Marcio Jose Sanchez/AP Photo
Organization of American States Secretary General Luis Almagro listens during a plenary session at the Summit of the Americas, June 10, 2022, in Los Angeles.
In October 2019, Bolivia’s left-wing president Evo Morales was certified as the winner of a fourth term in office. A former coca leaf union leader, Morales was broadly popular for pragmatic economic governance that expanded access to health care and education. He beat his closest rival by more than ten points, according to Bolivia’s election board, narrowly avoiding a runoff.
As results rolled in, the Organization of American States (OAS) cast doubt on the legitimacy of the election. A coalition of Western Hemisphere countries through which the U.S. projects power in Latin America, the Washington-based OAS questioned the integrity of the vote count, declaring “an inexplicable change in trend that drastically modifies the fate of the election and generates a loss of confidence in the electoral process.”
The New York Times and other U.S. media quickly amplified the OAS report. Atlantic columnist Yascha Mounk cheered the findings as evidence of left-populist overreach, saying the president finally “went too far.” The ensuing turmoil in Bolivia fueled a political crisis, with protests killing some 30 people. A military coup in November forced Morales to resign early and flee the country. (The right-wing coup plotters would be soundly defeated the following year with the election of Luis Arce, Morales’s former finance minister.)
As the dust settled after the election, multiple teams of independent researchers found that the preliminary OAS report, as well as a final report issued the next month, had been flawed. The New York Times walked back its support of the OAS narrative, and members of Congress called for an independent review of the OAS claims.
But Luis Almagro, the OAS’s bombastic secretary general, doubled down. In a disjointed 3,200-word press release, the OAS countered the Times’ criticisms, accusing the newspaper of going soft on totalitarianism.
The Times had published reporting on the Soviet Union that was “ultimately more a defense of Stalin than of the truth,” the statement argues, and in Cuba had been “instrumental in building a pro-Castro narrative.” The statement adds that in seeking to defend the truth, Almagro “has paid high political costs on many sides of the spectrum.”
But Almagro certainly didn’t pay for OAS’s actions in Bolivia. Instead, he was rewarded in 2020 with a second term. Mike Pompeo, secretary of state under President Trump, championed Almagro’s re-election, praising him for leading an “OAS revival” and singling out his role disputing the Bolivian election results.
Since assuming the top job in 2015 under President Obama, Almagro has led the OAS into a crusading new era. He has pushed out human rights officials and stacked the organization with center-right and right-wing officials, making it a powerful counterweight against the “pink tide” of leftist governments recently elected in Latin America.
Now, Almagro is facing an ethics probe over a romantic relationship with an OAS staffer and apparent top adviser. That investigation, which is set to conclude this month, has prompted calls to look deeper into the rot at OAS, and how it has produced circumstances like the organization’s role in the Bolivian coup. Eight U.S. lawmakers released a letter today arguing that other misconduct by the head of the OAS should be investigated.
Almagro’s scandal and the ensuing fight over the future of the OAS is becoming something of a proxy war for hemispheric tensions.
The investigation into Almagro’s affair is “wholly insufficient in its scope,” the congresspeople write, since “several other highly credible allegations that involve far more egregious and damaging acts of wrongdoing have come to our attention.”
Sens. Bob Menendez (D-NJ) and Marco Rubio (R-FL), both champions of Almagro, did not respond to requests for comment. But Almagro’s scandal and the ensuing fight over the future of the OAS is becoming something of a proxy war for hemispheric tensions.
“This guy has been the tip of the spear for U.S. intervention in the region,” David Adler, head of the Progressive International, told the Prospect. “None of us are excited that he might fall on an affair,” he added, but “it’s a bit like Al Capone going to prison for taxes. We’ll take what we get.”
ALMAGRO MADE AT LEAST 34 work trips with staffer and romantic partner Marian Vidaurri, according to public records first reviewed by the Associated Press. The trips include an intimate excursion to Miami in 2019, where Almagro accepted the “MasterMind Latino Award.”
Almagro and Vidaurri took 15 of those work trips without any other OAS staff present, records show. The OAS boss apparently did not turn in records for 2020 and 2021. He has said that the relationship was consensual and that he was never Vidaurri’s supervisor. But online biographies and posts to OAS social media accounts suggest otherwise, listing her as “advisor” or “head advisor” to Almagro.
