Word: war
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...Privately, Obama Administration officials acknowledge that Washington's own influence inside the OAS has shrunk since the Cold War, despite the fact that the U.S. is still the group's No. 1 financial backer, and they concede that the OAS could vote this week to readmit Cuba without U.S. approval, though it would be rare for the organization not to forge a consensus on the matter first. (New Jersey's Cuban-American Senator Bob Menendez has threatened to cut off U.S. funding to the OAS if it lifts the suspension.) Still, "the OAS's historic journey to become a region...
...seem easy at first to argue that Cuba's 1962 suspension from the hemispheric multilateral organization, like the embargo, is a Cold War relic, one that might have been understandable during the Cuban missile crisis but makes little sense two decades after the fall of the Soviet Union. (It's also hypocritical, Cuba backers say, since brutal right-wing dictatorships like Augusto Pinochet's Chile were never suspended.) But that case is undermined by the OAS's 2001 Inter-American Democratic Charter - approved on 9/11 - which mandates that members adhere to democratic norms like multiparty elections and free speech...
...Chilean foreign minister nicknamed El Panzer for his tanklike drive, has actually strengthened the OAS's influence since being elected secretary-general in 2005 - the first winning candidate, in fact, who wasn't regarded as "Washington's man." Last year, for example, he played a key role in quieting war drums in the Andes when a crisis broke out among Colombia, Ecuador and Venezuela over leftist guerrillas and territorial sovereignty. But he also took heat last fall for what critics called an all too OAS-like soft response to credible charges of widespread, government-orchestrated vote fraud that erupted after...
...stability of squalor. Burnt cars and blown-out windows litter the outskirts of Tskhinvali, South Ossetia's largest town and self-styled capital. Kokoity's government received 10 billion rubles - $324 million at the current exchange rate - from Moscow to reverse the damage wrought by the five-day war. But residents have seen little evidence of any such spending. (See pictures of Russia's war with Georgia...
...Before the August war, many South Ossetians made ends meet by trading food with neighboring Georgia, but the economy survived largely due to Russia's assistance and the illegal trade of arms, drugs and counterfeit money. That trade has fallen off since the tension on Georgia's border with South Ossetia and now unemployment is soaring under the separatist region's red, white and yellow flag. Kokoity's extra-parliamentary opposition, such as Vyacheslav Gobozov of the Fatherland Party, accuses him of theft and corruption...