WASHINGTON — Latin American leaders are quietly resisting a Bush administration proposal to strengthen democracy in the region, saying they fear it was crafted to target Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez.
U.S. officials have been trying to persuade the Organization of American States to adopt what they say are standards for democratic government.
Diplomats from many countries fear that it is aimed at Chavez, viewed by some as an anti-U.S. leader, and that it also could amount to an invitation for the U.S.-dominated group to meddle in other nations' affairs.
"This organization has followed a principle of non-intervention for many years," Salvador Rodezno, the Honduran ambassador to the OAS, said in an interview. "Many countries are just not ready for this.... We should move gradually."
The dispute over the proposal, which will be the focus of discussion at an OAS meeting in Florida next week, also is a sign of Latin America's growing resistance to U.S. influence. Left-leaning leaders are now in charge of three-fourths of the hemisphere's governments.
The OAS has historically organized joint actions to help countries that have suffered coups or blows to the governing order. But officials of the United States and other countries have argued for some time that it would be better to head off these crises. Officials made this point after governments fell in Ecuador this year, in Haiti last year and in Bolivia in 2003.
U.S. diplomats have been circulating a proposal that would create a mechanism by which the OAS could evaluate how well each country's democratic institutions functioned. The standard of measurement would be the Inter-American Democratic Charter, a collection of core democratic principles that OAS members voted to adopt in September 2001.
The OAS could compile a list of countries that don't meet the standards, just as the United States and other international organizations do for countries that are judged lacking on narcotics, human rights, corruption or other criteria. Making such judgments would assign a more muscular role to the OAS, which usually shies from strong action against its own members.
But many Latin American countries dislike the idea that they could be stigmatized by inclusion on such a list, even if it didn't necessarily entail any other punishment, OAS diplomats and analysts say.
