Formation of international mediation group to resolve Venezuela’s political crisis stalls

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A picture dated June 21 shows a protester demanding liberation as dilomats struggle to form mediation groups to resolve the crisis in Venezuela. Photo: EPA

Published: 4:15am, 22 Jun 2017Updated: 6:09pm, 30 Aug 2017

Foreign ministers from throughout the Americas appeared to fail yet again on Wednesday at reaching an agreement on mediating in Venezuela’s intractable political crisis.

The United States strongly pushed the idea of creating a “group of friends” like the one that mediated in the Central American civil wars of the 1980s. The US viewed that as the least the Organisation of American States (OAS) could do after a stronger resolution on Venezuela failed to pass on Monday.

But Luis Alfonso de Alba, Mexico’s representative to the OAS, said the mediation proposal wasn’t included in any of the resolutions to be voted on in a closing session Wednesday.

“The resolution on human rights has been finished, and it isn’t in there,” De Alba said.

Diplomats at the General Assembly of the OAS meeting in Cancun said the US and its allies probably didn’t have the two-thirds of votes needed to put the issue on the agenda again.

The diplomats also declined to piggyback the mediation group proposal on a rights resolution that might win approval with a simple majority of the 35 members.

US Deputy Secretary of State John Sullivan (C) arrives to deliver a speech during the OAS 47th General Assembly in Cancun, Mexico, on June 20, 2017. Ministers from the Organisation of American States failed to agree on a resolution to address the crisis in Venezuela, as the death toll from weeks of clashes at anti-government protests rose to 74. Photo: AFP