Comment on March 2010 OAS SecGen elections
The election OAS secretary general coming up in late March and Insulza is running for another six year term unopposed. All he needs is 17 out of 34 votes, but being the OAS, I'm sure he wants more than the bare minimum. Brazilian President Lula and Chilean President-elect Piñera have endorsed the Secretary General for reelection and so far no country has mounted a serious opposition.
I don't know that Insulza should be reelected. I tend to lean towards getting someone new into the position. More importantly, I'm disappointed that nobody is running against him. I think a competition and debate over the role of secretary general would be good for the hemisphere.
That said, the criticism in the Washington Post earlier this month was unfair. To claim that Insulza is anything but a defender of democracy is to not know his positions or have heard him speak. I've heard Insulza speak at least four times in the past 2 years and I can guarantee he's as concerned about the decline of democracy in various countries as anyone. He's given the issue thought, he's acted where he could and he's called on numerous occassions for reform and strengthening of the OAS on the issue of defending democracy. (Also read Peter Hakim's take on Insulza, which I read after I wrote this post).
The issue here is that Insulza is boxed in by the limitations of the OAS. The secretary general is not dictator. He's not even a president. He serves the will of the OAS. His ability to set his own agenda is incredibly limited. He can only act in a manner in which the other countries agree (for another example, see this post from May 2008).
For Insulza to have tried to implemented the Democracy Charter on Venezuela or Nicaragua in the past two years as the Washington Post argues would have destroyed the OAS as an organization. Most countries in the hemisphere are not ready to take that step and a push by the secretary general would have not changed that. If the issue had pushed further, a significant number of countries would have left the organization (Chavez threatened to leave earlier this year over the mildest of criticisms from the OAS), accomplishing little and harming the good work that is done often unseen in the pan-American system.
Any push to reform the democracy charter and implement it in the more troubling cases in the hemisphere needs to come from the countries of the hemisphere, not some mythically brilliant leader who is elected secretary general. Those placing the blame on Insulza for what's wrong in the hemisphere are living in the same dream world in which the Cuba embargo works.
Perhaps the OAS is simply broken beyond repair, an anachronism of another era that has failed to reform to match modern challenges. Or maybe it's just going through a rough patch and will eventually find the right structure or have the hemisphere return it to relevancy when the time is right. Either way, the blame the current problems falls on the entire hemisphere, not any one individual. The Secretary General of the OAS is only as relevant as the legitimacy the hemisphere grants that organization. That remains true whether Insulza is reelected or some other leader takes his place.

