The head of the Organization of American States (OAS) wants regional governments to suspend Venezuela from the Washington-based group unless general elections are held soon to break a political impasse that on Tuesday he said is destroying the country’s democracy.
OAS Secretary-General Luis Almagro made the request in a 75-page report on Venezuela’s political crisis, in which he accused Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro’s government of systematically violating human rights and standards of democracy enshrined in the Inter-American Democratic Charter, to which Venezuela is a signatory.
Maduro’s administration, which has long accused Almagro of doing the bidding of the US, said the OAS leader was overstepping his authority in an effort to pave the way for an “international intervention” in Venezuela.
Almargo “is guided only by the hatred he professes toward Venezuela and his complicity with the coup-mongering, extremist and anti-democratic Venezuelan opposition,” the Venezuelan Ministry of Foreign Affairs said in a statement.
Almagro asked the OAS’ 34 member states to intervene in Venezuela’s crisis almost one year ago after Maduro’s government disavowed a landslide loss to the opposition in legislative election and then suspended a constitutionally allowed recall campaign seeking to force him from office before next year’s election.
However, regional governments, many of them ideologically aligned with Maduro’s left-wing administration or recipients of subsidized Venezuelan oil shipments, voted against intervention and instead threw their weight behind an attempt at dialogue between his government and the opposition.
Those talks, which were sponsored by the Vatican and enjoyed the support of former US president Barack Obama’s administration, broke down after little progress on key opposition demands, including freedom for dozens of jailed activists and a commitment to hold gubernatorial elections that were supposed to have taken place last year.
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