OAS turns a blind eye to violations by left - link to original article

BY GLENN GARVIN

Posted on Tuesday, 07.14.09

GGARVIN@MIAMIHERALD.COM

There’s been no formal announcement yet, but I think Woody Allen must be remaking Bananas, his old comedy about Latin American politics. Really: When Argentine president Cristina Fernandez tells the Organization of American States that the miliary coup in Honduras amounted to ”kidnapping the democratic restoration in Latin America,” how could it be anything but a punch line? And the joke — a very sad and expensive one — is the OAS.

An organization that can, with a straight face, expel Honduras as a threat to democracy barely a month after inviting Cuba (50 years without elections and still counting) to join, has lost any claim to serious consideration, much less the funding of American taxpayers.

Founded in 1948, the OAS is an artifact of the Cold War, originally intended to resist Soviet mischief in Latin America. How much it really accomplished in that regard, and at what cost, are open to debate. But what isn’t arguable is that for the past 30 years, the OAS has devolved into a pack of circus clowns who perform political somersaults for the amusement of the region’s leftists — all on the nickel of U.S. taxpayers, who put up more than 60 percent of the OAS budget.

The OAS double standard on democracy dates at least to the late 1970s, when it worked to oust Nicaragua’s anti-communist Somoza dynasty while breathing not a word about Omar Torrijos, the vicious left-wing military dictator just over the hill in Panama.

But in the past decade, the organization has outdone itself. If the OAS were a sports team, its official mascot would be a pipe cleaner, its motto Capable of bending around any corner.

The rule of law? That’s very important for a centrist government in Honduras — so much so that the OAS has appointed itself the ultimate arbiter of the country’s constitution, overruling the Honduran supreme court. Not so much in Venezuela, where leftist strongman Hugo Chávez sent mobs to Caracas city hall to keep a victorious opposition candidate from taking office after he won election last year.

The sanctity of elections? Absolutely crucial in Honduras, where the OAS insists that Chávez’s sock-puppet Manuel Zelaya be returned to power to serve out the final six months of his term even though practically every political force in the country opposes him. But much less so for Nicaragua, where President Daniel Ortega’s Sandinista party was so obvious in its theft of 40 mayoral elections last fall that even the ordinarily sympathetic European Union cut off aid.

Toppling elected governments? That’s an authoritarian affront to the hemisphere if it’s done by the army in Honduras and participatory democracy when it happens at the hands of leftist mobs in Ecuador, where Jamil Mahuad was forced out in 2000. (Pssst! Don’t tell the OAS, but the Ecuadoran army helped, too!) Or in Bolivia, where two presidents in two years were driven from office by machete-wielding gangs loyal to cocaine socialist Evo Morales — who, in an amazing coincidence, was elected president right afterward.

Literally nothing — not even captured documents showing that he was supplying money, oil and weapons (including anti-aircraft missiles) to Marxist guerrillas in neighboring Colombia — can prod the OAS into breathing a word against Chávez and his left-wing cronies.

The organization’s left-eye-blindness reached terminal levels in the wake of last month’s coup, when the OAS ignored Chávez’s ranting threats to invade, then blandly cited ”the principle of nonintervention in the internal affairs of other states” as its justification for expelling Honduras and threatening the broke little country with economic sanctions. As Woody Allen said in Bananas, “It’s a travesty of a mockery of a sham of a mockery of a travesty of two mockeries of a sham.”

Doble moral democrática - enlace a publicación en El Independent

Por Jorge Ramos Avalos

El Nuevo Herald

Me parece sensacional que haya tanta preocupación internacional por la democracia en Honduras. Nunca había visto algo parecido en América Latina. Pero es inexplicable que no se luche con la misma intensidad por la democracia en Venezuela y en Cuba, dos países con gobiernos autoritarios.

Ha sido sorprendente ver a varios presidentes latinoamericanos viajar por todo el continente para apoyar al derrocado presidente de Honduras, Manuel Zelaya. La presidenta de Argentina, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, y el presidente de Ecuador, Rafael Correa, por ejemplo, volaron hasta San Salvador para aparecer sólo por unos minutos en una conferencia de prensa con Zelaya.

