By Jackson Diehl
Monday, July 13, 2009
As the Obama administration and a host of Latin American governments
campaigned to reverse the coup in Honduras, another democratically
elected Latin leader embarked on a lonely effort to draw attention to
the double standard that has lately governed violations of political and
human rights in the region.
Venezuelan Antonio Ledezma is no gadfly or dissident; as the mayor of
Caracas, he received almost as many votes in last November's election
(700,000) as Manuel Zelaya (915,000) did when he won the presidency of
Honduras in 2005. Yet while the Organization of American States has been
united in demanding Zelaya's return to his post, and in suspending
Honduras for violating the Inter-American Democratic Charter, it has
studiously ignored the case of Ledezma -- who, since his election, has
been illegally driven from his office by a mob, stripped of most of his
powers and budget, and subjected to criminal investigation by the regime
of Hugo Chávez.
So on July 3, as OAS ministers were gathering in Washington to act on
Honduras, Ledezma launched a hunger strike in the OAS offices in
Caracas. His aims were pretty straightforward: to force Chávez to turn
over funds needed to pay thousands of municipal employees and to compel
OAS Secretary General José Miguel Insulza to investigate Chávez's
massive violations of the democracy charter.
Insulza, a Chilean socialist who is counting on Chávez's support to win
a second term in office, embodies the double standard. He has been
theatrical -- and ineffectual -- in his attempts to manage the Honduran
crisis; a week ago he joined a foolish, Chávez-sponsored attempt to
force Zelaya's return to the country. Undertaken against the advice of
every government in the Americas, save those allied with Chávez, the
airborne caper produced violent clashes at the Tegucigalpa airport and
led to the sidelining of Insulza's diplomacy in favor of Costa Rican
President Oscar Arias's.
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While championing Zelaya -- whose attempt to illegally rewrite the
constitution united Honduras's Congress and Supreme Court against him --
Insulza refused to interest himself in the case of Ledezma and other
elected Venezuelan mayors and state governors who have been subjected to
power-stripping and criminal prosecution by Chávez. The OAS "cannot be
involved in issues of internal order of member states," said a statement
Insulza issued after a June meeting in Washington with Ledezma -- a
declaration he quickly contradicted once the pro-Chávez Zelaya was deposed.
Ledezma's hunger strike eventually shamed Insulza into making a phone
call in which he promised to meet with the Venezuelan mayors and
governors in Washington, and to investigate their charges that Chávez
had violated the democracy charter. But Insulza later repeated that "it
is very difficult to determine how a country should organize itself
internally."
Such willful disregard of political repression was the prevailing policy
among OAS members before the Honduran coup -- including the Obama
administration. Though Chávez launched his latest and most virulent
campaign against elected opposition leaders and independent media
shortly after Obama's inauguration, the administration for months
refused to publicly respond; instead, it agreed on a new exchange on
ambassadors with Venezuela and repeatedly announced its hope to "work
with" the caudillo.
Last week it finally began to look as though Secretary of State Hillary
Clinton and others in the administration had changed their approach.
Immediately after meeting with Zelaya, Clinton granted an interview to
the Venezuelan television network Globovision, which Chávez has vowed to
shut down because of its critical reporting. In it she reiterated the
administration's desire to "lower the temperature" with Chávez but spoke
out against persecution of the media and "the arbitrary use and abuse of
power that would lead to political prisoners being confined."
Globovision's owner is one of the numerous opposition leaders now under
criminal investigation.
In testimony to Congress the next day, the State Department's incoming
assistant secretary for the Western Hemisphere, Arturo Valenzuela, said
that following the Honduras crisis, "it should be clear that the
collective response of the hemisphere in support of democracy should not
be limited to taking action simply when elected leaders are removed from
office by force." Does that mean the United States now will also push
Insulza and the OAS to judge what is happening in Venezuela -- and in
Nicaragua, Ecuador and other states where freedom of the press and free
elections have been under sustained attack? The administration's
high-profile effort to defend a hostile Honduran president has provided
an opportunity to take the offensive against the hemisphere's most
dangerous anti-democratic actors.
Jackson Diehl - A Double Standard on Democracy in Latin America -
washingtonpost.com (12 July 2009)
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/07/12/AR2009071201531.html
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