I'm John Batchel, visiting with my colleague Professor Evan Ellis of the U.S. Army War College.

He is traveling. He's in Bogota, Colombia. We look to the news from Haiti.

The U.S. is exploring a potential deployment of Latin American peacekeeping troops to Haiti,

writes the Financial Times, the pink newspaper out of London,

the best newspaper for news about the Americas, because there's no dog in the fight. These are Europeans

writing this. Troops to Haiti, where Kenyan-led international forces, failed to halt a takeover by

criminal gangs of key areas of the country.

Washington has suggested, goes the copy. Such a force would operate under the umbrella of the

organization of American states. Why, to get around a longstanding Russian and Chinese veto

on deploying U.N. blue berets in Haiti.

Professor, OAS, what I know about it most recently is that it has, as its head, someone

you know very well from Suriname.

And at the time we reported that, you regarded this a very big positive for OAS and also for the

relations of the neighborhood, Suriname being both a Caribbean entity and an Atlantic Ocean

entity, but it's a small nation tucked into the northeastern corner of the Americas.

The OAS is not built, I'm told, to maintain a police force, whatever you call it, a peacekeeping

force.

Is this something that would require the vote of everybody?

And is this something that sounds credible to you? Because to recover the

backstory in Haiti since we've been speaking these last years, it's a nightmare. And repeatedly,

the U.S. and its allies, but chiefly the U.S., over a long period of time, has failed to solve

what's wrong in Haiti, which is despair, food

...