Thursday, October 26, 2006

No end to the deadlock

At 41 unresolved ballots, the Guatemala-Venezuela Security Council tussle is already the third most protracted in the U.N.'s 61-year history. (The previous record is 155 rounds, set in 1980: the General Assembly had given up on Cuba and Colombia after 154, and chose Mexico on the 155th.)

Fuel-injected Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez now believes he can kind of have his way by nominating Bolivia as a compromise candidate; in effect setting up his buddy Evo Morales as his UN proxy. Comrade Evo might not be able to shake Noam Chomsky's oeuvre at the council quite so convincingly, but his government would surely deliver all the necessary leftist-populist rhetoric.

Guatemala isn't yet ready to give up the fight. "It would be unfair if someone else would capitalize without effort on the huge amount of work we've put into this," Foreign Minister Gert Rosenthal observed plaintively yesterday.

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