The OAS Does it Again…

March 22, 2017

By Elio Delgado Legon

OAS secretary general Luis Almagro and Venezuelan president Nicolas Maduro.

HAVANA TIMES — Luis Almagro’s obsession against the government of Venezuela has revealed itself during the last few months and shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone.

Almagro is an insignificant person who became the Secretary General of the Organization of American States after, supposedly, changing his ideology in Uruguay and taking the governing Frente Amplio’s side, because it was the party who was most likely to win the elections. Jose Mujica then named him foreign minister and later supported him in being elected for the highest position at the OAS.

If we take a real good look at things, Almagro is nothing but an opportunist, capable of changing his discourse and behavior if the wind changes, and if it’s coming from the North, that’s even better. He simply managed to become the OAS’ Secretary General and he can’t do anything else but follow orders from whoever is paying him.

An OAS Secretary General can never be on the side of the peoples, but rather on the side of whoever the US Government tells them to be, otherwise they wouldn’t last very long in the position. Let’s remember that the OAS has its headquarters in Washington and is kept up and running, in essence, by the government of this country.

It isn’t about Almagro’s obsession against Venezuela. It’s about the secretary general of an organization which has a terrible history where it has had to play its role like the Cuban Foreign Minister of Dignity, Raul Roa Garcia, so brilliantly put it: “the ministry of the United States’ colonies”.

Almagro’s meddling statements against the Venezuelan government is nothing new in the history of the OAS, a history riddled with meddling in Latin American countries’ domestic affairs, whenever there is a government which troubles imperialist interests, and of complicit silences whenever the most condemnable violations of people’s human rights are committed.

Ever since it was founded in 1948, up until the present day, there is a long list of actions and neglect which would be too long to cite here, but I will write about the most important ones.

The OAS supported, along with the US, the military coup orchestrated by Fulgencio Batista in 1952, in Cuba, which sunk the country into a long night which lasted seven years, full of tortures, murders and disappearances. It showed neglect when there was a military coup against Jacobo Arbenz’s constitutional government in Guatemala (1954). It supported the Nicaraguan dictator Anastasio Somozo. It kept knowingly quiet in 1961 when Cuba was invaded by an army of mercenaries trained by the United States to end the Revolution, giving way to US military intervention which would then impose a government in keeping with this country’s own interests.

This is the same organization which didn’t say a word when the elected president in Ecuador, Velazco Ibarra, was the victim of a coup d’etat; it’s the same organization which encouraged a military invasion of the Dominican Republic in 1965 and agreed with the training of torturers and repressors at the School of the Americas.

This discredited organization didn’t even raise a finger to oppose the military coups, supported by the United States, in Uruguay, Argentina and Chile, which cost these people thousands of deaths and disappeared people. It didn’t condemn Salvador Allende’s death, or the deaths of thousands of South Americans as a result of Operation Condor. Nor did it condemn the invasion of Grenada in 1983 and Panama in 1989.

Finally, so as not to make this post too long, the OAS supported the coup d’etat orchestrated in Venezuela in April 2002 against the constitutional president Hugo Chavez, who had been elected by the vast majority of the population and who was reinstated by the people themselves and loyal army forces, actions which showed who the participants in the coup were and who the Organization of American States was backing.

With all of that noted above as well as many other actions and displays of neglect in its already too long history of disrepute, I can say that we shouldn’t be surprised by Mr Almagro’s meddling declarations against the Venezuelan government because, quite simply, the OAS is repeating its history again.