Ni la crisis económica en Ecuador ni la epidemia de influenza en Argentina fueron razones suficientes para evitar que sus presidentes salieran del país. La democracia hondureña era más importante.

Por su parte, Bolivia y Nicaragua retiraron a sus embajadores de Tegucigalpa. Y 33 países miembros de la Organización de Estados Americanos (OEA) suspendieron a Honduras por el golpe de estado. Actuaron con energía y rapidez.

Ningún país del mundo reconoció al gobierno interino de Roberto Micheletti. El presidente norteamericano, Barack Obama, dejó claro que no estaba de acuerdo en muchas cosas con Zelaya, pero le llamó golpe al golpe y pidió su restitución al poder.

El esfuerzo por defender a un presidente elegido democráticamente no tiene precedente en el hemisferio. Todos los gobiernos con Zelaya. Ninguno en contra. Y ahora, me pregunto ¿por qué no se ha hecho lo mismo en los últimos años para denunciar la falta de democracia en Cuba y Venezuela? Es una doble moral democrática.

El presidente Felipe Calderón denunció en Managua, ”a nombre del pueblo y del gobierno de México, nuestro más enérgico rechazo al golpe de estado ocurrido en Honduras.” ¿Denunciará Calderón, con la misma fuerza, la total ausencia de democracia en Cuba durante su próximo viaje a La Habana? Lo dudo. Y eso que la situación en Cuba es mucho peor que la de Honduras.

El acto de mayor cinismo ocurrió cuando el dictador Raúl Castro pidió, también en Managua, el regreso de la democracia en Honduras cuando a él y a su hermano nadie los eligió en votaciones libres y multipartidistas como gobernantes. O sea, Raúl quiere democracia para Honduras, pero no para Cuba.

A Calderón y a muchos presidentes latinoamericanos les parece espantoso lo que ha ocurrido en Honduras. Pero no se atreven a decir nada sobre el medio siglo de dictadura de los hermanos Castro, con sus prisioneros políticos, sus disidentes, sus muertos, su flagrante violación de las libertades individuales y su falta de elecciones multipartidistas.

Es pura hipocresía. No hay otra palabra. Sólo este año los presidentes de Pa- namá, Ecuador, Guatemala, Chile, República Dominicana, Argentina, Nicaragua y Bolivia han visitado Cuba sin hacer una sola denuncia sobre violaciones a los derechos humanos. Y el mismo Zelaya –que ahora tanto pelea por la democracia y se queja de los dictadores– se quedó callado cuando visitó a Fidel Castro en marzo. Ojalá Zelaya pidiera para los cubanos lo mismo que él quiere para los hondureños.

La misma doble moral se aplica con Venezuela. A pesar de sus victorias electorales, Hugo Chávez se ha comido la democracia en Venezuela. En ese país decide un solo hombre. Chávez controla la Asamblea, el Tribunal Supremo de Justicia, el ejército, el Consejo Nacional Electoral y la mayoría de los medios de comunicación. Además, cambió la constitución para reelegirse a su antojo. Pero yo no he visto ninguna indignación continental por los abusos y excesos de Chávez en Venezuela.

El mismo Chávez reconoció el viernes pasado que engañó a los venezolanos en las elecciones de 1998. ”Yo fui candidato para llamar a una constituyente”, dijo con una sonrisa cínica en una rueda de prensa. O sea, que ya desde entonces pretendía eternizarse en el poder, pero no lo dijo. Se hizo pasar por demócrata. Hoy sabemos que no lo es.

El caso más reciente del peligro a la democracia en Venezuela ocurrió tras la elección a la alcaldía de Caracas del opositor Antonio Ledezma con el 52 por ciento de los votos. Chávez, inconforme con el resultado de la votación, le mandó quitar todos los recursos y poderes a Ledezma. Y le puso por encima a un jefe de gobierno elegido por dedazo. Eso no es democracia.

