American Enterprise Institute

May 25, 2006

[Edited transcript from audio tapes]

3:15 p.m.	Registration
3:30	Introduction:	Roger F. Noriega, AEI
	Keynote Address:	José Miguel Insulza, Organization of American States
5:00	Adjournment

Proceedings:

Roger F. Noriega:  Good afternoon.  Thank you very much for joining us.  We are going to get started in a few minutes if you folks want to have your seats.  Thank you.  Ladies and gentlemen, thank you very much for coming this afternoon.  We have a great opportunity to reflect on the Americas with one of the political leaders of the region, and one of the real operators of the Americas who can interpret for us with a long view of what is happening in the Americas. 

Certainly, there has been an awful lot of discussion about the tumult and restlessness in the Americas, some have spoken of the famous swing to the left, others have preoccupied themselves, trying to figure out the impact of Hugo Chavez.  And I have recently come to the conclusion that this is really a continuation of the decades-old struggle that we have been in the Americas, that is to say, “How do you generate economic growth and strength in institutions of democracy to extend that economic opportunity to people from all walks of life and to empower politically those who are in the margins of society.”  Some, quite frankly, in the region on the margins are weary of waiting for the results of this reform agenda, and I do not know that weariness is ideological, but it is clearly having an impact on the politics in the region. 

Hugo Chavez, the President of Venezuela, has tapped into this ideology of discontent and developed a rhetoric and a momentum by tapping into those people who are on the margins and attacking institutions not only in his own country but as it happens in other countries.  Others in the Americas have a much more constructive vision for economic and political development because, quite frankly, most cannot depend on petrodollars to pay for other real problems.  And these two visions are fighting for the attention of the world, certainly for the media and certainly for the attitudes of investors who are looking for opportunities for putting their money around the world in this globalize economy.  It has to be said that Chavez has, at least for the moment, stolen the wind from the sails of the others who have this constructive, more positive vision, those from across the political spectrum. 

And so the challenge for us today is, how do you recapture the initiative, how do you succeed on a constructive agenda, economically and politically, and I believe that the Inter-American system really presents an opportunity for doing just that.  And with the leadership of our speaker, the Secretary General of the OAS, Jose Miguel Insulza, Latin America has an opportunity to put its best face and foot forward as they encourage culture of accountability and transparency and generate economic growth that is equitable and sustainable.  Jose Miguel Insulza was elected Secretary General of the Organization of American States on May 2, 2005, and he assumed his responsibilities on May 26, just a year ago.  He has an accomplished record known to many of you, I’m sure, of public service, most recently serving as Chile’s Minister of Interior.  Secretary General Insulza was elected secretary general for that five-year term, has pledged to strengthen the organization’s political relevance and its capacity for action. 

He began his career in academia and until 1973, was a professor of political theory at the University of Chile and a professor of political science at Chile’s Catholic University.  He also served as political adviser to the Chilean Ministry of Foreign Affairs and to the political director of the diplomatic academy of Chile.  In 1988, he returned from fifteen years of exile and helped lead a political movement toward the democratic elections in 1990.  His work earned him the confidence of Chile’s political leadership and he held a number of important, really strategically important high-level posts under President Patricio Aylwin, Eduardo Frei, and Ricardo Lagos. 

It is a great pleasure to welcome him here this afternoon.  The secretary general will make some comments and then will take some questions thereafter.  Thank you very much, Mr. Secretary General. 

Jose Miguel Insulza:  Thank you very much for this invitation.  Thank you, Roger, for your kind words, and thank you, also, for the introduction that really put forward a lot of issues that we will be discussing today.  I see some very good friends.  I also see some friends from the embassy.  I’ll try to be careful, but not so careful as to be boring.  I think that the first thing that I shall say as much as I remembered, tomorrow it will be my first birthday at the OAS.  I have been here for about a year and probably a good starting point would be to compare what was going on that 26th of May as compared to tomorrow. 

We had some crises in the region, some very difficult crises, and we were with the provisional government in Haiti.  I’m trying to hold elections, and actually the OAS was in charge of the vote registration, and we are doing it really slow thing.  We had 66,000 people registered, and we had to improve a lot of that if we are going to have elections in Haiti.  We had a crisis in Ecuador. 

Just to show what the situation sometimes is in Latin America, there were two votes, several votes while in two different periods in the OAS, and there was one Ecuadorian government doing the first one, and another Ecuadorian government in the second.  I might as well give that vote anyway but, of course, it was a crisis in Haiti and Bolivia and the president of Bolivia resigned while we were at the general assembly.  The foreign minister of Bolivia informed at the assembly that the president has resigned.  And from there, about a day or two after, we had to run to Nicaragua for the Congress.  It was a quite large majority against the president that was aiming to depose the president, and we find that would be a very bad idea. 

Probably the best to give you an idea of what the situation was as we saw it at that moment, when I went to Nicaragua, I felt I had a very good argument in telling some of the leaders of the opposition, “You cannot do this.”  I mean it cannot happen anymore in Latin America.  No more governments falling down in Latin America, and they said, “If you have accepted it from the Ecuadorians and the Bolivians, why can’t we do it in Nicaragua, when they are exactly the same, the different, the opposite issue?” 

