ETA–49. Editorial Note
Under Secretary of State C. Douglas Dillon, accompanied by Robert Cutler, Executive Director of the Inter-American Development Bank; Thomas C. Mann, Assistant Secretary of State-designate for Inter-American Affairs; T. Graydon Upton, Assistant Secretary of the Treasury; two congressional representative from the Senate Foreign Relations Committee-Senator Bourke Hickenlooper and Senator Wayne Morse; and various advisers drawn from the Departments of State, Treasury, and Agriculture as well as from the International Cooperation Administration, the Export-Import Bank of Washington, and the Development Loan fund arrived in Bogotá, Colombia for the third meeting of the Special Committee of the Council of the Organization of American States to study the formulation of new measures for economic cooperation (Committee of 21) on September 3, 1960, and returned to Washington upon the conclusion of the Committee’s deliberations on September 13.
At the third meeting of the Committee of 21, which was attended by representatives of all the Americans except the Dominican Republic, the United States presented for the Committee’s consideration a proposed new program for prompting social progress in Latin America to complement existing programs in the field of economic development. Financing for the new program was to come from the appropriation authorized by the United States Congress on August 31.
In a statement to the first plenary session of the committee on September 6, Under Secretary Dillon, the chairman of the United States delegation, presented a draft agreement for an inter-American social development program and said that its purpose was to add to the present expanding programs of basic economic and industrial development a broad new dimension of social development to further social justice in the Western Hemisphere. The program’s purpose, he stated, was to bring fresh hope to the less privileged people who constituted such a large proportion of the people of Latin America and to open before them the path to a better life of material well-being, equality, and dignity. The Under Secretary declared that the United States Government was prepared to devote over future years large additional resources to carry forward such a program, which was dedicated to supporting the self-help efforts of Latin-American governments and peoples.
[Typeset Page 125]The Latin American delegations welcomed the United States proposal. Their acceptance of the program was formalized in the Act of Bogotá, which was signed on September 13 by the representatives of all countries present except Cuba, whose representative had asserted on September 7 that the United States proposal was an instrument to stifle the awakening hope of the Latin American people in favor of the Cuban revolution, to isolate the Cuban people, to facilitate new aggression against [Facsimile Page 2] members of the Latin American system, and to distract attention from problems of independent and self-sustained economic development.
For the texts of Under Secretary of State Dillon’s statement of September 6 and the Act of Bogotá adopted on September 13, see the Department of State Bulletin, October 3, 1960, pp. 533 and 537, respectively. Additional documentation on Under Secretary Dillon’s trip to Bogotá is in Department of State decimal files 110.12-DI and 371.04 as well as as in the following Department of State lot files: OAS Files, Lot 60 D 665; ARA/REA Files, Lot 61 D 248; ARA Files, Lot 62 D 302; Conference Files, Lot 64 D 559, CF 1750–CF1752, CF 1755, and CF 1757; and ARA/IPA Files, Lot 66 D 230.