What SICA is and how it works

The protocol, and the charter it reformed

The institutions on this isthmus begin with the Charter of San Salvador, signed on 14 October 1951, which created the Organization of Central American States. A second charter of the same name replaced it, signed in Panama on 12 December 1962. Neither was dissolved when the present system was made. The Tegucigalpa Protocol, agreed at the eleventh meeting of Central American presidents in Tegucigalpa on 13 December 1991, is a protocol to that 1962 charter rather than a new founding document, and the organisation it reformed remains the legal ancestor of everything built since. The system began formal operation on 1 February 1993.

Standing outside the region followed. The General Assembly of the United Nations decided to invite the system to take part in its sessions and its work in the capacity of observer, by resolution 50/2, adopted without a vote at the thirtieth plenary meeting on 12 October 1995.

What the protocol set up, and what was added by treaty

Article 12 of the protocol names four organs: the Meeting of Presidents, the Council of Ministers, the Executive Committee and the General Secretariat. Alongside them it places the Meeting of Vice-Presidents as an advisory and consultative body, the Central American Parliament, the Central American Court of Justice, and a Consultative Committee drawn from business, labour, academic and other sectors.

The substance arrived afterwards, as separate treaties, each with a subsystem of its own. The Guatemala Protocol of 29 October 1993 constituted the economic subsystem, whose technical and administrative organ is the Secretariat for Central American Economic Integration, seated in Guatemala. The Alliance for Sustainable Development was constituted on 12 October 1994. The Treaty on Central American Social Integration, signed at San Salvador on 30 March 1995, organises the social subsystem and is housed in the offices of the General Secretariat. The Framework Treaty on Democratic Security was signed at San Pedro Sula in Honduras on 15 December 1995. In 2010 the heads of state and government of the member countries named five priority pillars for the process: democratic security, climate change and integrated risk management, social integration, economic integration, and institutional strengthening.

Belonging to the system is not the same as accepting its organs

The court is where that distinction is easiest to see. The statute of the Central American Court of Justice was signed in Panama in December 1992 by the presidents of Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua and Panama, together with the presidents of their supreme courts of justice. The system's own account of the court states that the statute has since been ratified by El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras and Nicaragua. The court installed its permanent seat at Managua on 12 October 1994, in a building donated by the government of Nicaragua, and it is composed of six titular magistrates, two for each state that signed the statute, appointed for ten years. The same account records that the incorporation of the Guatemalan magistrates is still outstanding.

The parliament has a history of its own again. Its constitutive treaty dates from 1987 and originates in the Esquipulas accords, its seat is in Guatemala City, and it has been in force since 28 October 1991, the day its first plenary was constituted. Its representatives are elected directly by universal suffrage in the countries that send them, which is what separates it from every other body here.

The protocol is common to all of them; the treaties under it, and the organs those treaties stand up, are ratified one at a time. A membership list is therefore not a list of obligations, and reading one off the other is the mistake this page exists to prevent.

Where the edges are argued

The group is wider than the isthmus, and the system says as much in its own description of itself: the English text of its purpose speaks of Central America and the Dominican Republic together rather than of a single region. The Dominican Republic is filed under the Caribbean in this catalogue and has been a full member of the system from 2013. Belize acceded in 2000, and its own record files it as a constitutional monarchy where the rest are republics, with English official and with membership of the Caribbean Community dating from 1974.

Beside the members the system keeps a long register of observer states and organisations, among them Mexico, Spain, Chile, Germany, Japan, the United States, the United Kingdom and the European Union. An observer is not a member, and only full members are counted on this page.

The seat

The General Secretariat sits in El Salvador, in a building called the Casa de Centroamérica at Antiguo Cuscatlán. The site was granted on loan by the Salvadoran government and the construction was financed by the government of the Republic of China (Taiwan), which appears on the same register of observers. The building was inaugurated in July 2011. Its other bodies sit elsewhere: the parliament in Guatemala City, the court in Managua, and the economic secretariat in Guatemala.