Caribbean & Central America - June 2015 (ISSN 1741-4458)

***NEW BELIZE-GUATEMALA AGREEMENT. On 25 May the (now former) Secretary General of the Organization of American States (OAS), José Miguel Insulza attended the signing of the Protocol to the Special Agreement between Belize and Guatemala in Guatemala City. According to an OAS press release, the latest agreement will allow both governments to hold separate public consultations with a view to submitting their longstanding territorial dispute to the International Court of Justice (ICJ) at The Hague.

Guatemala lays claim to 12,772km² of adjacent land and sea, over half of Belize’s territory, stretching from south of Sibun up to the Sarstoon River and including many of its coastal cayes. While both countries began a dialogue process in 1995, brokered by the OAS, the negotiations have so far failed to yield much progress.

In his speech on 25 May at the event – his last act as OAS Secretary General - Insulza described the role of facilitator and mediator in the dispute played by the OAS as “one of the most important tasks of the Organization and one to which we have assigned the highest priority in the General Secretariat”. He also said it was “the only territorial dispute in the region that the OAS has accompanied continuously for more than fifteen years”.

Insulza also recalled that the most recent milestone vis-à-vis Guatemala-Belize relations took place in December 2014 when “the foreign ministers of Belize and Guatemala, with my guidance and in the presence of all the Heads of State and Government of Central America meeting in Placencia, Belize, in the framework of the Central American Integration System (SICA), signed thirteen bilateral agreements under the coordination of the OAS for the direct benefit of the people of Guatemala and Belize”. According to a statement by Insulza, “these agreements, together with the three agreements on security and intelligence that had been adopted three months before in order to strengthen the mechanisms of cooperation to combat illegal activities, including transnational organized crime, reflect the significant progress achieved in the process led by this Organization.”