We the undersigned citizens and residents, as well as organizations of the United States, Canada, Latin America, and the Caribbean, committed to the sovereign equality of our nations, respectful of the democratic institutions of our peoples, and aware of the grave history of foreign military intervention in Latin America, declare our strong rejection of the declarations this week by the Secretary General of the Organization of American States (OAS), Luis Almagro. During his September 14th visit to Cucuta, Colombia, the Secretary General said “with regard to military intervention to overthrow the regime of Nicolas Maduro, I  believe that we should not discard any option.”

It is an extremely serious matter that as a representative of an international body, in theory the custodian of the Inter-American Democratic Charter, who is charged with protecting, as a sacred duty, continental democracy, expresses in such a blatant form the possibility of military intervention against a republic of our Americas.

Luis Almagro, breaking with the impartiality that ought to characterize the office of the Secretary General, a post representing a community of nations with all its political and ideological diversity, has led an extremely partisan, targeted, discriminatory campaign aimed exclusively against the legitimate government, elected at the polls, of President Nicolas Maduro, thereby allying himself in an integral way with the hegemonic policies of the government of the United States towards the continent.

Secretary Almagro has attacked the government of Nicolas Maduro on numerous occasions in terms that denigrate the entire continent and the values of the Inter-American Democratic Charter. This is not the first time Almagro has broken with the democratic institutionality of the Americas. On April 3, 2017, Almagro manipulated the Permanent Council of the OAS, using unscrupulous maneuvering to suspend the Presidency of Bolivia for just enough time to appoint the representative of the government of Honduras, an ally of Almagro’s partisan efforts. This was done in an attempt to force a vote of condemnation against the government of President Maduro, an effort that failed to garner the support of the minimum required number of countries.

The reprehensible conduct of Almagro evokes the specter of the historic record of the OAS, during the cold war, when the continental body abandoned its regional spirit and became another arm of the imperialist foreign policy of the United States.

Almagro has never expressed, in similar terms, his denunciation of the grave situation of Honduras, one of the most violent countries on the planet. He responded in a passive manner to the electoral fraud of November 2017, despite the denunciation of serious irregularities by his own observation team of the election that brought Juan Orlando Hernandez to power.

Almagro has also not condemned, with the same force he attacks Venezuela, the government of Mexico, co-responsible for the disappearance of 43 students of Ayotzinapa, and the tens of thousands of persons tortured, disappeared, mutilated and murdered at the hands of state actors and narco-criminals.

Almagro has not raised his voice in the face of the serious state of affairs in Colombia, where more than 7.6 million Colombians have been displaced by civil conflict and 343 social movement leaders and human rights defenders have been murdered since January 2016. Hundreds more continue to receive death threats. The selective indignation of Luis Almagro speaks for itself.

The gravity of the statements of Almagro constitutes a strong moral blow against his own nation’s history. Uruguay, the Secretary’s country of origin, has itself suffered the drama of military intervention, one that brought death and suffering to hundreds of thousands of Uruguayans. The same historic drama took the lives of hundreds of thousands of Latin Americans during the dictatorships of Chile, Paraguay, Argentina, Brazil, and Bolivia. To call for military intervention in Venezuela is an enormous infamy and reflects a disdain for the very institutionality of the OAS and its Inter-American Democratic Charter.

The Lima Group, despite being allied with the foreign policy of the United States, gave a rare show of independent democratic expression by repudiating Almagro’s declarations. But this Group, some of whose member nation’s face their own serious political and economic challenges, has yet to repudiate the economic sanctions against Venezuela and align itself with the cause of regional peace and cooperation. Nevertheless, this “preoccupation and rejection” by the Lima Group of Almagro’s bellicose statement in Cucuta shows the seriousness of Almagro’s escalating interventionism since he assumed the post of Secretary General of the OAS.

For all the above reasons, the undersigned urge the immediate resignation or expulsion by means of a vote by the member states of the OAS of the present Secretary General, Luis Almagro, for the serious abandonment of his duties, for his repudiation of the democratic values of the continent, for breaking the guidelines of the Inter-American Democratic Charter, and for his partisan and intensely adversarial conduct towards the elected government of Nicolas Maduro, President of Venezuela.

Washington DC, Sep. 17, 2018

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