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.
‘ABSURD MISTAKE’: The election commission said that there had been a failure to anticipate turnout after 14 polling stations ran short of ballot papers South Korean riot police yesterday cleared protesters from a Seoul polling station after a 35-hour blockade sparked by a shortage of ballot papers during local elections earlier this week. Wednesday’s election was the first nationwide vote since South Korean President Lee Jae-myung took office following the ouster of Yoon Suk-yeol over his short-lived martial law declaration. Lee’s ruling Democratic Party swept most races, but failed to flip the crucial Seoul mayoral seat. The South Korean National Election Commission apologized, blaming a failure to anticipate turnout after 14 polling stations in Seoul ran short of ballot papers. Some polling stations stayed open until 10pm to
France experienced its hottest spring on record, the French weather service said on Tuesday, after an exceptional early heat wave that also broke highs for the season in England and Wales. Meteo-France said the average nationwide temperature over March to May was 13.8°C — about 1.7°C above the norm, and surpassing records set in 2011 and 2020. “The warmest spring since records began in 1900,” it said in a bulletin. All three months were warmer than average, but the onset of an “unprecedented heatwave” late last month pushed the mercury to highs typically seen at the height of the summer. “Our country had never
A Sherpa guide was found crawling to base camp on Mount Everest a week after he went missing and was reunited with his family, who had given up hope he would return. Dawa Sherpa was last seen on Friday last week descending the mountain, but he did not reach base camp even though his client did. The pair were among the last climbers on the mountain as the climbing season came to an end and the route was dismantled. Dawa was located by a cleaning crew on Thursday morning as he was crawling down the snowy slopes around the Khumbu Icefall, just above
Chinese authorities are snuffing out any remembrance of the deadly 1989 military crackdown on student-led pro-democracy protests in Tiananmen Square, which happened 37 years ago yesterday, in a further tightening of a years-long campaign to erase what happened from public memory. Police told relatives of the victims they would not be allowed to visit a cemetery in Beijing on the anniversary of the crackdown, a person with knowledge of the matter said. Relatives of the victims visited the cemetery on the anniversary for more than 30 years to read memorial statements with police keeping watch, Amnesty International said. Hundreds of people,
RSS