March 21, 2014
Earlier this week, in a highly irregular move, Panama offered its seat at the regular meeting of the OAS Permanent Council today to Venezuelan opposition lawmaker María Corina Machado. Machado, along with Leopoldo López, are the leaders of the “La Salida” — “The Exit” — campaign, which calls for street protests to oust the current government.
At the beginning of the meeting, the OAS representative from Nicaragua called for a vote on whether the meeting should be public or private. After much debate, 22 countries voted to make the meeting private, while 11 countries voted in favor of it being public. It should be noted that this is far from the first time the OAS Permanent Council has held a meeting that was closed to the media. Many of the meetings that occurred after the Honduras coup, for example, were also closed to the media.
Many within the Venezuela opposition and the media were quick to cast the vote as a move to censor Machado and prevent her message from being heard. Others have presented the vote as a barometer of support for the Venezuelan government and opposition. Brazil, which voted to make the meeting private, has quite a different explanation:
The objective of this meeting is not to turn itself into a circus for an outside audience as some representatives have shown they want to do.
