George Washington rarely shares the limelight in the capital that bears his name but the founding father’s bust has considerable company in the marble-clad headquarters of the Organization of American States (OAS). In the Hall of Heroines and Heroes of the Americas, Washington stares down Simón Bolívar, the great liberator of Latin America, plus more than a dozen historical figures from Ecuador to Jamaica.

This statuary reflects the curious conceit of Pan-Americanism: the most powerful country in the western hemisphere is but one among equals. That, at least, is the principle underpinning the OAS, a 77-year-old multilateral institution that was founded to encourage peaceful conflict resolution between neighbours.

So when Monocle takes a seat under the crystal chandeliers in the Hall of the Americas during a recent meeting of the Permanent Council, diplomatic protocol insists that the voice of St Kitts and Nevis, which has a population of about 47,000, has the same weight as the host country’s. Under the flags of 34 nations, delegates take turns interrogating the Colombian and Peruvian candidates for assistant secretary-general, one of whom will join the new chief, Albert Ramdin. Hailing from Suriname, Ramdin who assumes office on 30 May, is the first Caribbean OAS secretary-general. He takes up his role at a turbulent moment for the organisation and multilateralism more broadly.

Since its birth, the OAS has undeniably been a creature of Washington. Headquartered in the shadow of the White House, half its $99m (€88m) budget flows from the US Treasury. Outside, the monuments reinforce this idea. While a bronze Bolívar sits powerfully astride his horse in an adjacent plaza, his figure is dwarfed by the nearby obelisk bearing the name of the American Cincinnatus.

To its critics, the OAS is a mouthpiece for US foreign policy to enforce the 200-year-old Monroe Doctrine. Leftists deride it as the “Ministry of Colonies” or simply as an irrelevant organisation that has been unable to resolve chronic issues in counties such as Haiti and Venezuela. “If you look at the region’s most pressing challenges, where is the OAS?” says Rebecca Bill Chavez, president of Inter-American Dialogue.

Its adherents concede the inter-American system’s imperfections but argue that it has evolved to operate more independently from the US through laudable election-monitoring methods, a respected human-rights court and valuable regional co-operation on organised crime, narcotics and migration. From tense elections to disputed borders, the OAS has a track record of effectively wielding diplomacy in smaller countries. These elements, as well as the US stance that the region constitutes its backyard, are core ingredients of the western hemisphere’s relative geopolitical stability in the 20th and 21st centuries.

“Peace has been established in the western hemisphere for a long time – we don’t have open wars or major conflicts,” Ramdin tells Monocle, weeks before he takes office. But as Donald Trump’s administration reviews US membership and funding in all international bodies, the OAS presents a special case. Historically, Washington has propped up the organisation because it provides a multilateral veneer for advancing US interests. As the OAS ambassador from Antigua and Barbuda Sir Ronald Sanders puts it, “They regard the OAS as their property.” At a time when Washington is stripping away veneers, will the US invest in the plumbing and the fixtures or dispose of its pet diplomatic property entirely?

On the day we arrive in Washington, the news cycle is consumed by Benjamin Netanyahu’s second visit to the White House, a reminder of the current president’s Middle Eastern focus and preference for bilateral negotiations. Latin America and the Caribbean might feel like perpetually neglected neighbours but it wasn’t always this way. Monocle meets Brazilian ambassador Benoni Belli, the current Permanent Council chair, in the OAS headquarters’ interior patio, which flourishes with verdant gardens representing the flora of North, Central and South America, and the Caribbean. Inaugurated in 1910, the Pan American Union building embodies the era’s transcontinental spirit. It’s an amalgam of English, French, Portuguese and Spanish architectural influences that heralds co-operation among the New World’s young republics.

