Above: new OAS Secretary General-elect Luis Almagro (OAS Photo)

By the Caribbean Journal staff

The Organization of American States will soon have a new Secretary General.

The hemispheric body voted Wednesday to elect former Uruguayan Foreign Minister Luis Almagro as its new secretary general for a five-year term.

Almagro will begin in the role May 26.

“It is time to put an end to unnecessary fragmentations,” he said in his inaugural address. “My efforts will be focused on making the Organization a useful tool in the interests of all the peoples of the Americas, wherever they are from.”

Almagro received 33 votes in favour and one abstention. He will be succeeding Jose Miguel Insulza in the role.

“I am convinced that the time of a discursive, bureaucratic OAS, far removed from the concerns of the people of the Americas, anchored in the paradigms of the past, is definitely giving way to an OAS of the 21st century,” he said. “I do not want to be the administrator of the crisis of the OAS, but the facilitator of its renewal.”