Ledezma, quien ha denunciado el ”comportamiento neodictatorial del régimen de Chávez”, está pidiendo a la OEA ”el mismo celo, interés y prontitud aplicado en el caso de Honduras”. Pero esa ”respuesta urgente” que quería Ledezma no ha llegado.

No tiene ninguna lógica el que haya urgencia por reestablecer la democracia en un país y no en otro. ¿Con qué cara la OEA pide democracia en Honduras y se olvida de Venezuela y Cuba? Y hasta que no se apliquen los mismos principios democráticos a todos los países, seguiremos padeciendo caudillos y dictadores.

Democracy is under siege - link to original article

Miami Herald - 8/19/09

BY SUSAN KAUFMAN PURCELL
skpurcell@miami.edu

The recent behavior of the Organization of American States regarding Honduras is worthy of a magical realist novel. According to one definition, magical realism is “what happens when a highly detailed realistic setting is invaded by something too strange to believe.”

Among the things that are “too strange to believe” is the precipitous classification of events in Honduras as a traditional military coup, despite the fact that the military was asked to intervene by the Honduran Congress and Supreme Court after the incumbent president, Manuel Zelaya, decided to ignore Honduras’ constitution, which forbids reelection, by organizing a “poll” to show that “the people” wanted him to run again.

This supposedly would then make it all right for Zelaya not only to ignore the constitution, but to change it. The OAS sent observers to oversee the “poll,” a strange decision given that it had never before observed a Latin American poll.

Readmitting Cuba

Even more surrealistic was OAS condemnation of the overthrow of democracy in Honduras only weeks after it had pushed hard to readmit Cuba, a dictatorship that has not held a presidential election in 50 years. The fact that the OAS had earlier added a “democratic clause” to its charter apparently was not considered relevant to its decision to readmit Cuba.

Nor, according to the OAS, was it relevant to the situation in Venezuela, where President Hugo Chávez has used the democratic rules of the game to destroy Venezuelan democracy.

Why wasn’t the “democratic clause” applicable to Cuba and Venezuela? Because, according to the OAS, the lack of democracy in those countries was an “internal” issue, and the OAS doesn’t intervene in the internal affairs of member countries. Why is the involvement of the military in the internal affairs of Honduras also not an “internal” issue?

At the heart of the matter is the determination of the OAS and its members not to allow history to repeat itself. Specifically, the region does not want to return to its sorry past of constant alternations between democratic governments and military regimes.

Unfortunately, however, by refusing to consider the reasons for, and the nature of, military intervention in a particular country, the OAS and its members are fighting the last battle — not the present one. In the past, the military often intervened in the absence of undemocratic behavior on the part of the elected government.

Although there usually were groups in the civilian population — often from the middle class — that supported the coups or even asked the military to intervene, in most cases the presidents deposed by the military had not destroyed the country’s democratic political institutions in order to concentrate power in their own hands.

Today, in contrast, the main threat to democracy in Latin America is not the military but rather, charismatic, authoritarian demagogues who use modern means of communication for two undemocratic purposes. One is to mobilize “the people” to overthrow democratically elected leaders (such as the “civilian coups” that forced Fernando de la Rúa in Argentina and Gonzalo Sánchez de Losada in Bolivia from office). The other is to provide a pseudo-legitimacy for democratically elected authoritarians (such as Chávez in Venezuela and Evo Morales in Bolivia) to dismantle democratic institutions.

There are several conclusions that can be drawn from these changes in the nature of today’s threats to Latin American democracy.

The first is that it is necessary to challenge undemocratic and unconstitutional behavior before things get so bad that democratic institutions need the military’s help to avoid being destroyed by elected presidents acting illegally. This was not done in the Honduran case. Nor was it done in the Venezuelan case, where the country’s democratic institutions were destroyed and the military was purged.

Strength in numbers

Second, given the fragmentation in Latin America between countries governed by elected democrats and those governed by elected authoritarians, the challenge to democracy in the region is probably not amenable to a collective response by the OAS, since the elected authoritarians in the OAS will never vote against one of their own. This may mean that the only feasible collective response to these new threats will require that the region’s democracies join together to help and support each other.