OAS must stop Venezuela from going over the brink

The Organization of American States (OAS) met in Cancún, Mexico this month and utterly failed to take any effective action on its one crucial agenda item: how to halt Venezuela’s death spiral. Needing a two-thirds vote, a handful of Venezuela’s Petrocaribe oil recipients and an even smaller number of ideological allies blocked a strong resolution supported by 20 hemisphere foreign ministers and the Trump administration in its first General Assembly. The timing of the White House roll-back of former President Obama’s normalization initiative with Cuba three days earlier could not have been worse for diplomats seeking to cajole and twist arms to get the missing three votes. More…