Will the Americas ever take action on Venezuela? | McClatchy Washington Bureau

Nine months after the secretary-general of the Organization of American States threatened to invoke the hemispheric organization’s Democratic Charter against Venezuela, the 34-nation group continues its wait-and-see approach.

The Venezuelan government essentially has dared the United States and the United Nations-like OAS to just try and take action in response to its suspension of a recall referendum that could have ousted President Nicolás Maduro.

That move by the Maduro administration prompted OAS Secretary-General Luis Almagro to compare the Venezuelan government last week to a dictatorship and to call on the countries of the Americas to apply the OAS’s Democratic Charter to “defend democracy in Venezuela.”

But the wheels of international diplomacy turn slowly, and it’s at best uncertain what steps, if any, the OAS is prepared to take. Several opposition members of Venezuela’s General Assembly are seeking to come to the United States next week to meet with Almagro. But no new meeting has been scheduled of the OAS’s permanent council where delegates could voice their concerns and possibly vote on taking action.

Jamaica’s ambassador to the OAS, who’s the current chair of the permanent council, didn’t respond to requests for an interview about scheduling a meeting. The interim representative for Barbados, whose ambassador will assume the chair next, said she supports a meeting but noted that the group has had these discussions before.

Her assessment suggested the challenges Almagro faces as he tries to convince members to take more concrete actions. “What I understand there is now some kind of formal dialogue set up, including a representative from the Vatican, so obviously we’d want to see how that process plays out,” Jane Brathwaite said. “We want to give every opportunity to dialogue.”

Encouraging dialogue between Maduro and his opponents in the National Assembly was the result of the last round of OAS meetings when the organization got together this summer to consider Almagro’s 135-page report demanding an immediate change in the way the country was governed and calling for a recall referendum on Maduro’s rule before the end of the year.

At that time, Almagro charged the Venezuela government with blocking the democratically elected National Assembly from carrying out its role, stacking the Supreme Court with biased judges and jailing political prisoners. He urged the OAS members to invoke the Democratic Charter, under which OAS members agree to be governed democratically. A determination that Venezuela has violated the charter could result in its suspension from the group.

But an emotional four-hour OAS meeting on June 23 ended without any decisions being made, with the diplomats divided between those who favored pressuring Maduro to make accommodations to his opponents and those who believed such a move would violate Venezuela’s sovereignty.

The resort to dialogue in June went nowhere. Talks initiated in the spring and led by Spain’s former Prime Minister José Luis Rodriguez Zapatero failed to break any political impasse. More than 1.3 million Venezuelans signed a petition to oust Maduro, and the recall was moving through procedural steps when Venezuela’s electoral authority ordered the process stopped last week amid charges that opposition leaders fraudulently collected some petition signatures.

The Maduro administration barred some of those opposition leaders from leaving the country. Members of the opposition-led General Assembly accused Maduro of staging a coup, announced plans to pursue impeachment proceedings and called for a massive street rally.

Whether OAS members feel differently about invoking the Democratic Charter now after marches broke out in Caracas following the Maduro administration blocking the recall referendum is unclear.

Angel Medina, an opposition leader in the Venezuelan General Assembly, described the situation via text messages as “precarious.” He encouraged the permanent council to hold another meeting to re-evaluate the situation in Venezuela.

“The OAS can activate mechanisms to help the country escape its crisis,” Medina said.

Roger Noriega, who was appointed U.S. ambassador to the Organization of American States by President George W. Bush and also served as assistant secretary of state for Western Hemisphere affairs, wrote in a column for the Washington Examiner that the United States should support Almagro and consider sanctions against Venezuelan leaders involved in drug trafficking and money laundering.

The United States shouldn’t act alone, according to Michael Shifter, the president of the Inter-American Dialogue, who said multilateral pressure would be more effective. But it’s time for the OAS members to act, he said.

“If they don’t, it’s pretty shameful,” Shifter said. “I think what it’ll show is that most governments are not serious about democracy, which is one of the core principles. This is a test that is quite clear cut. If they don’t go along with it, it’s hard to claim this is a hemisphere that is committed to defending democracy as we know it.”

Shifter compared Maduro’s recent action to those of Peru’s ex-President Alberto Fujimori, whose dissolution of the Legislature, interference with the courts and rewriting of the constitution inspired the OAS in 2001 to adopt the Democratic Charter.

The United States appears to also want to move through the OAS, with a State Department spokesperson calling the group the “appropriate forum” to express concerns and offer recommendations.

“We are working with other governments in the region on this issue to create greater political space in Venezuela and call on the Venezuelan government to live up to the hemisphere’s shared commitment to democracy, as articulated in the OAS Charter, the Inter-American Democratic Charter and its obligations and commitments related to democracy and human rights,” said the spokesperson, whose name cannot be used publicly because of administration policy.