I think that it is very important to recognize that we have really a difficult year but we have progressed a lot in that direction.  We had the inauguration of President Preval in Haiti.  We had an election in Bolivia.  It was probably not the result many people wanted, but it was a clean result, a clear-cut result, differing from most elections in Bolivia but the problems usually came from the fact that they have minority governments.  Nobody had ever gotten, in the recent Bolivian democracy, nobody had ever gotten over 50 percent of the votes in previous elections. 

We are having a transition problem, a process, good transition process in Ecuador.  Actually the Supreme Court was reappointed and things seemed to be going well with that court, and in Nicaragua we have elections also by the end of the year in November on their own.  And the government is stable, is working well, and it is doing a good job from our point of view.  That does not mean, of course, that things are all going well. 

We usually say the problem in Latin America is not that much today of the existence or non-existence of democracy, of regular voting, rather there is a problem of governance, which is probably a larger concept than just having a vote every once in a while.  Of course, democratic governance has to do with three things at least:  One, which is usually first, is democratic elections.  Democratic elections we have in Latin America.  We had that this year.  We have had six elections; seven with the one in Peru, which is still between the first and the second round, and there have been normal elections which is interesting because some of them have been very tight and some of them have had unexpected results, and some of them, the opposition has won unexpected. 

Some years ago that could not happen.  Probably it would have at least brought about the crisis.  But in Honduras the opposition won.  The country that won but it showed very, very small majority and he won unexpectedly.  In Bolivia nobody expected Evo Morales to get absolute majority on the first round, and in Chile most expected that we would have a second round and in Costa Rica, everybody thought that President Arias was going to win handily and to win that handily, they spent about three weeks counting the votes and in spite of all this, the system has worked. 

Now, of course, we still have elections, seven elections to go before the end of the year.  Some of them have, I would say, predictable result if something can be predicted in this electoral year in Latin America, and the Caribbean and others are probably going to be very tight, and these are beginning this week.  And by the end of this week we have an election in Colombia, and at the end of the next week, we have the general assembly and we have the vote, the second round of voting in Peru, and then come Mexico and Ecuador, and then Nicaragua and Venezuela. 

So I think that from that point of view of democratic governance in general, in spite of the problems, we have observed practically all the elections except in the most… the larger countries are the most stable democracy.  We do know that we have one mission in Chile.  We have an invitation to be there for the Mexican election but not with our previous [sounds like] mission.  In all the others we are … in Brazil probably we will not need a fair observation mission, but in general we have been there, and we have been there not only for presidential elections, also for congressional elections. 

And our view is that, our general view is that things have been normal, and the only case in which some critical remarks were made not as many as the government felt were being made was in Venezuela this year, in which the main problem was basically political.  It was not the problem in Venezuela for their congressional election was not something that happened on the day of the election.  Things happened before the opposition withdrew and the election was very, only about for 25–26 percent of the people voted.  That was the problem, not something that happened on the day of the election. 

Usually when you have an electoral observation, you register everything.  So everybody can find in the report something that went wrong.  Some things are stated there, but as I say, it did not mean there is a problem in the Venezuela election.  The only one in which some critical remarks, were really critical remarks were made was precisely on what happened before the election and the withdrawal of the opposition. 

So this year, in this part I say that this has never happened in Latin America.  I mean thirteen presidential elections plus two general congressional elections in countries in which we have a parliamentary regime with the possibility of two more before the end of the year.  It means that at least half of the members of the Organization of American States will have had a general election between December 2005 and December 2006, and that certainly is very remarkable and speaks very well about this aspect of them. 

Now then, we have, however, two other aspects which I think are necessary to be considered.  I will enumerate in a logical way, I will treat them in a different manner.  First, let us remember that the Americas signed on the 11th of September 2001, the Democratic Charter of the Americas.  Now, this charter has a lot to do with issue number one, the elections, clean elections and all that, but the basic theory but for that we already have the OAS foundational charter.  Maybe it was not applied but to say that we have to have democratic elections like we have said before. 

Now the interesting thing about the democratic charter of the Americas is that it goes beyond the notion of legal, clean elections to speak about democracy.  From taking echo [sounds like] from a lot of literature published in the previous decade, the charter states that democracy, to have a democratic government you have to have, of course, clean elections but you also have to have respect for human rights, freedom of opinion, separation of powers, transparency and control of corruption, functioning of political parties, and some other features which are, as I usually call it, to give us not a definition of democracy.  I think it would be disastrous this time to start defining, I mean using one short sentence to define.  We have taxonomy on them.  If you want to define a democracy, you have to fulfill all these, know basic notions at least to a normal or a reasonable extent. 

That charter, of course, it gave us also jobs to do and things to do because if you are an organization that has to do with democracy in the Americas, our priority is we do not have to set too many political priorities.  We just have to follow a charter and see what things we have to work on.  That is why we work so much on electoral observations and on human rights, and we have some program for the enhancement of political parties and we have a convention on transparency.  We are having this year by the way in the assembly, the first report of a multi-lateral coalition mechanism for the convention of transparency, et cetera.  I’m talking only about the political area of the OAS of course, not [indiscernible] talk or the security aid was also an input. 

