forum for inter-american research (fiar) Vol. 11.3 (Dec. 2018) 94-109 issn: 1867-1519 © forum for inter-american research Development before Democracy: Inter-American Relations in the long 1950s stella Krepp (uniVersity of Bern) Abstract Even though Latin American diplomats had been central actors in the debate surrounding human rights in the nascent years of the United Nations, the predominant preoccupation in the 1950s centred on development. Latin American politicians generally framed development as “social progress,” arguing that political and civil rights were meaningless unless basic needs were met. Nonetheless, this decidedly materialist approach to human rights is complicated when considering how, within months of each other in 1959, both the Inter-American Development Bank and the Inter-American Commission of Human Rights were founded. Looking at debates in the Organization of American States (OAS), this paper relates the fundamentally uneasy relationship between human rights and development in the inter-American system in the 1950s and early 60s. . Keywords: Democracy, Latin America, Inter-American Comission of Human Rights 1. Introduction In the frst report of the Panel of Nine on the Alliance for Progress, chairperson Raúl Saéz of Chile warned: “The Alliance, like all revolutionary movements…cannot be expressed simply through general concepts of freedom and representative democracy’, because these democratic ideals were “too far removed from the needs of the impoverished masses in most of the countries of the hemisphere to suffce of themselves” (“Document 17” 1).[1] But how could democratic governments address demands by the masses for economic progress and political participation in a climate of political polarisation and economic turmoil? The answer to this, according to Saéz, was development. Saéz was by no means a radical, but his opinion refected a widespread conviction in Latin America that development framed as “social progress” had to become the priority. Without meeting basic needs, Latin American politicians argued, political and civil rights were meaningless. Long before the right to development was formalised in 1986 with the United Nations’ Declaration on the Right to Development, debates on the diffcult relationship between the two concepts of development and democracy raged in the 1950s. In many ways, the 1950s are the “forgotten decade” in the crisis-driven narrative of Cold War Latin America (Grandin 426).[2] This might seem surprising, as the 1950s in Latin America were a pivotal decade in inter-American relations and in institutionalising development and human rights in the inter- American system. By the end of the decade, with the creation of the Inter-American Development Bank, the Santiago Declaration that bolstered democracy in the region, and the establishment of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, perceptible advances had been made, marking a peak of inter-American cooperation. However, during the 1950s and 1960s there was a decided tension between the demands of development and democracy. For many Latin American societies, the 1950s were the frst democratic decade. While most had experienced a short period of democratisation in the years from 1944 to 1949, they soon reverted to more authoritarian forms of rule (Bethell and Roxborough 328). By the mid-1950s, a second wave of democratisation again elevated