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Venezuela Denounces “Serious Altercation of Constitutional Order” at OAS

Venezuela blasted several right-wing governments' "usurpation" of the OAS Permanent Council Presidency to push through an interventionist resolution on Monday afternoon. 

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Venezuela’s Foreign Ministry issued an official statement this Monday evening, after at least fifteen countries pushed ahead with an extraordinary session at the Organization of American States to discuss Venezuela’s institutional standoff between the Supreme Court and the National Assembly. The session took place in spite of the fact that Bolivia, which recently assumed the Presidency of the Permanent Council, moved to cancel the meeting on Monday morning due to concerns that it had not been called in accordance with OAS norms. The extraordinary session began at 2pm without the presence of Bolivia, nor the Permanent Council’s Vice-President, Haiti. Several other member-states were also absent. 

Full statement:

The Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela responsibly denounces before the international community an unprecedented act aimed at the destruction of the Organization of American States, through which a group of governments in league with the Secretary General, have carried out a take-over of the Presidency of the Permanent Council to impose on the organization and the rest of its member-states their own illicit agenda, which subverts its norms and seriously transgresses the principles and aims consecrated in its Founding Charter.  

Insolently, a group of governments have opted to take matters into their own hands, and usurp the functions of the Presidency of the Permanent Council through legal sophistry, which is patently false at first glance, in their obsession to impose their illegal and deeply unfair plan to use Venezuela to organize the imposition of a new fascist hegemony once again, aimed at dominating the continent. 

We categorically denounce these actions as a flagrant aggression against the institutions of the organization and a dark regression to an interventionist past at the OAS. This sacred, sovereign, free and independent homeland, will never bow before the imperial powers and its lackeys*. 

Caracas, April 3, 2017

*Here the Foreign Ministry uses the word “sepoys,” referring to Indian soldiers serving under the British colonial administration.  

Translated by Rachael Boothroyd-Rojas for Venezuelanalysis.com.