IX Conference of Defense Ministers of the Americas & Preparatory Meeting
On July 19 and 20, vice-ministers of defense and similar defense officials from all over the hemisphere traveled to Santa Cruz, Bolivia, for a Preparatory Meeting of the IX Conference of Defense Ministers of the Americas (CDMA). In November, all of the hemisphere’s ministers of defense – likely including U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates – will attend the CDMA in Santa Cruz. Participants in the Preparatory Meeting meet to define and agree on the conference’s agenda and to prepare the summit’s final declaration. Minutes from the meeting are available at the CDMA’s website.
The meeting’s highlights were as follows:
The CDMA’s agenda will consist of three points:
- Consolidation of Peace, Trust, Security and Cooperation in the Americas: Defense Ministers will discuss mechanisms to strengthen peace, cooperation and security in the region, as well as transparency mechanisms in defense budgets, expenditures and arms purchases.
- Democracy, Armed Forces, Security and Society: this point aims to discuss women’s participation and gender equality in the armed forces and defense institutions; as well as modernization, interculturality, defense education and democracy within defense systems.
- Regional Security and Natural Disasters - Strengthening Hemispheric Cooperation: the goal is to exchange lessons from Haiti and Chile’s experience in prevention, preparation, response and reconstruction of natural disasters. Also, this item will debate regional capacity to respond to natural disasters.
The Draft Declaration includes a few points worth highlighting:
- It commits to preserve the “Spirit of Williamsburg” (the first CDMA, held in 1994 in Williamsburg, Virginia, United States, known for its declaration’s institutionalist and democratic tone), to strengthen democracy, peace, security, solidarity, and cooperation among the nations of the hemisphere.
- It promotes a gender perspective as a crosscutting issue in all defense environments.
- It stresses confidence-building measures as an instrument of cooperation and peace in the hemisphere. It acknowledges the set of confidence and security building measures recently approved by the South American Defense Council, which establish mechanisms for information-sharing on defense budgets, defense expenditures and arms purchases, among others.
- It celebrates Nicaragua’s declaration to be a country free of antipersonnel landmines, following a long cleanup effort from the country’s 1980s civil war, making Central America the first region free of landmines in the world.
- It mentions the need to achieve full implementation of the Inter-American Convention on Transparency in Conventional Weapons.
- In light of Haiti’s and Chile’s natural disasters, it supports the need to strengthen crisis management systems, hemispherically and internationally.
- It highlights the need to consolidate the training of civilians in defense issues, promoting the inclusion of civilian training programs in bilateral and multilateral assistance.
- It rejects the presence of illegal armed groups in the hemisphere.
- It commits to inviting Honduras, which was not invited to this year’s conference, to the next CDMA, which will take place in Uruguay.
- Finally, and perhaps most surprisingly, it also commits to inviting Cuba for the X CDMA as an “Observer State.”