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Break Called in Voting on Security Council Seat

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Times Staff Writer

After three days and 35 rounds of voting, Guatemala and Venezuela agreed Thursday to a timeout until next week in their deadlocked contest for a U.N. Security Council seat.

Latin American and Caribbean diplomats hope to come up with a compromise candidate by the time voting resumes Wednesday, after the Muslim holiday of Eid al-Fitr on Monday and Tuesday.

Guatemalan Foreign Minister Gert Rosenthal said as long as Venezuela remained a candidate, his country would stay in the race, but added that the repetitive voting had become like “a theater of the absurd.”

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Guatemala has led or tied every round, but has failed to earn the two-thirds majority of the 192 votes in the General Assembly needed to win the seat allocated to a Latin American or Caribbean nation.

Venezuela trailed in each round Thursday by 20 to 30 votes, but refused to yield, making it hard for another country to come in to solve the deadlock.

Venezuelan Ambassador Francisco Javier Arias Cardenas said that to pull out would be “a humiliation” and would “entail to accept that the U.S. has a veto power in the General Assembly, and that is unacceptable.”

The election to fill a two-year seat on the Security Council is being portrayed by many as a showdown between Venezuela and the United States, which is backing Guatemala. U.S. Ambassador John R. Bolton has made it clear that Washington views Venezuela as a potentially negative force in the Security Council that would oppose U.S. interests in a dramatic way.

Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez reinforced that notion last month in an anti-U.S. diatribe at the U.N. in which he called President Bush “the devil.”

Midway through the proceedings Thursday, Bolton urged Venezuela to drop out.

“The honorable thing would be for the candidate that has now lost 28 out of 29 ballots to withdraw,” Bolton told reporters at the U.N. “But Venezuela insists on putting everyone through this vote after vote. It is clearly obstructionist.”

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Venezuela tied in one vote Tuesday.

The voting marathon continued until sundown Thursday, leading diplomats to wonder whether they were on their way to break the 1979 record of 154 inconclusive rounds in a contest for a Security Council seat between Cuba and Colombia. Both countries ultimately withdrew after three months of voting, and Mexico took the seat on the 155th ballot.

Diplomats from the member nations sat in the General Assembly chamber all day, writing names on ballots and slipping them into wooden ballot boxes. Each round of voting and counting took about 30 minutes, and the results hardly varied. By the end of the day, most seats were occupied by junior diplomats and interns, as ambassadors went back to other business.

The ambassador from Ghana, Nana Effah-Apenteng, slipped out in the late afternoon to buy a newspaper, but returned in time for the 32nd round of voting. Like most envoys, he hadn’t wavered all day in his support for his candidate.

“I’m as constant as the North Star. I won’t change,” he said. “We are just going through an exercise, and it is not very useful.”

Effah-Apenteng was also here for the Cuba-Colombia deadlock in 1979. “One hundred and fifty-fourrounds,” he said, shaking his head. “That was in the middle of the Cold War. This one has also taken on an ideological slant, but it won’t be that bad.”

Uruguay, Paraguay, Costa Rica, Chile, Mexico, the Dominican Republic and St. Lucia have been mentioned as possible compromise candidates.

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Brazil and Cuba are seen as nations that could nudge Venezuela to step down without losing face, and they may use the coming break to find a solution.

“It has been the same thing all the time, and countries are losing patience,” Brazilian Ambassador Ronaldo Mota Sardenberg said. “Let’s try to profit from this pause.”

maggie.farley@latimes.com

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