Since we have the charter, the second problem about democratic governance is how much are countries progressing in the goals of the charter?  I mean how are human rights going?  How is the freedom of expression going?  Is there a true separation of powers?  Do we still have an acceptable… I think we still have some unacceptable levels of corruption in some countries, et cetera, et cetera.  That is the second big governance issue - the one that has to do with the other features of liberal democracy, I should call it.  I’m thinking of the word on the contrary of what Fareed Zakaria wrote in 1997, who was wrong where he questioned them.  That precisely, the whole idea that it was enough to elect a democratic government and to have a government of majority, and it could happen to majority the size to suppress the minority. 

What happens if the majority votes in favor of laws that eliminate all fronts of dissent that close all newspapers, that intervened at the congress and the Supreme Court, and that is done by a majority.  That is a majority vote but that is not democratic.  The second issue of governance is, what can we really speak about democracies in our region, is democracy - and that was the issue of my friend Roger and others shows last year for the general assembly for a lot - is democracy delivering its benefits to a majority of the people, because that also links the concept of democracy with some of the biggest problems in Latin America which are poverty and inequality, discrimination, et cetera. 

The big question is, therefore, do we have governance in the sense of delivering the benefits of democracy?  Let me just leave that at the moment and go to the third issue, which I think is very important.  And the second is, let me put it in a very blunt way, are the people in the all the societies in Latin America and the Caribbean able to keep stable governments?  I think that we must address also in this issue of governance or government ability, if you want. 

We have to have functioning institutions.  Governments have to subsist.  The big problem last year when we were having all these crises was that we had in the last fifteen years, sixteen democratic governments that had not finished their tenures.  I’m talking only of presidential governments, of course.  There is no crisis when the prime minister has to leave because it was just majority in Congress, but there is a crisis when a president has to leave because he has a fixed term, even if he loses majority in congress, and we had sixteen of those for the last fifteen years.  I am not counting Haiti President Aristide fell twice in the last fifteen years and I’m counting it as only one, so it would be seventeen if we count Haiti twice. 

And most of these crises have taken place because of process of governance.  They were not ideological problems.  They were not the really the old-fashioned military coup.  I think none of them was an old-fashioned military coup.  I mean there were governments that have fallen because of corruption problems.  We have governments that have fallen under tremendous economic crises.  There are governments that have fallen because simply of some kind of a disillusion of the state in which the government had to go home because nobody was willing to continue with it.  They were not ideological crises.  They were crises motivated by the inability of the governments to hold. 

Some people tend to confuse this with a positive trend, that people went out to the streets and deposed the government.  And usually those people do not have alternatives, really, so what follows is a bit of chaos and probably that country will not get back on its feet, on track for some years.  The fall of a government is not a good, and probably it is a fault of the government in most cases - not in all of them - but it is not necessarily a good or a reasonable idea. 

So those are the three things that we have to deal with as an organization.  These are the issues that our Organization of American States, we have to deal with.  There are international organizations, which are completely pluralist.  The United Nations is one of them, and you do not have to, you only have to be a state to be in the United Nations.  There are others, which have to have large economic, not only political, but also economic, affinities. 

The European Union is one of those organizations.  You not only have to be democratic, you also have to stand in favor of some rules to govern not only the country but your economy.  I mean more than half of the laws of the European Union, you may like them or not, that is not the question, how to do it with economic issues, with the competition, with the rules applying to foreign investment with freedom of investment, with flow of goods, et cetera, et cetera. 

The Organization of American States is something in between.  It does not have, for example, a set of economic rules for the countries have to follow.  There is nothing in the charter that says that the ownership of the state is good or is bad.  So it is enough even when the Washington Consensus was very much in vogue in Latin America, nobody ever tried to set is as some kind of a rule of government for the Organization of American States.  So we have a lot of pluralism in matters of economic and public policy but you also have some very clear rules, some basic rules in terms of membership by democratic governments, defined as the taxonomy of the Inter-America, the charter of Inter-America and democratic charter, the fact. 

We have to work basically for an opportunity to have good elections and to have transparency, human rights, separation of powers, et cetera, et cetera.  Up to, I would say, the big difference when I came to office in the organization is that the first, the stability matter was not solved.  We had too many governments that were trembling but there were too many differences in the issues dealing with liberal democracy.  All countries fairly abided by those issues. 

In the last twelve months, probably two new things have happened or three new things have happened.  One is that governments are much more stable, and the relations of the elections are taking place in a way, a normal way but on the other hand, we have the rights - and we must admit it – of several ideological contexts among countries that did not exist a year ago.  Does this mean that there is, as somebody said, as Roger said in his introduction, a lot of people say we have a shift to the left, strong movement are leading to the left?  I would argue against that, and I think that we agree on this.

There is only one country in which you can say that we really had last year a big change in government, and that is Bolivia.  We were challenged, of course, is not… I do not want to discuss or challenge here as president of the country which is a member of the organization, but he was elected seven years ago.  He is the oldest, the longest-running president in the Organization of American States. 

