Hugo Chávez's bag man

A federal jury in Miami yesterday convicted Venezuelan Franklin Duran of acting illegally on behalf of his government inside the U.S. If there were any lingering doubts about the danger that Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez presents to democracy in the Western Hemisphere, this verdict puts them to rest. Click here for full story

Victory in El Salvador

IT'S POSSIBLE to view the outcome of El Salvador's presidential election on Sunday as another lamentable victory for the Latin American leftist populism represented by Hugo Chávez. Mr. Chávez himself was quick to do so, and with some reason: His Venezuelan government has been a financial backer of the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front, the former guerrilla movement whose candidate, Mauricio Funes, won a narrow victory. But El Salvador's election was also a triumph for a system that Mr. Chávez has disregarded: liberal democracy. Seventeen years after the United Nations brokered a peace accord between the country's left and right -- and after four consecutive election victories by the rightist Nationalist Republican Alliance (ARENA) -- democracy produced an inevitable and necessary alternation of power Click here for full story

Report shows summits have a poor follow-up record

Ever wonder whether anything actually comes out of these presidential summits?

A new report by the Active Democracy Network says Latin American nations are slow at showing results and have suffered ''worrying setbacks'' when it comes to following up on summit mandates.

The group spent three years studying how 21 different countries in the region had complied with past summit declarations that deal with access to public information, freedom of expression, decentralization, and strength of civil society. They released a study Thursday on the eve of the Fifth Summit of the Americas titled ''The Summits must not end up empty promises'' that showed 57 percent of the countries had difficulties or setbacks in implementing mandates from past Summits.

Democracy is under siege

T he recent behavior of the Organization of American States regarding Honduras is worthy of a magical realist novel. According to one definition, magical realism is ``what happens when a highly detailed realistic setting is invaded by something too strange to believe.''

Among the things that are ``too strange to believe'' is the precipitous classification of events in Honduras as a traditional military coup, despite the fact that the military was asked to intervene by the Honduran Congress and Supreme Court after the incumbent president, Manuel Zelaya, decided to ignore Honduras' constitution, which forbids reelection, by organizing a ``poll'' to show that ``the people'' wanted him to run again.

This supposedly would then make it all right for Zelaya not only to ignore the constitution, but to change it. The OAS sent observers to oversee the ``poll,'' a strange decision given that it had never before observed a Latin American poll.

Congressional report could hurt OAS leader's reelection efforts

The head of the Organization of American States' campaign to win reelection took a hit Tuesday from a report complaining the OAS has failed to stop elected presidents from eroding democracy in the region.

``Given the challenges described in this report, no reelection should be rushed or rubber stamped,'' the U.S. Congressional staff report said. ``Any reelection should involve a deliberative evaluation of the incumbent's first term in office.''

OAS Secretary General José Miguel Insulza, a Chilean socialist whose five-year-term ends in May, has said he wants to be relected, and so far is the only candidate. The 34-nation OAS was scheduled to vote Wednesday on holding the election in March, but the vote was postponed at the last minute.