The Organization of American States (OAS) in a perilous path towards irrelevance

By: Carlos Sánchez Berzaín - 13/03/2025

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The organization that proclaims in its Democratic Charter that “the peoples of the Americas have the right to democracy and their governments the obligation to promote and defend it,” does not fulfill such mandate. In this 21st century, dictatorships have multiplied, there are para-dictatorial governments, and the practice to ignore the objectives and principles of the Organization of American States (OAS) is habitual. Dictatorships continue wielding power in Cuba, Venezuela, Bolivia, and Nicaragua with the use of State-terrorism and crimes against humanity, all of these while the irrelevance of the OAS grows.

The OAS, as the foundation of the democratic system, is one of the main victims of 21st Century Socialism. When Hugo Chavez, Fidel Castro, and Luis Ignacio Lula da Silva conspired to control Latin America as an antiimperialist zone, they orchestrated the toppling of the OAS Secretary General Miguel Angel Rodriguez former president of Costa Rica, to yield to the tenure of Jose Miguel Insulza from 2005 to 2015, a period when the principles of the OAS were blatantly ignored, and protection of the Cuban dictatorial expansion in Venezuela, Ecuador, Bolivia, Nicaragua, and its influence throughout the region, grew.

The backing of OAS member-States to 21st Century Socialism or Castrochavism, was made possible with Venezuelan oil revenues that sparked rapid results in the nations of the Caribbean through Petrocaribe founded in 2005 with 18 of the 35 member-States of the OAS. All of these happened while the US -with Bush 43 as president- was abandoning the First Summit of the Americas because of the terrorist attacks it suffered on 11 September of 2001.

The OAS is a political organization that expresses the position of the governments of its member-States. It is comprised by 35 States but Cuba -withdrawn since 1962- excludes itself in-spite of the annulment of such withdrawal in June of 2009. Dictatorships from Venezuela and Nicaragua have also withdrawn their membership in the OAS. Through the control of the majority, resulting from the Petrocaribe foundation and the expansion of dictatorships and para-dictatorial governments, the OAS was in the hands of 21st Century Socialism for the 10 years of the Insulza tenure, a time in which fundamental standards and principles of democracy and human rights were ignored and violated.

Twenty-First Century Socialism is the political brand of the transnational organized crime group that, under the command of Cuba’s dictatorship, has expanded its criminal system into Venezuela, Bolivia, Nicaragua, Ecuador with Correa, for the subjugation of nations through the use of State-terrorism, repression, political incarceration, exile, manipulation of the judicial system, installation of narco-States, hybrid war, crimes against humanity, vote-catching dictatorships, and all of these with impunity. This is the group that controlled the OAS from 2005 to 2015.

With the election of Luis Almagro as Secretary General, 21st Century Socialism sought to extend its control of the OAS, but the Uruguayan former Secretary of Foreign Affairs chose to return democratic institutionality to the organization and began his tenure releasing reports on the situation of Venezuela that concluded that the government of said country was a dictatorship.

By decision of the new Secretary General who, ironically, had ascended to his position with the help of 21st Century Socialism, the first five years of Almagro’s tenure were of democratic recovery and he -sustaining principles- turned out to be a democratic regional leader and a worldwide icon. The political correlation of United States’ representation changed with Trump 45. With a new change of government in the US in 2021, the weakening of the OAS was noticeable, to the point that -in critical cases- motions for defense of democracy could not muster the vote of 18 governments.

Beyond the difficulty that seems to be the reflection of the political position or position of convenience of member-States, the OAS has serious problems such as; the equal sovereignty of the member-States, portraying that all States have an equal vote without regard to its size, population, economic contribution, or anything. Grenada, Saint Lucia votes are the same as Brazil, Mexico, or the US. Geopolitically this is a delicate matter.

Financially, as reported by InfoBae, the United States contributes with 53% of the OAS budget and Canada with 11.3%, these combined represents “more than 64% of the funding required for the functioning of the OAS and all of its institutions.” Venezuela’s dictatorship, as well as Cuba’s “have won many votes at the OAS by resorting to the delivery of oil to Caribbean micro-States, each one of them with the right to a vote, the same as the US.”

The foreign affairs’ policies of Trump 47, do not seem to favor multilateralism and seek to discontinue the financial support to institutions that do not yield any benefits to the US and are, to the contrary, the foundation for attacks against it. It would be extremely serious that due to the actions of dictatorial and para-dictatorial governments, and of those from the Caribbean influenced by the antiimperialist dictatorships of 21st Century Socialism under the command of Cuba, the irrelevance of the OAS takes it to a total paralysis. This would be another success of the anti-democracy strategy.

*Attorney & Political Scientist. Director of the Interamerican Institute for Democracy.

Translation from Spanish by Edgar L. Terrazas

«The opinions published herein are the sole responsibility of its author».