The other one, of course, is longer but he is not in the organization, and he is in a class by himself because he is going to be forty-seven years this year.  Hugo Chavez will only be seven years in government, but he is no news.  Maybe he is news from the point of view that is due to a lot of known economic developments.  He is much more powerful today.  Maybe he has changed in some the ways in which he proclaims his policies after all the officials from Peru and Colombia to negotiate free trade agreements with the United States taking more than two years ago. 

Now Chavez objects to them, before he did not.  So we have not had a shift to the left from the electoral point of view and to talk about that we would have to see what happens in the next elections.  Certainly if some results occurred concur all together, you can say that and certainly sometimes somebody would even say that there is more at the end of all these elections has more continuity or even a shift to the right sometimes.  But what has happened is that countries that the governments that existed and that had policies before that are tempting to collide in political terms.  And those collisions have to do with running also, with some issues in some political issues, with intervention, with open discussion of the elections of each country, and they are to do also with the political alliances, with their economic alliances, excuse me. 

I think the biggest, the ones that have lost more in this first phase of events are the political and economic alliances of South America because the Mercosur and the Andean pact that are in very good shape today.  Everybody has to admit that.  They are not functioning as they should function.  If Bolivia and then the Andean pact at this moment is [indiscernible] politically dependent on Bolivia’s will to stay in the pact. 

So we do have a lot of ground to cover in terms of this ideological matter which is threatening, and which can, I will say, has not spilled too much yet but could certainly spill into the area of democratic governance, having to do with the basic rules of democracy.  I hope that the ministers of foreign affairs meeting in Santo Domingo next week will address, probably not in the public debate but in the private debate, these issues. 

The countries of Latin America are not that much in a political crisis today.  Elections are running well but countries are more divided by themselves, among themselves.  They are more separate.  We had the other day an assembly, I mean a meeting of our permanent council, the first issue was Argentina and Uruguay, the second item was Peru and Venezuela, and we could have certainly have chosen a couple of more items, more or less the same, Costa Rica and Nicaragua, and Bolivia and Brazil.  We were having problems of a new nature among themselves at that time.  I think this is a concern. 

My forecast for the rest of the year is probably how we will have some very contested elections, but we may have a couple of elections which we will have to all watch very closely, in Nicaragua for example is one of them.  But democracy in general will hold.  We will end the year with democratic elections, but I cannot be completely sure that in the other two basic features of democracy, especially one has to do with the democratic governance, we still do not get to have a lot of discussions first.  For all we think about the possibilities of disagreeing or re-discussing some of the problems that countries are having among them that are giving this image of a more fragmented hemisphere that we had one year ago.  [Indiscernible] introduction certainly throw in the questions so I can clarify more some of the ideas. 

Thank you very much.

Roger F. Noriega:  I’m going to share the microphone for a moment but let me ask you a question, a quick question first.  We see Nicaragua was complaining about Venezuela’s meddling in elections, Peru complaining about the interference in the elections there, the dispute between Bolivia and Brazil where you, quite frankly, see the Bolivians following Chavez’s advice, and I think that the Brazilians would probably hold him at least partly accountable for the influence that he is exercising, and I know sort of a new imperial force in the Americas and it is not us and I feel kind of nostalgic for that.

Jose Miguel Insulza:  Brazil [Inaudible]

Roger F. Noriega:  Yes, which is interesting in and of itself.  The OAS really was constrained to operate from the mid-60s until the end of the Cold War because so much of the Americas, I would say a couple of important countries and region, were sort of goalies to keep and make sure that the OAS was not, that the United States could not score, and so the OAS became sort of an organization that did not really execute or take initiative, and there was legitimate reason for that.  Until the end of the Cold War, we did not have the same sort of ideological divide, say, you actually saw the organization renovated because people were less legitimately elected democratic governments that were not worried about the OAS looking over their shoulders, second-guessing them.  So you gradually saw the organization move again. 

When you see Venezuela’s influence in the region using the petrodollars - this will be the Caribbean and other states in the Americas that are constrained really, take a line that is radically different than Venezuela’s - do you have any concern that the organization’s gears might sort of locked up again where it will not be able to function?

José Miguel Insulza:  Well, just for the sake of clarity, I would like to separate between two matters.  One is the what we would call… by the way, when the Nicaragua presented the forum that you just mentioned in a very dramatic way in the council of the OAS, the permanent council, the ambassador started by making [indiscernible] this difference.  And he read a lot of things that different people in the government in different countries of Latin America had said about Nicaragua and, of course, the most hard was President Chavez’s words but all of us had said things about Nicaragua, I mean some presidents have said that it would be a very bad thing if Mr. Ortega won the election. 