Belli leads the way to a well-appointed office decorated with Brazilian artwork supplied by the OAS’s in-house museum and gives a history lesson. Founded in 1948 amid anti-communist fervor, Belli says, “The OAS gave a seal of legitimacy to the Monroe Doctrine.” At the height of the US-Soviet rivalry, the OAS turned a blind eye as military dictatorships committed gross human-rights violations in the name of anti-communism. Cuba’s communist revolution led to the island’s suspension in 1962 (the ban was rescinded in 2009; Havana declined the invitation). When the Reagan administration invaded fellow OAS member Grenada in 1983 without repercussions, the secretary-general resigned in protest over the institution’s perpetual sidelining in hemispheric geopolitics.

But with Latin America’s transition to democracy and the easing of Cold War tensions, the OAS flexed its muscles to operate with autonomy from Washington. Belli cites Nicaragua in 1990 when the socialist Sandinistas – a fervent foe of the Reagan-Bush administrations – agreed to elections and invited the OAS to monitor, on the provision that the US government stay out. The Sandinistas lost and couldn’t charge the Yankee imperialists with meddling.

“It was a golden era,” says Belli. “The OAS was able to safeguard democracy without giving the impression that it was simply a vehicle to impose American power in the region.”

Flash forward a quarter century and the OAS’s gilt has tarnished. While there are still success stories such as an OAS diplomatic mission that mediated the post-election crisis in Guatemala last year, they are more the exception than the rule. In Nicaragua’s case, Sandinista revolutionary leader Daniel Ortega had the last laugh. Ortega runs a dictatorial regime with his wife, Rosario Murillo, and withdrew from the OAS two years ago. Venezuela, a perpetual thorn in the side of the organisation since Hugo Chavez’s rise to power, left in 2019. But under byzantine rules, Cuba and Venezuela continue to formally count as OAS members for voting purposes as the US made the sad spectacle in 2019 of seating an ambassador representing failed opposition leader Juan Guaidó.

“They must be laughing their heads off in Caracas and Havana every time we have to cast a vote knowing fully well that they are the jumbies – the ghosts – haunting this place,” says Sanders. Known as el decano or the “dean” as the body’s longest-serving ambassador, he holds court in the Delegates Lounge, shooing away a trio of Spanish-speaking staff and chiding Belli’s secretary for interrupting his soliloquy.

With his institutional wisdom, Sanders takes the Trump administration’s early moves in stride – and sees the OAS’s cosy relationship with its host country as an existential benefit. “President Trump will not release an advantage if he has one,” says Sanders. “To the extent that the US has dominated this place for such a long time, I think he might keep it in his back pocket.”

That perceived domination has spurred detractors and alternatives though nothing has yet supplanted the OAS entirely. The Union of South American Nations sits moribund 17 years after its founding while the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States has puttered along for more than a decade without a major splash. In 2021 former Mexican president Andrés Manuel López Obrador went as far as calling for the OAS’s replacement with a more autonomous organisation that would be “nobody’s lackey”. But the common thread among detractors is often bristling at criticism from the organisation, especially its non-partisan umpire the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights. In Mexico’s case, the commission has called out judicial reform as threatening the rule of law. And in March, it expressed concern over potential human-rights violations by the US for sending migrants to El Salvador’s notorious mega-prison.

The latter communiqué will surely not endear the OAS to Trump but defunding the organisation would, ironically, hand a political victory to the Latin American left. During his last term, Trump became the first US president to skip the OAS’s flagship Summit of the Americas, a move interpreted as consistent with his disdain for Latin America. His predecessor’s signature foreign policy initiative, meanwhile, was the pivot to Asia. “The truth is that we have been at a crossroads for some time,” says Sanders. “The US has been ambivalent about the OAS for the past 20 years.”

But US secretary of state Marco Rubio, himself Cuban-American, has showered the region with attention, albeit to articulate Trump’s dim view of Latin America and the Caribbean as a hotbed of security concerns and the source of his immigration nightmares. Days after being confirmed in January, Rubio visited five Central American countries on his inaugural trip and stopped in the Dominican Republic, where he affirmed support for the host nation of the next Summit of the Americas in December (whether Trump will attend remains unknown). In March, he made a whistle-stop tour of the Caribbean, meeting six heads of state and publishing an op-ed in the Miami Herald asserting an “Americas, first” foreign policy.

