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Secretary of State Rice, Foreign Minister Maduro exchange accusations and insults at ATLAPA

OAS General Assembly turns into US-Venezuela fight ring

by Eric Jackson

When the Organization of American States holds a General Assembly in Panama City, it becomes a magnet for anybody with a cause to publicize. As diplomatic delegations gathered on the weekend of June 2 and 3, relatively small groups of protesters against the capture of wild dolphins in Panamanian waters and  allegedly inappropriate construction practices in Panama City marched by hotels where foreign officials and international reporters were staying. On June 4 as the sessions began, other little bands of protesters decrying the mass poisoning of public health care system patients, non-payment of an international court judgment awarding back pay to public workers illegally fired in 1990, mining projects and hydroelectric dams in the Ngobe-Bugle Comarca and the capitalist system in general took to the streets to demonstrate their causes to the world. There was a brief traffic blockage on the Transistmica, but there was no violence.

Then there were the capitalist protests, funded and organized by Panama's corporate mainstream media owners, against the Venezuelan government's decision not to renew the RCTV television network's broadcast license. A crowd of Panamanian journalists, media owners and managers and opposition politicians, a delegation of RCTV employees flown in from Caracas and members of Panama City's mainly anti-Chávez Venezuelan community --- about 200 people in all --- gathered outside the ATLAPA convention center. There were also ads denouncing the license non-renewal in all the mainstream media.

The theme of this gathering was "Energy for Sustainable Development" and inside the hall as the foreign ministers made their statements on the afternoon of June 4 there was general agreement that "addiction" to petroleum is a bad thing, along with some sharp words about a few locally controversial energy matters. Ecuador's Foreign Minister María Fernanda Espinoza, for example, defended her government's decisions to abrogate oil drilling contracts in national parks and indigenous areas where the people don't want oil wells. Venezuelan Foreign Minister Nicolas Maduro said that his country had been "a dependent oil colony" but has now "rescued sovereignty over the use of our country's oil." Colombian Foreign Minister Fernando Araujo Perdomo hailed his country's efforts to link its electrical grids with those of Panama, Venezuela and Ecuador and a gas pipeline project that would eventually link Venezuela, Colombia and Panama.

However, what the world was waiting to hear, and paid the most attention to when it was not disappointed, was a war of words between the leaders of the US and Venezuelan delegations, Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice and Foreign Minister Nicolas Maduro respectively.

Before and after these ministers' main presentations some of their colleagues made veiled references to the RCTV issue upon which the Americans and Venezuelans were to clash. Canada's Peter MacKay, for example, advocated for "core values" which he said include "freedom of expression."

Rice talked about energy at the start of her presentation, but then urged that governments in the Americas must "deliver on the revolution in expectations" and the OAS should "take action to ensure the long-term development of democracy."

"Freedom of speech, freedom of association and freedom of conscience are not a thorn in the side of government," Rice argued. "Disagreeing with your government is not unpatriotic and most certainly should not be a crime." She made specific reference to RCTV and called upon OAS Secretary General José Miguel Insulza to go to Venezuela and investigate the case. "We... must defend freedom where it is under seige," she concluded.

Rice got a lot of applause from those in the room.

A few speeches later it was Maduro's turn, and he began with a cold stare at Rice and a complaint that she had strayed from the meeting's agenda. After his presentation on energy, in which he claimed that "the Americans looted our country" and dominated its oil industry, he lauded President Hugo Chávez's independent energy policy and his efforts through PetroCaribe to ensure the energy supplies of Caribbean countries.

Turning to Rice's remarks, Maduro accused the United States of an "unacceptable intervention" in Venezuela's affairs and defended the decision not to renew RCTV's 20-year lease on its broadcast channels as a "democratic, legal and fair decision... to create a new television station [and] to break a monopoly." He demanded respect for Venezuela's sovereignty.

Maduro continued by calling on the OAS to investigate torture at the US prison camp in Guantanamo, blasted the United States for alleged human rights violations on the US-Mexican border and rhetorically asked "How many Panamanians were murdered in the the barrio of El Chorrillo?" in the 1989 US invasion. He denounced US involvement in the 2002 coup attempt against President Chávez.

Maduro's speech also received applause, although a little less than Rice's.

At the end of the plenary Rice and Maduro were each given a couple of minutes to rebut one another's charges.

About the Venezuelan complaint about her straying from the Agenda, Rice said that "issues of democracy and the defense of democracy are never inappropriate on an agenda of the Organization of American States."

"As to issues in the United States of human rights, of how we fight the war on terror, of the detention of unlawful combatants at Guantanamo, on immigration policy, on any issue," Rice continued, "I am quite certain that it would be difficult for any commission to debate more fully, to investigate more fully, to criticize more fully the policies of the United States government than is done every night on CNN, on ABC, on CBS, on NBC and on any number of smaller channels in the United States. That is the point of press freedom, that in a democracy the citizens of a country should have the assurance that the policies of their government will be held up for criticism by a free and independent press."

Maduro responded that what goes on in Guantanamo and the CIA's secret prisons is "comparable only to the Hitler era, when there were clandestine jails with prisoners who didn't have names --- it's monstrous." He challenged the US government, if it is so respectful of press freedom, to let reporters from Venezuela's new state-owned TVes television station go into the Guantanamo prison camp and interview prisoners there.

Rice, however, was not in the room to listen. She led a walkout of the US delegation during Maduro's rebuttal.

Arrests devastate Panama's Servicio Maritimo Nacional coast guard
Luciani, Jované and Villalaz charged in poisoned medicines case

OAS meeting gathers an audience for many causes

Pro Ciudad takes its first steps
Small dolphin demo for the international media

Reports from Venezuela on RCTV, TVes and all the commotion
Panama News Briefs