Tlatelolco Treaty: The Global South’s Postcolonial Contestation of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Regime

Abstract

This article demonstrates how Global South countries tried to manage global pressures and preserved nuclear scientific ambitions via post-colonial understandings. By resorting to the Treaty for the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons in Latin America and the Caribbean (Treaty of Tlatelolco), this work states this treaty operated as a response to arguably colonial-minded nonproliferation structures and, in this sense, refined existing instruments through a Latin American initiative. The lessons from this example are still crucial because it represented the first well-accomplished Global South initiative to establish a fully-fledged Nuclear-Free-Zone area. In so being, Latin American countries acquiesced to global nuclear rules by requiring some concessions from great powers. For instance, the Treaty of Tlatelolco’s Additional Protocols I and II require that foreign countries with overseas territories in Latin America and nuclear-armed countries assumed not to perform tests or stock atomic weapons in the region. Employing a post-colonial theoretical approach, this article qualitative analyzes primary sources to unveil some peculiar regional tendencies from Latin America that encouraged countries to provide a response for international mechanisms erstwhile under formulation to curb nuclear proliferation according to great powers’ understandings.