What CELAC is and how it works

The two summits that made it

At Playa del Carmen in Quintana Roo, on 22 and 23 February 2010, the twenty-first summit of the Rio Group and the second Latin American and Caribbean Summit on Integration and Development sat as a single meeting. What the participants agreed there was to fold both into one body. That body was formally constituted at Caracas on 2 and 3 December 2011, where the summit issued the Declaration of Caracas and an action plan to carry it out.

No treaty was opened for signature at either meeting. Nothing was deposited, nothing was ratified, and no member has an instrument of accession to show for its place here. What the founding papers set up instead is a calendar. The Latin American and Caribbean Economic System, which keeps the community's documentary record, lists five bodies: the summit of heads of state and government, the meeting of ministers of foreign affairs, the meeting of national coordinators, the specialised and technical meetings, and the pro tempore quartet. One member holds the pro tempore presidency for a year and hands it on. Decisions are taken by consensus and published as declarations, and none of them binds a member in law.

Membership drawn by subtraction

Membership reaches every sovereign state of the Americas except the United States and Canada. That is the whole of the entry test, which is why the community is easiest to describe against the older body standing beside it. The Charter of the Organization of American States, signed at Bogotá on 30 April 1948, covers the same hemisphere with two more seats at the table, and every state on this page holds one of them.

One of those seats has stood empty since 1962. Resolution VI, adopted at the Eighth Meeting of Consultation of Ministers of Foreign Affairs at Punta del Este on 31 January 1962, excluded the government of Cuba from participation in the inter-American system. The OAS General Assembly, meeting at San Pedro Sula on 3 June 2009, resolved that Resolution VI ceases to have effect, and Cuba has not resumed its participation there. Cuba held the pro tempore presidency of this community in 2013, and the second summit met in Havana in January 2014.

Whether that makes the community an alternative to the Organization of American States or an addition to it is argued in print. Its own papers take the second reading: they describe a mechanism for political dialogue and coordination that complements the regional architecture already in place rather than duplicating it. Commentary published around the founding summit took the first. The catalogue records both readings and settles neither.

What it does not replace

Nothing here displaces the arrangements the members already hold, and the records underneath this page show them overlapping. Belize joined the Caribbean Community on 1 May 1974 and acceded to the Central American Integration System. Brazil is in Mercosur and in the Community of Portuguese Language Countries. Colombia is in the Andean Community. Mexico joined Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation on 17 November 1993 and is a party to the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement, which binds it to one of the two states this community leaves out. The members with records here are filed in four different subregions: North America, Central America, the Caribbean and South America.

What leaving costs

Because there is no treaty there is no denunciation clause, no notice period and no depositary to write to, so the practical measure of membership is attendance. Brazil stopped taking part in January 2020 and resumed in January 2023, in time for the seventh summit at Buenos Aires. Neither step required an instrument and nothing had to be ratified again on the way back. The same absence of paperwork is what makes a roster of this community a question about who came to the last summit rather than a question about who has deposited what.

Four languages, and one that is missing

The Proclamation of Latin America and the Caribbean as a Zone of Peace was signed at Havana on 29 January 2014, at the close of the second summit, in a copy written in the Spanish, English, French and Portuguese languages. Those four reach most of the membership and not all of it: Dutch is official in Suriname and does not appear on the text. The proclamation commits its signatories to settling disputes by peaceful means and to the purposes and principles of the United Nations Charter. Like everything else the community issues, it is a political undertaking rather than a treaty obligation, and no court has been given anything to enforce.

One address for the region

A body with no secretariat is still useful for one thing: it gives the region a single counterpart for anyone who wants to deal with the whole of it. The summit series with the European Union began at Santiago in January 2013. The fourth met at Santa Marta in Colombia on 9 and 10 November 2025, co-chaired by the European Council and by Colombia as the holder of the pro tempore presidency, and produced a joint declaration, a declaration on citizen security, a declaration on a bi-regional pact for care, and a roadmap running to 2027. The fifth was set for Brussels in 2027.

The presidency itself had moved earlier that year. The ninth summit, at Tegucigalpa on 9 April 2025, passed it from Honduras to Colombia, which is the same transfer the community has made every year since Chile took the first turn in 2012: a communiqué, a handshake, and a foreign ministry somewhere else taking over the filing.