page_title: Latin American integration
section_title: 20th century
hierarchical_section_title: Latin American integration / 20th century
caption_attribution_description: La cumbre iberoamericana 2007 en Chile
context_page_description: The integration of Latin America has a history going back to Spanish American and Brazilian independence, when there was discussion of creating a regional state or confederation of Latin American nations to protect the area's newly won autonomy. After several projects failed, the issue was not taken up again until the late 19th century, but now centered on the issue of international trade and with a sense of pan-Americanism, owing to the United States of America taking a leading role in the project. The idea of granting these organizations a primarily political purpose did not become prominent again until the post-World War II period, which saw both the start of the Cold War and a climate of international cooperation that led to the creation of institutions such as the United Nations. It would not be until the mid-20th century that uniquely Latin American organizations were created.
context_section_description: The experience of World War II convinced hemispheric governments that unilateral action by one nation could not ensure the territorial integrity of the American nations in the event of extra-continental aggression, in particular Soviet or communist incursions. To meet the challenges of global conflict in the Cold War period and to contain conflicts within the hemisphere, they adopted a system of collective security, the Inter-American Treaty of Reciprocal Assistance, popularly known as the Rio Treaty, in 1947. The following year, at the Ninth International Conference of American States, headed by U.S. Secretary of State George Marshall, twenty-one member states pledged to fight communism in the Americas, and transformed the Pan American Union into the Organization of American States (OAS). The transition was smooth. The Director General of the Pan American Union, Alberto Lleras Camargo, became the OAS's first Secretary General and the organization began functioning in December 1951.
  By the late twentieth century, many Latin American leaders saw a need for an alternative organization that was not dominated by the United States. The experience of dealing with the 1970s and 1980s communist insurgencies in Central America through the creation of the Contadora Group, which did not include the United States, inspired the creation of the Rio Group in 1986. The Rio Group did not create a secretariat or permanent body and instead chose to rely on yearly summits of heads of states.
  Latin America also reached out to Europe, in particular its former colonial mother countries, to create other regional organizations based around common languages and cultures. In 1991 the governments of Mexico, Brazil and Spain organized the First Ibero-American Summits of Heads of State and Governments in Guadalajara, Mexico. The result was the creation of the Iberoamerican Community of Nations, which holds yearly summits of its heads of state.
caption: The 2007 Ibero-American Summit in Santiago, Chile.
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