Between the creation of national acolytes and instrumental delegation: Global North and South agendas and the emergence of OAS criminal justice and public security organs (mid-1990s ? 2000s)

HATHAZY, PAUL

Las Vegas

Congreso; International Studies Association Annual Convention; 2021

International Studies Association

This presentation reconstructs the direct and indirect influence of Global North countries? foreign policies in the emergence of OAS organs specialized in criminal justice and crime prevention in the 1990s and 2000s. In this presentation I reconstruct some of the symbolic and material linkages between the emergence of the OAS Justice Studies Center of the Americas and the Department of Public Security to show the decisive weight of Northern countries on OAS Latin American members?via development assistance programs. As the narrative presented shows, the process is not one of direct imposition over the OAS, but a convergence of the strategies of U.S. actors with those of Latin American government and experts eager to participate in the OAS organs regionalizing their know-how and expertise. Through the analysis of foreign policy and OAS documents and references to north and south specialized experts´ trajectories, I show that those OAS organs continue the original strategies of U.S. state agents, combined with those of its allied Latin American experts and government agents but under the guise of an generalized Inter-American consensus. The creation of OAS organs legitimates north and south agents? very specific strategies at the same time that insulates the original U.S. policies from traditional criticism of interventionism.