Where do the remaining 27 OAS countries stand in all of this? They don't. They have no clear stance.
Cochez alone dared to denounce "those [governments] which, through demagoguery and doublespeak, seek to weaken this organization."
The United States and Canada offered only tepid support for Cochez, even though these two countries have generally pushed for the IACHR to be strengthened. The same cannot be said of the OAS majority, consisting of 25 national delegations that are bullied by Venezuela into sepulchral silence or expressing tacit support for dictatorial Cuba as a legitimate "special" form of democracy. Few seem prepared to assert the democratic principles that the organization was founded, in part, to defend.
According to the OAS's democracy clause, governments who seize power through coups, as well as democratically elected rulers that choose to erode democracy from within, should be monitored closely and pressured into restoring democracy or, eventually, suspended from the OAS. Under this standard, it was right, for example, to suspend the Honduras government of Roberto Micheletti from participation at the OAS in the wake of the June 2009 coup that removed President Zelaya. But the democracy clause should also have been applied to Venezuela, suspending the Chávez government from the OAS for its departures from democratic norms, as well as to Bolivia, Ecuador, and Nicaragua, who are also guilty of undermining democracy and violating human rights. Indeed, the OAS would have been entirely justified in putting the presidents of these countries under the same type of diplomatic monitoring mission the OAS created twice (in 1992 and 2000) to watch over Peruvian president Alberto Fujimori.
When the Inter-American Democratic Charter was signed in 2001 in the wake of Fujimori, it was unthinkable that just a decade later, Fujimori-like governments would be allowed to systematically violate human rights, maneuver their way into multiple reelections, and find themselves at will to court and praise the only dictatorship of the continent while torpedoing the OAS institutions from within.
It remains to be seen whether anyone can pick up where Cochez has left off, as the lone man daring to speak truth to the powers-that-be at the OAS. In the meantime, the organization is almost certainly destined to continue its slow slide into irrelevance.
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