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Guatemala’s former Vice President Eduardo Stein bids for top job at troubled OAS

This article discusses the Latin American Program's October 16th event on the OAS Leadership transition, which featured the Honorable Eduardo Stein Barillas.

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Speaking earlier this month at the Woodrow Wilson International Center – a Washington think tank – Stein didn’t pull any punches about the difficult road ahead.

“There are questions not only about what candidates for the post are proposing to face these formidable challenges, but also deeper questions about whether reform of the organization is still really possible and feasible – and if whoever gets elected will really be able to pull the organization out of this mess,” said Stein, who served as Guatemala’s foreign minister from 1996 to 2000, and vice president from 2004 to 2008.

“The OAS is in dire need of profound structural reform,” said the elder statesman. “There is a severe financial crisis in the organization. The original Cold War blueprint doesn’t cut it anymore.”

U.S. taxpayers finance about 60 percent of the struggling body’s $83 million annual budget. Canada, Mexico and Brazil account for another 38 percent, while the remaining 32 countries fund the remaining 2 percent.

But Stein added that “no new secretary-general can work miracles on his own. Without full political and financial support, reforms will never come to be, and whoever gets elected to the post will be drowned in fruitless efforts to salvage a languishing organization that – as one foreign minister put it, privately of course – will become as extinct as the dinosaurs.”

He also called for the elimination of OAS mandates that have long ago outlived their usefulness, noting that “there are 757 existing mandates in the organization without a proper budget to honor them. This will be a major institutional disaster if we don’t get our act together.”

Stein, who was introduced by Cynthia Arnson, director of the Wilson Center’s Latin American Program, is used to formidable challenges. In the late 1980s, he participated in the Esquipulas Accords aimed at bringing peace to Central America. He was also active in the San José Dialogue between Central America and the European Union, and played a critical role in the peace talks that brought an end to Guatemala’s civil war in 1996.

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Latin America Program

The Wilson Center’s prestigious Latin America Program provides non-partisan expertise to a broad community of decision makers in the United States and Latin America on critical policy issues facing the Hemisphere. The Program provides insightful and actionable research for policymakers, private sector leaders, journalists, and public intellectuals in the United States and Latin America. To bridge the gap between scholarship and policy action, it fosters new inquiry, sponsors high-level public and private meetings among multiple stakeholders, and explores policy options to improve outcomes for citizens throughout the Americas. Drawing on the Wilson Center’s strength as the nation’s key non-partisan policy forum, the Program serves as a trusted source of analysis and a vital point of contact between the worlds of scholarship and action.  Read more