There's been no formal
announcement yet, but I think Woody Allen must be remaking
Bananas,
his old comedy about Latin American politics. Really: When Argentine president
Cristina Fernandez tells the Organization of American States that the miliary
coup in Honduras amounted to ''kidnapping the democratic restoration in Latin
America,'' how could it be anything but a punch line? And the joke -- a very
sad and expensive one -- is the OAS.
An organization that can, with a
straight face, expel Honduras as a threat to democracy barely a month after
inviting Cuba (50 years without elections and still counting) to join, has
lost any claim to serious consideration, much less the funding of American
taxpayers.
Founded in 1948, the OAS is an artifact of the Cold War, originally
intended to resist Soviet mischief in Latin America. How much it really
accomplished in that regard, and at what cost, are open to debate. But what
isn't arguable is that for the past 30 years, the OAS has devolved into a pack
of circus clowns who perform political somersaults for the amusement of the
region's leftists -- all on the nickel of U.S. taxpayers, who put up more than
60 percent of the OAS budget.
The OAS double standard on democracy dates at least to the late 1970s, when
it worked to oust Nicaragua's anti-communist Somoza dynasty while breathing
not a word about Omar Torrijos, the vicious left-wing military dictator just
over the hill in Panama.
But in the past decade, the organization has outdone itself. If the OAS
were a sports team, its official mascot would be a pipe cleaner, its motto
Capable of bending around any corner.
The rule of law? That's very important for a centrist government in
Honduras -- so much so that the OAS has appointed itself the ultimate arbiter
of the country's constitution, overruling the Honduran supreme court. Not so
much in Venezuela, where leftist strongman Hugo Chávez sent mobs to Caracas
city hall to keep a victorious opposition candidate from taking office after
he won election last year.
The sanctity of elections? Absolutely crucial in Honduras, where the OAS
insists that Chávez's sock-puppet Manuel Zelaya be returned to power to serve
out the final six months of his term even though practically every political
force in the country opposes him. But much less so for Nicaragua, where
President Daniel Ortega's Sandinista party was so obvious in its theft of 40
mayoral elections last fall that even the ordinarily sympathetic European
Union cut off aid.
Toppling elected governments? That's an authoritarian affront to the
hemisphere if it's done by the army in Honduras and participatory democracy
when it happens at the hands of leftist mobs in Ecuador, where Jamil Mahuad
was forced out in 2000. (Pssst! Don't tell the OAS, but the Ecuadoran army
helped, too!) Or in Bolivia, where two presidents in two years were driven
from office by machete-wielding gangs loyal to cocaine socialist Evo Morales
-- who, in an amazing coincidence, was elected president right afterward.
Literally nothing -- not even captured documents showing that he was
supplying money, oil and weapons (including anti-aircraft missiles) to Marxist
guerrillas in neighboring Colombia -- can prod the OAS into breathing a word
against Chávez and his left-wing cronies.
The organization's left-eye-blindness reached terminal levels in the wake
of last month's coup, when the OAS ignored Chávez's ranting threats to invade,
then blandly cited ''the principle of nonintervention in the internal affairs
of other states'' as its justification for expelling Honduras and threatening
the broke little country with economic sanctions. As Woody Allen said in
Bananas, ``It's a travesty of a mockery of a sham of a mockery of a
travesty of two mockeries of a sham.''