4.2 Organization of American States (OAS)

Born 1948 (Bogota Charter; the Pan-American Union's successor), HQ Washington D.C. — the hemisphere's oldest general regional body. Composition: the thirty-five independent American states (the suspension history: Cuba's exclusion-from-participation since 1962, the later returns-and-debates; Nicaragua's recent tensions). Organs: the General Assembly (the annual foreign-ministerial), the Permanent Council (the ambassadors' Washington standing body), the Meeting of Consultation (the crisis organ), the Secretariat, and the specialised conferences. Functions: the democracy's collective defence (the Inter-American Democratic Charter — the hemisphere's normative signature: democracy as the participation's condition), the security-and-disputes machinery (the Rio Treaty's mutual-assistance face; the peaceful-settlement tradition), the human-rights system (the Inter-American Commission and Court — the regional systems' pioneer), the development-and-integration dialogues. The OAS lesson: the democracy-and-rights regionalism — the hemisphere's norm-forward identity.