Carlos Davila

Dávila was born in Los Ángeles, Chile to Luis Dávila and Emilia Espinoza. He graduated from the University of Santiago, Chile (then called School of Arts and Crafts) in 1907. In 1911, he entered Law School at the University of Chile, but dropped out three years later to work for newspaper “El Mercurio”, of Santiago. He left that paper in 1917 to establish “La Nación” of the same city, which he directed until 1927. In 1932, he founded the Chilean magazine, “Hoy”.

From 1927 to 1931, Dávila served as Chilean Ambassador to the United States. In 1929, he received an honorary LL.D. from Columbia University, and another the same year from the University of Southern California, in Los Angeles, California.

In 1933, Dávila was visiting Professor of International Law at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, under the auspices of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Later he came to the United States and was associated for many years with the Editors Press Service, and acted as correspondent for numerous important South American newspapers. In 1941 he received the Maria Moors Cabot Award from Columbia University for his distinguished journalistic contribution in the service of the Americas. A prolific writer, Dávila is the author of “We of the Americas”, published in 1949 and has contributed many analytical studies on politics and economics to leading American publications.

Dávila served on the Council of United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration from 1943 to 1946, and was Chilean Representative to the Inter-American Financial and Economic Advisory Committee in 1940. In the same year, he became the author of the “Dávila plan”, which created the Inter-American Development Commission, which became the Inter-American Council for Integral Development within the Organization of American States, when that body was created in 1948. In 1946, he served as a member of the United Nations Economic and Social Council.

Dávila’s first wife, Herminia Arrate de Dávila, died in Chile in 1941, and Dávila returned to the United States with their two daughters, Luz and Paz. In 1950, he remarried, this time to Frances Adams Moore of Massachusetts, a widow with a daughter, “Dolly”, by her first husband.

Having contributed to the founding of the OAS, Dávila was chosen, in August 1954, as its Secretary General.

Dávila died on 19 October 1955, 14 months into his service as Secretary General of the Organization of American States.