Another one had said that it would be a good thing if Mr. Ortega had won the election.  So what the ambassador had said, “I am not that concerned about this kind of meddling.”  I, frankly, I tend to agree with him because if you see that kind of meddling, it does not really do any good to the one with the practice it, and if taking issue with President Toledo had been a good thing, President Toledo would not have more than doubled his popularity in the recent polls in Peru.  President Toledo had never been in a more positive position in the polls of certain ideas than as he was after this discussion.  And, of course, a lot of people say that other candidates that have been supported are not doing any better because they had been supported from one side, and there is a lot of begging to everybody not to get involved because they are going to damage my possibilities on every side. 

The third issue is with the… what you called probably [indiscernible] would they consider intervention?  By the way, we can say that it is already intervention to say, “If you vote for this gentleman, I will cut my relations.”  I will go further than that, for I still do not think that it is really damaging in terms of the political process in the country. 

The concern that the Nicaraguans were putting forward was this pretense up to now, the pretense that has not happened yet, all of the Venezuelan government to send oil only to the municipalities that belong to one party in Nicaragua.  That was probably more difficult, and this has already happened in El Salvador, which is the only country.  And the concern about the relationships that may exist between Mr. Morales and Mr. Chavez, et cetera, whether they had something to do with the decisions that the Bolivian government took in terms of its gas, a little bit on the nationalization of gas reserves in Bolivia. 

I think that there are two issues there also.  Again, I think that one is the objective problem of the structure of prices in its energy relations between Bolivia and their neighbors.  But the real issue is, I think, that that have to be negotiated anyway sooner or later.  The real issue is how that had happened.  I think that program was… I mean it was directed by somebody who was not the Bolivian president.  This program, I think, was done by the Bolivian president, of course, but it would be more of a program, it is some kind of a guidance that took place. 

Now when talking about these things, I have a feeling that we tend - not only here in this country, everywhere - to go to extremes.  One is to say, “Yes, this is going on.  Let’s punish them.  Let’s do this, that, et cetera,” and we use some kind of escalation that will lead this government to remain completely isolated.”  And the other one is to say, “I do not know.  Energy is a big problem.  They have a lot of internal affairs that run in the country.  Let’s do nothing.  Let’s try to talk to them.”  Of course, there are intermediate positions.  And that it is only the Brazilian, and the Brazilian will say, “No, no, I do not like what you are doing so I will not go along with you.” 

We are having a lot of discussions today in there, in the permanent council of the OAS, because of some resolutions and some proposals that the Venezuelan government has presented are rejected by all the other countries, which is probably an easy way than finding fault of going along or, on the other side, finding ways of turning these discrepancies into some big issue.  I think that some problems exist, but I think that we have to be cautious.  We have to be careful; we have to try to think… I mean to say that to make sure that things do not escalate the young that probably are willing to have, that everybody feels comfortable in the organization, and at the same time they try to show that they have a clearer position in relation to this. 

I mean, the problem that occurs today, to be frank, is the country that is affected at a certain moment says something, all the rest then to keep quiet.  Everybody has his own bilateral relations.  “You do not do this, I will not do that.”  And to all the countries begin at a certain point, where all the policy, I will reuse the word, and I’ll have problem not to use it, but I will try to use it in a positive way, not in a strategic, in a military strategic way, just in a political way to recover some notion of containment of denying some objectives, we could do better. 

We will do more transparently.  I hope that we can discuss as much at the general assembly.  In the contrary of not doing anything is not intervening, and the contrary of intervening is not doing anything, it is doing nothing.  There are a lot of ways in between these things can be handled, and I do hope that they use them, that the rules of the organization analyses that we can decide and use it in that direction.

Roger F. Noriega:  I will just ask that you identify yourselves and give your names and organization as you ask questions, and Megan will pass you the microphone.

Mark Schneider:  Mark Schneider, International Crisis Group.  Mr. Secretary General, Roger.  In your discussion, you talked about one concern, which was the ideological division that perhaps was appearing over the course of the past year might spill over and affect the core of democratic institutions, which you described to some degree as the second to those three areas in which the democratic charter lays out the responsibilities of the governments within the region. 

I’m curious whether in looking at that, whether you have thought about aspects of the organization’s mandate, capacity, and resources, where you think something more needs to be available to you, Secretary General, and to the organization as an institution particularly in terms of action early to try and prevent that from occurring.  Or when it does occur, whether it is — let’s take something like in a country which has been elected with the majority government - they absolutely wipe out separation of powers, checks and balances.  Are there thoughts that you have had about additional capacity, mandate, resources for the organization that would be needed?

Jose Miguel Insulza:  I have been thinking a lot about that, and one big problem we do have, and we have to go in some line, is that this is probably an Organization of American States in all its levels, except in the Commission on Human Rights.  The Commission on Human Rights is the only place where you or anybody can go and complain, or somebody come and complain.  All the other structures and organizations can only be activated by governments. 

So we have a big contradiction that the democratic charter of the Americas did not solve.  I mean, if the gentleman in power dissolves Congress, who is going to complain?  Another government will have to, another government can do, I mean, the government next door because it looks these guys are not abiding by democratic principles, but as you know we had that problem with Ecuador. 

