United Nations of Latin America?

A/RES/60/283. The heading for the United Nations' resolution for institutional reform so reads - A/RES/60/283. Encapsulated in bold black type, this resolution proposes to renew the United Nations by strengthening the organization's approach to emerging world crises. A/RES/60/283. It reads as a simple, fix-it-all response. Whether the heading A/RES/60/283 makes any sense is a question that ultimately depends on the reader, diplomat or world citizen, who undertakes a look. Even if nominally understood, A/RES/60/283 may still be ultimately discounted as a mystified formula. It may still comprise pages of technical formalities, a charter for itemized euphemisms no longer consistent with a body of Nations Disunited in their worldview. That the document mandates the creation of a Committee for Ethics, Chief Information Technology Officers, and a discretionary spending authorization of $20 million for the UN Secretary General-to the exclusion of more tangible actions involving cited member-states and specific world crises -speaks to A/RES/60/283's myopic sense of purpose, and perhaps more significantly, to the UN's renewal as a reframing, rather than a redirecting, of its 1946 charter.

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Notably amiss from A/RES/60/283 are any substantive clauses. Missing are the clauses which demand architecting courses for regional action and weeding out un-gardened social landscapes. Global trends (such as increased pro-regionalization and anti-imperialist policies in Latin America, to name but a few) warrant the redirection of global interest, but A/RES/60/283 halts its exquisitely polished boots before it even marches toward this particular battleground.

Given that the UN's blind spots are precisely what Latin American state officials count on to successfully perpetrate their illicit trades, laundering schemes, and electoral debris, A/RES/60/283 only perpetuates the region's current governmental corruption and anarchy. Whether excusing itself from Haiti's 2004 crisis-or the political grievances which prompted it-or refusing to investigate the widespread social cleansing campaigns painting Honduras' towns red, the United Nations has long needed an A/RES/60/283 to redeem its regional oversight.

Latin America's local pro-regionalization movement serves remarkably well to counter the pro-globalization politics which member-states have attributed to the UN. The region's perception of the UN as stagnant, in absentia, or in Americana (the country, not the continent) can be expected to at least further precipitate Latin American consolidation. By not submitting to U.S. pressures to globalize, Latin American diplomats presume, the region must necessarily respond poker-faced and preemptively to the UN "calls" and "urgings" to reconsider globalizing. Because the UN has historically moved to underplay its role in Latin American affairs-bringing its mandate to the region's forefront only when the World Bank needs nominal advocating-Latin America has followed suit. Thus, spectators witness Latin America gravitating toward the UN's globalized model only when the World Bank demands it. Until now, that is.

The New York Times on November 8, 2006, printed a piece on Nicaragua's president-elect, Daniel Ortega. In it, Ortega, the former guerrillero-comandante, is portrayed as a renewed politician, willing to bend Latin America's knee for America to deliver a strident kick. According to The New York Times, Ortega's leftist policies operate on principles that could easily prompt Latin America to gear toward United States market demands. With Chavez leading South America's "pink revolution" and leftist political tendencies coloring electoral constituents throughout the region, Ortega's campaign similarly featured a tongue-in-cheek pinkist, double-talking his way through both socialist and foreign investment agendas. The actual diplomatic implications of his election are far more relevant given that they attest to a convergence of UN-U.S. interests in Latin America's public eye. Ultimately, answering why Latin America has adopted anti-Yankee foreign policies effectively begs the question of why the United Nations has retained such hesitance in Latin America's affairs. In what the region perceives to be an enduring U.S. monopoly of UN influence and World Bank executive mandate, the UN's association with the U.S. has rendered reform an object of regional apathy. For Latin America's citizens, that the United Nations is an external institution is sufficient cause to remonstrate. That the United Nations' resolution for organizational reform does not address its distanced role in the region only makes the UN-U.S. connection appear that much more intimate.

Deep-seated uncertainties and suspicions of the United Nations' ties to the United States have only been further evidenced by nascent pro-regionalization factions and leaders. This is precisely why Chavez and Ortega do not propose socialist programs but instead advocate counter-internationalist agendas that electorates gravitate towards for the anti-US shock value they invoke.

With the Security Council's recent selection of Panama as its temporary member-state from the Latin American region, Hugo Chavez' longstanding contentions that Venezuela would cradle the coveted seat looks like yet another UN snub to the region. Although the United Nations is not directly charged with designating Security Council seats, the UN remains an agent publicly blamed for Venezuela's absence from its Security Council VIP list. Popular conceptions of Panama as a proxy for the United States, representing only diluted Latin American interests, reinforce notions of the UN as a non-perceptive, non-representative, and non-existent forum for social intercourse in the region. Where greater regional support for Venezuela should have superseded contender-Guatemala's voiceless performance, the appointment of Panama-itself an opinion-shy, but no less Americanized, actor-recalls the region's doubts about the UN's credible concern for public creed.

Finding no forum in the United Nations, Latin America has formerly lodged its concerns with the Organization of American States (OAS). Since the OAS, however, advocates a fundamentally regional approach to conflicts, engaging very little global participation in the process, it is more often the case that global participation engages the organization's resources forcibly. Diplomatic inexperience thus seems to emanate from the OAS' acting on unsolicited world input. Of course the OAS' pandering to the logistics of a U.S.-framed "War on Drugs" in Colombia (while Colombia's factional civil war rages on) does not help. With the OAS's almost deliberately staged incompetence and mounting UN political unconcern for Latin America, a power vacuum has formed out of the region's instability-and ideology has been all too proliferate in vouching to fill it.

Independent leaders promoting interstate dependence have regionalized by virtue of a communal enmity toward the United States and, by extension, the UN. As an ideology, anti-Yankeeism thus served as a front for the "united nations" of Latin America. The United Nations cannot only be the United Nations when the World Bank needs an umbrella spokesman. It must also be the representative United Nations at all times-even if this requires recognizing Latin America's nascent anti-Yankee identity as embodied in Chavez. Thus, the UN's implicit revocation of Venezuela's Security Council seat, weeks after Chavez' rabid tirade at New York headquarters, reminds Latin America that it ought to guard jealously against "unilateral" slights to its representative member-states. This jealousy has become particularly instrumental in developing a newly collective identity on member-states' private behalves.

Chavez may prance around New York's auditoriums, playing the part of court jester all he likes, but Latin America's deprivations cannot be scorned for his personal rashness. With the United Nations in a state of flux, its particular inter-regional reforms cannot help but boast of some indeterminacy. But with landmark budgetary allowances being conferred, and the Secretary General and Committee of Ethics working their way out a staffing shortages, substantive matters of member-state interest continually find themselves being brushed aside.

Since A/RES/60/283 proposes to strategically bolster UN credibility without properly answering questions about the UN's regional oversight, Latin American readers might hesitate to decode the elusive resolution. Instead, Latin American diplomats and citizens alike may find themselves referring back to the UN Development Program's initiatives, sorting through its annals to determine why A/RES/60/283 did not find them particularly worth addressing as the UN undergoes reform.