In a 2021 biography, Luis Almagro No Pide Perdón (“Luis Almagro Doesn’t Ask Forgiveness”), Vidaurri was interviewed about their relationship and described it as “very profound and very intense.” Almagro declined to provide details on the affair for the biography, but quoted a Nicaraguan poet: “With graying hair I approach the rose bushes.”
Almagro added that “the female sex” has been an important “engine” fueling his professional ambitions, comparing himself to a Uruguayan football player who said he always played his best game when he had a new girlfriend.
In an ironic twist, the probe into Almagro’s personal misconduct was announced shortly after he was found to have maligned the reputation of a top human rights official by accusing him of giving impunity to employees accused of sexual harassment.
In 2020, Almagro abruptly fired Paulo Abrão, head of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, accusing him of creating a hostile work environment. An administrative tribunal subsequently found that the firing had maligned Abrão’s reputation and that the administrative complaints cited by the OAS as evidence of misconduct may not even have existed. The tribunal ordered OAS to award Abrão a year of back pay.
THE ETHICAL IMPROPRIETIES ARE only a small part of how Almagro’s critics characterize him. As OAS chief, he has used his post to hire people aligned with the U.S. agenda for the region, according to multiple experts familiar with his staffing choices, and has made the OAS a refuge for members of political parties that are out of power.
Almagro’s secretary for strengthening democracy, Francisco Guerrero, has spent his career supporting Mexico’s center-right PRI party. Former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro’s deputy chief of staff, Luis Fernando Lima Oliveira, is OAS secretary for multidimensional security, a role that involves oversight of illegal mining, deforestation, and land grabs.
Francesca Emanuele, an expert on Latin American politics who is writing a dissertation on the OAS at American University, said Almagro has a track record of pulling strings for friends.
She pointed to his appointment of former President of Ecuador Lenín Moreno as commissioner for disability affairs. Moreno was charged with bribery earlier this month over his role in granting a contract for a Chinese-built hydroelectric plant. He remains in Paraguay, despite Ecuadorian prosecutors’ request that he be placed in pretrial detention. Emanuele said the former president’s appointment at OAS is widely seen as an attempt to help him evade justice.
Critics also cited close ties between Almagro and the former president of Honduras Juan Orlando Hernández, who now sits in jail in New York awaiting trial on drug trafficking and weapons charges. In 2016, Almagro created an anti-corruption mission, MACCIH, at the request of the Honduran government. In 2018, the program’s top officials resigned, saying they had been prevented from carrying out their work, while accusing Almagro of having an “impunity pact” with Hernandez.
“It was a whitewash commission,” Emanuele said, which Almagro created “as a sham to tell Hondurans that the president was committed to the fight against corruption.”
In 2019, after widespread reports of abuses by security forces in Chile during popular protests, ranging from police torture to sexual violence, Almagro praised Chile’s president, saying he had “efficiently defended public order.”
“You would expect the secretary general, regardless of his politics, to play a more mediating role,” said Guillaume Long, Ecuador’s former minister of foreign affairs.
Almagro has taken a particularly hard line on Cuba and Venezuela, at one point echoing Trump’s threat to use military force to remove Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro.
His support for the hard right came as a surprise to observers, since he was previously foreign minister in a left-wing government in Uruguay. But several experts on the OAS said he is more opportunist than ideologue.
“What he did in Bolivia was really a crime of opportunity,” said Mark Weisbrot, co-director of the Washington-based Center for Economic and Policy Research, which has led an effort to debunk the OAS reports on Morales’s election. Trump and Rubio wanted Morales out, Weisbrot said, and Almagro wanted a second term.
MEXICO AND ARGENTINA CALLED for Almagro to step down at last year’s Summit of the Americas, prior to the ethics probe.
Efraín Guadarrama, director general of American regional organizations at the Mexican Foreign Ministry, told the Prospect that the new allegations come on top of existing frustrations with the OAS.
During the pandemic, Guadarrama pointed out, OAS did not procure a single vaccine. By contrast, the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC), a regional organization with a fraction of OAS’s resources, secured four million doses, as well as ventilators and other medical supplies.
Meanwhile, Almagro was focused on an out-of-touch personal agenda. In 2021, he issued a statement condemning Hamas as a terrorist organization. “Almagro issues statements on whatever topic he wants, regardless of member states’ opinion, regardless of whether it’s an issue for the hemisphere,” Guadarrama said.
The OAS, which was founded in 1948 as the U.S. escalated competition with the Soviet Union, has not been meaningfully reformed since the 1990s. It should be reformed, Guadarrama argued, since for now, “we’re playing by the rules of the end of the Cold War.”