Ecuador, the president of Ecuador decided to eliminate the Supreme Court, and he managed to get in not a very clear way enough votes in Congress for that.  That was in flagrant contradiction of the Inter-American Democratic Charter.  I hate to say this because I had a good relation and a good opinion on Mr. Lucio Gutierrez, who was at that time the president of Ecuador, but he was certainly in violation of the provisions of the Inter-American Democratic Charter, when he not only violated the separation of powers, he just dissolved one of the three institutional powers. 

But who was going to complain?  Who was going to say anything?  I mean the Congress was not going to come and even if they came, I would refer to the [indiscernible] afterward.  And certainly the president of Ecuador was not going to call and say, “Look, I have been… whether you examine this matter in the Permanent Council,” so they did nothing about Ecuador. 

We did something about Nicaragua, but there was something really interesting about Nicaragua.  Two weeks before, I mean, two days after I took office, the day after I took office in the OAS, I received a letter from the Nicaraguan Congress saying, “We want to meet with you,” and I asked around what will we do, and I said participation [??] if the government does not approve, it would not be a good idea for you to have a meeting with the Nicaraguan Congress here in Washington. 

So when we had a big crisis and Nicaragua was falling, I went to Nicaragua and who do I meet first?  Well, the Nicaraguan Congress, of course.  But at that moment they were deciding to throw the government.  So yes, I would like to have more, I do not know how to say this in English.  In Spanish we call them ventanillas.  I mean when you go to those places in the bank when you cash your checks.  Windows, what windows in which people can come in and some are better.  Of course, we are implementing early warning systems and all that.  But these are not early warnings in the sense that you will [indiscernible] of something that is surprising.  These are early acting systems, where you are going to have to wait until that one who feels that he is being mistreated by the government takes some extreme measures.  That is one thing, and one thing that I would certainly evoke to have. 

And then among countries there are also some - it is here, the problem is that there is a kind of an unwritten law.  It is not in the charter that says that the OAS should never intervene in bilateral problem, and that is probably right.  And it was right when it was started because even today’s treaties on multilateralism always say that you should have multilateral institutions, should never get involved in border problems even if the two states involved do not ask them to intervene.  Border matters, territorial or anything is not something should be touched by multilateral institutions.  That is why it started that way because at the moment in which that consensus was reached, there were mainly territorial disputes. 

Now we have a lot of problems between the countries, and I think that the international organizations should do something about - so some way of conciliation, some way of facilitation.  I’m not talking intervention.  I’m not even talking arbitration.  Some way of participation in the problems that arise from time to time between states would be a good possibility.  I have been this year in situations in which some shuttling could have really solved problems that were not solved.  I promise to answer briefly the next question.

Roger F. Noriega:  I do not want to answer briefly.

Gustavo Coronel:  Gustavo Coronel, I am a Venezuelan, and I am very interested in the Venezuelan domestic situation as opposed to the intervention aspect of the Chavez’s government.  I realized that the limitation that exists for the OAS to act because it is an organization of states rather than an organization of people.  And I understand also that the Nicaraguan government can complain against Chavez’s intervention in Nicaragua and Peru can also complain, and so on, but if the Venezuelan people are being victimized by the political domestic situation, how can they complain? 

You have said, of course, that the OAS has this limitation, but is there not a provision within OAS that the secretary general could initiate an action against the government that does not comply with the Inter-American Charter?  You have defined the democracy as much more than elections, and I fully agree with that.  I think the violations to the legitimacy by performance of the government of Venezuela can be so well-documented but there should be a way to bring this to the attention of the OAS.

Jose Miguel Insulza:  Well let me, just to clarify, I have a possibility of sending fact-finding missions to countries [indiscernible] but to really send the delegation over the council, somebody would have to ask me for a very clear procedure and nobody has ever asked for that.  Some other government will ask for that. 

Now I think that the situation of - I am not going to argue that the situation in Venezuela is one that really is [indiscernible] from a democratic point of view but there is… let me put this way because I usually get from Venezuelan friends a call saying, “When you had a dictatorship in Chile, all the democratic world was helping out a lot, et cetera, et cetera.”  First, I do not think that the situation is exactly the same.  We had very little freedom of the press, less than now.  We had, of course, [indiscernible] to oppress us.  They have been denounced now but basically all the press was in favor of the government, all the television channels were in favor of the government, et cetera.  And we really did get a lot of help from abroad to be able to present our positions in the elections that were certainly lopsided from the point of view of the guarantee somebody had, but thanks to a lot of help from abroad, we managed. 

But let me say two things:  First, if Mr. Pinochet has had more votes than we, he would have won.  That you then you would have one, and that you cannot fix from abroad.  The first problem in… what many people doubt about in Venezuela is does the opposition have a majority?  Is the majority of the Venezuelan people against… I’m not saying neutral, not saying neutral, against. 

And second, how many candidates can you handle at one time?  Well, we have seen a very fragmented and divided opposition.  And even those who - I think in this part I’m not talking as a secretary general, just as a political observer - if I had to give an advice I would say, “Why would you look at those two [indiscernible]?”  Very few countries are going to be willing to throw themselves into the fray for the Venezuelan opposition as long as they believe that the government has them. 

