The Treaty of Tlatelolco and Our Nuclear Weapons Free America: Justice, Inclusion, and Peace Re-imagined

• In Event: Política, sociedad y desastres en México y el Caribe

Abstract

“I want peace. I don’t want peace with hunger.” Those words, uttered by an anonymous Latin American peasant and quoted in the New York Times encapsulate the thinking of the framers of the Treaty of Tlatelolco. Obviously preventing a nuclear conflict was a primary objective of this treaty barring nuclear weapons from Latin America. But equally significant for the treaty authors was the threat posed by the pursuit of nuclear weapons. In such pursuit, they feared Latin American nations could squander their limited financial resources and put at greater risk their somewhat imperiled sovereignty. The treaty architects knew Latin American nations, if forced to compete or even participate in the nuclear arms race, would sacrifice resources better spent on development and freedoms important to their peoples. The best way, they believed, to promote social justice and secure Latin America’s place in a pan-American community of nations, was to keep nuclear weapons out of the region altogether.
This paper will examine the Treaty of Tlatelolco from the perspective of the America its framers hoped to create. It will explore the concepts of positive and negative peace and suggest that the Treaty embodied the former. As such, the Treaty represented an effort to prevent war, but also to ensure that freedom and quality of life did not become the price of prevention.

Author

• Julia Sloan, Curry College