Venezuelan crisis vexes OAS leaders

CANCUN, Mexico — Foreign ministers from throughout the Americas failed yet again Wednesday at reaching an agreement on mediating Venezuela’s intractable political crisis.

The United States strongly pushed the idea of creating a “group of friends” like the one that mediated in the Central American civil wars of the 1980s. The U.S. viewed that as the least the OAS could do after a stronger resolution on Venezuela failed to pass on Monday.

But Luis Alfonso de Alba, Mexico’s representative to the OAS, said the mediation proposal wasn’t included in any of the resolutions to be voted on in a closing session Wednesday.

“The resolution on human rights has been finished, and it isn’t in there,” De Alba said.

A small group of Venezuelan opposition activists briefly interrupted the session late Wednesday, chanting “asesinos” or “murderers.”

Later, just before the close of the final session, Venezuelan Foreign Minister Delcy Rodriguez referred to the protesters as “fanatics” and complained of U.S. attempts to interfere in the country.

Then she told the assembled diplomats that she would be stepping aside as minister to be a candidate for the special assembly rewriting Venezuela’s constitution, a move President Nicolas Maduro announced earlier this month.

Diplomats at the General Assembly of the Organization of American States meeting in Cancun had said the U.S. and its allies probably didn’t have the two-thirds of votes needed to put the human rights resolution on the agenda again.

Still, some nations pledged to push on with efforts to do something about the increasingly bloody political strife in Venezuela has left at least 70 people dead and more than 1,300 injured, and the country’s economy is in tatters.