ABSTRACT
Democratic government has been a constant goal of the peoples of the Americas almost since the time of their independence and the collapse of the absolute monarchies. After the Bogota Conference, the emergence of dictatorial governments in Latin America slowed the development of additional inter-American pronouncements in furtherance of representative democracy. Between late 1948 and mid-1954 a half-dozen democratic regimes were overthrown and replaced by military dictatorships. The most recent step in the development of the inter-American democracy doctrine was the reform of the Organization of American States (OAS) Charter—the Washington protocol—approved in December 1992. A balance between the traditional conception of sovereignty and the more modern view of the limits of state discretion is found in Article 16 of the OAS Charter. Sovereignty has been limited in recent decades by the transformation of democratic entitlement from moral prescription to international legal obligation.