The US did not immediately back Ramdin, who was initially tarred as a Chinese agent in right-wing circles. Rival candidate Rúben Ramírez Lezcano, the Paraguayan foreign minister, mounted an intensive pro-US lobbying campaign and even landed a coveted selfie with Trump at Mar-a-Lago. But the OAS’s independent streak reared again as the 14-vote Caribbean bloc held steadfast, insisting it was finally their turn to lead the body, and once four more votes were confirmed heading Ramdin’s way, Washington joined the bandwagon – currying favour with a newly oil-rich nation was ultimately deemed good politics.

For Rebecca Bill Chavez, who served in the Biden administration in Western Hemisphere Affairs and counts several OAS ambassadors among her confidants, the administration’s moves thus far are encouraging that the organisation has a future despite Trump’s hostility to multilateralism. “All the signals are the right signals,” she says.

Leading said future falls to the mild-mannered 67-year-old former Surinamese foreign minister and career diplomat. Ramdin is widely viewed as a technocrat who will keep a low political profile in stark contrast to his predecessor, Luis Almagro. The 10th secretary-general elevated the OAS’s profile with his poetically vociferous critiques of leftists authoritarians – much to the US’s delight – but also raised the hackles of member states frustrated at his freelance advocacy. 

“[Almagro] was more general than secretary,” says Bolivian ambassador Héctor Arce Zaconeta, whose socialist government blames the OAS for an election audit that precipitated Evo Morales’s fall from power in 2019. “The new secretary-general has to facilitate dialogue as an international functionary, not a political activist,” says Belli more diplomatically.

Soon enough Ramdin will be called upon to mediate the region’s flashpoints. The OAS has a long-running role in keeping peace over disputed territory between Belize and Guatemala, which could erupt when The Hague rules as soon as this year. Tensions continue to ratchet up between Venezuela and Guyana regarding the disputed Essequibo region with March seeing a British, Dutch and US naval exercise to counter Venezuelan warships. The US’s newfound expansionist designs on the Panama Canal also threaten regional stability. Haiti, where the OAS has operated a birth certificate and national-identity-card scheme for decades, remains a basket case, though Ramdin has credibility in Port-au-Prince, having made more trips to the troubled capital than nearly any other Caribbean diplomat.

It will fall to this representative from the region’s odd duck, the only Dutch-speaking country with a mere 700,000 inhabitants, to keep the peace. Ramdin sees his unique perch as an advantage. “Small countries can play an important role in international diplomacy because we are not threatening,” he says. “Therefore, we can be an honest broker.”

A former assistant secretary-general, Ramdin knows the institution’s inner workings. He’s well poised to rein in the bureaucracy and the budget if given a green light for reforms at June’s annual assembly in Antigua and Barbuda. Regardless of what the US decides on funding, “The truth is that the OAS has been broke for some time,” says Sanders. Contributions are proportional to national income and several countries are in arrears. USAID cuts have already cost the OAS some $4m(€3.55m).

Ramdin says that his meeting with Rubio in March was “open and frank” and that he has met with other high-level US officials about the OAS’s future, which largely hinges on Washington’s whims. To make the case, Ramdin appeals to the turn-of-the-last-century vision of regional co-operation that manifested in bricks and mortar. From his new office, he can peer into the courtyard where the rubber-fig “Peace Tree” planted by William Taft in 1910 still grows. One Republican president oversaw the building’s inauguration; now Ramdin must ensure another Republican president doesn’t oversee its closure.

“We need to demonstrate to the US how building a united hemisphere will be in their benefit: a flourishing regional economy where investments remain within the Americas and where we support each other’s development,” Ramdin says. “That goes to the essence of what Washington and Bolívar wanted to achieve.”