In spite of all these problems [indiscernible] and all that as a majority, that the majority is going to vote for Mr. Chavez, or that the opposition is going to be divided among the three or four different candidates making it clear and making it even more or even easier.  I’m not saying it is an easy task because after all, Venezuela grew 17 percent last year, and you can say anything about the government, but when you grow 17 percent, some of it spills over. 

Transition is not an easy task.  The Venezuelan government in this moment is much stronger from an economic point of view, but what I’m trying to say is that, you can get a lot of help from international organizations and from democratic movements, but first, there is the test of the majority that has to be completely won inside one’s country.  And by the way, complaints have been passed to the Commission on Human Rights, several of them.  All of them had been examined.  And the Commission on Human Rights and the Rapporteur for Freedom of Expression has taken them into consideration.  None of them [indiscernible] not considered neglected. 

The Venezuelan government, as I supposedly [indiscernible] to some of them and they have not answered possibly to some others and they are recently being criticized again for that by the Commission on Human Rights, and we will probably be discussing that matter in the assembly.

Ruben Barrera:  Thank you.  Ruben Barrera with Notimex, the Mexican news agency.  Mr. Secretary, during the presentation, you mentioned the fact that during the last year we have seen across Latin America an increased number of government who did not finished their constitutional mandate, not because of ideological internal crisis but because they were unable to respond or to fulfill the expectation of their people.  And also you mentioned that one other thing that you expect in Santo Domingo is that the foreign ministers talk about these increasing antagonisms among some countries in the regions.  Also, you dismiss the notion that in some way these antagonisms, these confrontations may be the result of some emerges of the left in the region. 

And the question is basically, I mean, having seen this increasing antagonism between countries for whatever reason, “What is the reason why, what do you feel behind these increasing antagonisms that we did not see before?  Maybe we have a more clear, deep ideological difference between these two countries, and you say that you expect that the foreign minister will discuss this. 

The other question is are you going to ask them to sit and discuss this matter?

Jose Miguel Insulza:  Well, let me make a couple of distinctions here.  In many cases, I would.  I mean, I think we have to make a very subtle distinction between discrepancies and antagonisms.  I mean, some countries may want a Free Trade Agreement of the Americas and others may not want a Free Trade Agreement of the Americas, and that is completely legitimate under the rules of the OAS.  Even though we decided in the organization, in the summit of the Americas, to negotiate that one, that is a voluntary matter.  You can participate with that negotiation.  You can decide not to do it. 

In the summit of Buenos Aires, the big division was that some countries said, “Let’s begin negotiations right now again.”  By the way, they have been stalled for two years, at that moment they were paralyzed for two years.  Another country said, “No, this is not the moment.  We think that the conditions are not there.  We want to wait for some other things.”  That may be the difference of opinions.  It was certainly not antagonistic.  I mean that kind of issues can get antagonistic when you say, “Look if you are going to get into this negotiation of foreign trade, then do not talk to me again.  I mean, I’m not… we are no good to be friends.”  That can be the rising to antagonism.

My concern is not a country leaving the pact.  There is a reason why it leaves it.  I mean one of their reasons was, “I do not want to negotiate a free trade agreement, and since the pact is going to negotiate a free trade agreement as a pact, I will leave.”  That is perfectly legitimate.  Another thing is a criticism of President Toledo, for example, “For the mere fact of negotiating something that the president of Chile, or president of Mexico, and all the presidents of Latin America or Central America, I will resign.” 

And so we have to be… and I want to be very careful.  I think that these matters are to be addressed.  They are difficult to address in speeches and in debate and the assembly, but I think we have to recognize that some degree of fragmentation is taking place when those things happen, and also that is all there is to it.  I must again stress that this is not an issue of - I mean the organization should take a role in those issues when they affect the basic elements of democratic rule, which are not necessarily affected because some countries take one choice and another one in economic terms.  But they can be, they can affect the organization.  These are proper forums and not respected in the way which the countries address each other. 

Yes, sorry.

Roger F. Noriega:  A followup on what you said about the basic elements of democratic rule, which is one area in which the OAS has particular flexibility.  Venezuela is holding its presidential election in six months.

Jose Miguel Insulza:  In December, yes, beginning of December.

Roger F. Noriega:  And well, as you mentioned before the importance of separation of powers, a lot has been said about the erosion of the separation of powers in Venezuela.  Are you doing some thinking about what kind of monitoring the OAS should carry out in Venezuela?  Before you talked about the importance of not showing up just on Election Day but before Election Day, presumably to monitor registrations and so forth, and what you envision for the OAS with respect to the December elections in Venezuela?

Jose Miguel Insulza:  Well, that depends on… first, that depends on being invited.  We have not been invited to observe any elections in Venezuela, and we do not go if we do not have a formal invitation.  Those are the rules.  Sometimes they are being discussed.  There have been talks about something you would call an open automatic invitation but that does not exist.  So the rules that [indiscernible], which is not only the OAS, but all the international organizations that do electoral observation to follow, is that we have to be invited. 

