A House panel unanimously voted Wednesday to limit the U.S. share of the Organization of American States [OAS] regular budget to 50 percent or less.”  Does this mean that members of Congress have come to realize the OAS’s role in arbitrarily changing the result of Haiti’s 2010/2011 elections?   Do they want to limit the U.S.’s enormous influence over parts of the OAS? 

Nope.  Members of Congress have introduced this and other bills to limit U.S. support for the OAS precisely for the opposite reason:  they believe that the OAS is no longer an effective tool for “defending U.S. interests abroad,” and this is only the latest attempt to punish deviation from Washington’s objectives.  Here is an excerpt from research prepared for Congress that shows the limits of “bipartisan” debate on this topic:

U.S. policymakers have responded to the United States’ declining ability to advance its policy preferences within the OAS in a number of ways. Some Members of Congress allege that the OAS has allied itself with anti-U.S. regimes, and is weakening democracy in Latin America. Accordingly, they maintain that support for the OAS runs counter to U.S. objectives in the hemisphere, and that the United States should withhold funding from the organization. Others disagree, arguing that OAS actions continue to closely align with U.S. priorities in many cases, and that defunding the OAS would amount to the United States turning its back on the Western Hemisphere. They maintain that weakening the one multilateral forum that includes every democratic nation of the hemisphere would strengthen the hands of hostile governments while further weakening U.S. influence in the region.

In other words, the debate seems to be whether the goal of defeating our government’s official enemies would best be served by maintaining funding or reducing funding to the OAS.  Few in Congress question why we are making enemies with democratic countries in Latin America, or countries that pose no threat to the U.S., such as Cuba.

CEPR / July 25, 2013