Luis
Almagro is the Secretary General of the Organization of American
States (OAS), whose tenure is best defined by the quasi-evangelical
zeal with which he has condemned and sought to delegitimise the
Venezuelan government of Nicolás Maduro.
On 15
December, Uruguay’s Frente Amplio (Broad Front) government
announced it had finally had enough after Almagro had advocated
Maduro’s removal by any means necessary, including force. Almagro
was previously Uruguay’s Foreign Minister from 2010 until 2015
under the Frente Amplio government of José Mujica.
For the
Frente Amplio, a long-standing ally of Venezuela, the final straw was
a press conference on 15 September. ‘With regards to military
intervention to overthrow Nicolás Maduro, I believe that we must not
rule out any option’, Almagro said then. He doubled down in an
interview published five days later, offering the Rwandan genocide,
in which around 800,000 people were killed, as a comparable example
of what inaction can produce.
Almagro’s
implication that bombing Venezuela was a potentially justifiable
course of action echoed growing belligerence within the US political
right, which for two decades has failed to depose chavismo through
various other means and now sees few alternatives to the tried and
tested method of military aggression.
‘We
have many options for Venezuela including a possible military option
if necessary’, said Donald Trump in August 2017.
Republican
senator Marco Rubio has also called for a coup d’état or US
military intervention to remove Maduro. Most recently, on 1 November
US national security adviser John Bolton labelled Venezuela part of a
‘troika of tyranny’ alongside Cuba and Nicaragua,
purposefully evoking the war-hungry ‘Axis of Evil’
discourse employed by George W Bush’s administration.
This
continues a pattern of hostile rhetoric towards the region’s
leftwing governments, despite recent state-backed human rights
violations in Brazil, Argentina, Mexico, Colombia, Chile, Honduras
and elsewhere. The difference in these cases is that they are
neoliberal governments closely aligned to the Washington axis (or, in
Mexico’s case, it was until a few weeks ago).
Almagro’s
rhetoric since his OAS appointment in May 2015 has largely resembled
a proxy voice for US foreign policy in Latin America, maintaining the
organisation’s decades-long reputation as a vehicle for expanding
Washington’s regional interests. His recommendation for a vote
recount following apparently-rigged elections in Honduras in 2017,
which saw the rightwing government returned to power despite strong
suspicion of voter fraud, was one of the few occasions he diverted
from the script.
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