ABSTRACT
A formal alliance system for the Western hemisphere, established by a treaty signed on 2 September 1947 at an Inter-American Defence Conference held at Petrópolis near Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, by 19 of the 21 American republics. Its formal title in English is the Inter-American Treaty of Reciprocal Assistance and, in Spanish, Tratado Interamericano de Asistencia Recíproca. Since then, Ecuador, Nicaragua, Trinidad and Tobago and the Bahamas have adhered to the Treaty, but Cuba withdrew on 29 March 1960, and Mexico gave notice in 2002 of its intention to do so also. By Article 3 of the Treaty the signatories ‘agree that an armed attack by any states against an American state shall be considered as an attack against all the American states’, and consequently ‘undertake to assist in meeting the attack in exercise of the inherent right of individual or collective self-defence recognized by Article 51 of the UN Charter’. The procedure for doing so is that ‘on the request of the state or states directly attacked and until the decision of the organ of consultation of the inter-American system’, each of the signatories ‘may determine immediate measure which it may individually adopt in fulfilment of the obligation contained in the preceding paragraph and in accordance with the principle of continental solidarity. The organ of consultation shall meet without delay for the purpose of examining these measures and agreeing upon measures of a collective character that should be adopted’. The Treaty was invoked on 14 occasions between 1948 and 1962; it has only been invoked once since, by the USA in 2001.