First, we have not been invited.  Second, if we were invited, we will follow the same pattern of the past election.  We negotiated a lot of guarantees with the government, with every government.  The government of Venezuela accepted the terms and is willing to make an observation.  They give us, under European Union, the same possibilities, which I must say they respected completely, and we do not have any kind of problem in [indiscernible] elections.  And we would go if we were invited on those same rules they followed. 

Now, we never go the day before.  We usually send the mission before because there are a lot of discussions on what the conditions are going to be.  Actually, we did negotiate for the election in Venezuela last year.  We negotiated and negotiated again and negotiated again until finally the opposition said that if the famous print machines, fingerprint machines, were eliminated, they will participate.  And so we went to the Venezuelan government and said, “Why did you disconnect the machines and let’s forget about it.”  They agreed we are now very proud that an agreement had been reached and two hours later the opposition decided to withdraw. 

I’m not questioning the [indiscernible] they withdraw, I mean maybe they have their own reasons, I do not know.  What I’m saying is that we did practically everything we could to get into a point in which we said, “Is this the last condition and if this condition is fulfilled, you will participate?”  And the answer was, “Yes.”  And well, of course, we are willing to do, go all over the process again.  We are very, I mean according to Venezuelan law, they tell me that not participating in election season is a right of the people.  In other countries, in my country for example, I think in Brazil also, it is an obligation to vote.  In Venezuela, it is not. 

But as an organization we prefer people voting.  We would do everything that we can to make sure that all people can vote in Venezuela at the end of the year.  That would be our main participation.  We will control the vote, of course, but I must say something because I think that some things sometimes are not well understood.  Their position is asking for a manual count.  That is legitimate.  They can ask for a manual count.  I do not know if they are going to give them a manual count or not.  But we did a sample manual count in the last election and the result was completely normal.  That has not been very published. 

So several guarantees were being given.  I do not think it was really… well, some people say yes, because they knew I will go to participate, and there was a guy who knew what he was doing, but I must admit that we did not have such an unsatisfactory experience unless such has been presented by some.  I forgot to say that we have, in relation to your question, that we have differences… when you have a globalized world and the degree of communications that you have to take, I mean that when people are confronted with each other closely everyday by the media, and when poverty and capacity to resolve people’s problems become a much larger issue than they were before. 

I’m not saying that the governments failed because they were incompetent or sometimes they just could not solve the problems of the people because they just could not.  And we view those as they would have been men’s task that the next Haitian government has, for example.  And you wonder, I think we need to be able to carry out the programs in a way that people will feel that some of the benefits of these elections are coming to them. 

It is not just a problem therefore of incompetence.  Sometimes it is that… even though I do think and I must say very strongly, I feel that everybody is entitled to democracy.  And governing democratically is sometimes more difficult in poor countries in which there are so many poor people that after all, probably as I try to say always that the largest problem in Latin America today, the bottom problem in Latin America today is that about 100 million people are going to bed hungry tonight.  And as we do not change that, we did not do something to change that.  Certainly the government [indiscernible] always be as stable and the possibilities of new options, new alternatives, will always appear.  We have only assessed [indiscernible] for that. 

Thank you very much.

Male Voice:  Mr. Secretary, I have a big-picture question for you.  The Economist had an editorial last week fighting for the Latin American soul and they may be arguing that populism is growing in the region, and this will ultimately have consequences for democratic institutions and values.  My question is, do you see the rise of populism?  Do you see the phenomenon growing and do you see that it is something that will ultimately have consequences for democracy in the region?

Jose Miguel Insulza:  …you can define populism in two words.  One is promising political things that you cannot give, and another one is distributing the goods without solely defining the economy so that they will pay for the consequences ten years later. 

The first thing I do not mind, I mean anybody who gets into power, promising things that they will not be able to give will probably be thrown out in the next election.  The problem is that some countries may abandon some basic rules, basic rules of economic health, start distributing [indiscernible] before they have enough bases to do it.  That is not happening in Latin America today.  I do not see in any country and… probably will say a reckless economic policy that is giving out the goods of the nation and not keeping anything for the future, on the contrary will say that even so-called populist new government regimes have been very prudent in changing economic policies.

And I’m not being [indiscernible] by making too many changes, so I’m not really that concerned at this time, and I think that The Economist takes a - by the way, the most usual line in this data, there are like two lefts, the fight for the soul of Latin America happening between two lefts.  There are several central, center-right governments in Latin America, yet.  I mean, I do not know if some of them are going to be re-elected, so I do not tend to share that much there with the piece but certainly there is an ideological discussion today.  It is based on important differences.  I think they are valid differences.  They are [indiscernible] differences.  And my problem is that they do not become divisions and conflicts among countries.

Roger F. Noriega:  Mr. Secretary General, for your presentation, I think it is remarkable you came to this gathering and did not get single question about Cuba.  And so maybe that is a good thing, and I have a question about Cuba but I’m not going to ask it. 

Thank you very much for coming, ladies and gentlemen.  And note that right now, AEI is preparing a document on Venezuela that will be sort of an empirical discussion of the essential elements of democracy and what is being done in each of those areas.  So look for that, not on newsstands but in here, right?  Because I cannot… nobody will pay for it but look for that on the Internet.  Thank you very much.

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