Prosponed: The Battle for the U.N. Latin American Seat

The U.N. General Assembly has suspended voting over an open Latin American seat in the U.N. Security Council for a week to do other work and allow time to break a deadlock between the two countries bidding for the spot, Guatemala and Venezuela.

Guatemala has led Venezuela in 34 of 35 of the votes held since the start of Monday, but can't muster the necessary two-thirds majority in the 192-nation General Assembly to win the seat. Yet Venezuela refuses to withdraw, saying that to do so would be to cede victory to the United States, which has campaigned against it.

The Latin American and Caribbean Group is too divided to pick one of the many compromise candidates that have been suggested, including Costa Rica, Panama, the Dominican Republic, Uruguay, Mexico, Brazil and Chile.

"I think right now it's obvious we're at a stalemate," Guatemala's Foreign Minister Gert Rosenthal said. "Nothing has happened. The situation today is virtually the same as the first day of voting, meaning that very few countries are willing to move from one candidate to the other."

With the 36th round of voting next week, the selection process will beat the record for the third-highest number of rounds of voting held to fill a council seat. In 1956, Yugoslavia beat the Philippines in the 35th round.

The record number is 155 rounds of voting, set in 1980. The General Assembly gave up on Cuba and Colombia after 154 rounds, and chose Mexico on the 155th, in early January of that year.
The second highest number of votes was 52, set in 1960. After that, the General Assembly agreed to allow Poland and Turkey to serve on the council for one year each.

The United States has repeatedly argued that Venezuela should stop pushing its bid since it has no hope of getting the two-thirds majority. The one vote that Guatemala failed to win was the sixth round, when it tied Venezuela with 93 votes each.

The Security Council has five permanent members — Britain, China, France, Russia and the U.S. The other 10 seats, filled for two-year terms, are portioned out to the five United Nations regional groups.
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Hugo Chávez has spent most of this year campaigning for the job, traveling the world and promising tens of millions of dollars in aid to poor countries in Asia and Africa whose votes he's counting on. His ambition is a big one: to become the leader of global opposition to the United States, or, as he puts it, to "radically oppose the violent pressure that the empire exercises."

It is unlikely that Venezuela or Guatemala will win the seat, most people expect a third candidate - such as Uruguay or the Dominican Republic will end up getting the job.

It might be embarrassing for Chavez not to get the post but he will get satisfaction that it will be a greater embarrassment for the United States who are unable to get a grip on the Latin American sector even from close allies.

The heavy-handed lobbying of Guatemala has prompted its foreign minister to say that he wished Washington "would not promote our cause so much."

What is the special relationship between the US and Guatemala?
Guatemalan history is marked by the Cold War between the U.S. and the USSR. The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), with a small group of Guatemalans, overthrew the freely-elected Guatemalan government of Jacobo Arbenz in 1954 after the government expropriated unused land owned by the United Fruit Company, a U.S.-based banana merchant.

The subsequent military rule, beginning with dictator Carlos Castillo Armas, led to over 30 years of civil war that, from 1960, led to the death of an estimated 200,000 Guatemalan civilians. According to the U.N.-sponsored Truth Commission, government forces and paramilitaries were responsible for over 90% of the human rights violations during the war.

During the first 10 years, the victims of the state-sponsored terror were primarily students, workers, professionals, and opposition figures of all political tendencies, but in the last years, they were thousands of mostly rural Mayan farmers and non-combatants.

From the 1950s to the 1990s (with a suspension of military aid between 1977 and 1982), the US government directly supported Guatemala's army with training, weapons and money.

In 1999, then US president Bill Clinton stated that the United States was wrong to have provided support to Guatemalan military forces that took part in the brutal civilian killings.

It was only until 1996 that Guatemala became a democratic state (helped by freedom fighters opposed to the Governments); however, corruption is still rampant at all levels of government.

It was revealed that 45% of all Guatemalan exports are to the United States and the friendship so great that the United States last Monday forgive about 20 percent of the US$122 million debt owed by Guatemala so the money can be used to protect threatened plants and wildlife - lets hope the money is used wisely.