What little difference a year can make.

As the OAS meets in the Dominican Republic on Sunday for another general assembly, it is being derided as never more bankrupt, and as incapable as ever of resolving the problems and deep divisions of its part of the world.

Insulza, a respected 63-year-old negotiator, is still held in high regard by many analysts and diplomats.

But weak finances, as countries fail to pay their dues, have limited his ability to help impoverished OAS members like Haiti.

And tasks such as mediating squabbles between the United States and Venezuela's leftist President Hugo Chavez, a vocal critic of US power and accused by Washington of authoritarian tendencies, seem beyond Insulza's reach, analysts say.

"It's a very weak organization," said Moises Naim, editor-in-chief of Foreign Policy, a magazine that focuses on international politics and economics.

"I regard him (Insulza) as a highly competent effective operator charged with an impossible task," Naim said.

"That task is to try to build political stability and strengthen electoral processes and institutions in Latin America at a time in which there are many powerful forces conspiring against that."

During the three-day meeting in Santo Domingo, foreign ministers of most of the 34 OAS member countries will discuss issues such as democratic governance and the corruption, poverty and inequality that still define Latin America.

The draft text of their final declaration is particularly bland even by OAS standards, however. Sidestepping regional tensions, it stresses the importance of information technology for education, good governance and development.

Perhaps the biggest problem the OAS faces, according to some analysts, is that it is still very much controlled by Washington at a time when the administration of US President George W. Bush remains caught up with Iraq, the war on terrorism and Iran.

ONE CAT, 33 MICE

"What we have really is an institution that is so asymmetrical in its distribution of power that you have 33 mice and one very large cat," said Larry Birns, director of the left-leaning Council on Hemispheric Affairs in Washington.

"No one in the Bush administration is really interested in the OAS," he added.

US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice had been expected to attend the meeting. But in what is sure to be seen as evidence of US inattention, Deputy Secretary of State Robert Zoellick will go instead. Rice is focusing on other issues, particularly on curbing Iran's nuclear programs, a senior State Department official said.

"Everybody would like to have the secretary but it would not be proper to talk of disappointment," Insulza told Reuters on Thursday when asked about Rice's absence.

"It's simply the fact that the US is paying all its attention to the Iran situation."

A US official said Thomas Shannon, the top US diplomat for Latin America, had also canceled plans to attend.

Such snubs could be dangerous when anti-Americanism is surging across Latin America, but they come as little surprise to those who see the OAS as irrelevant.

"It's like a Kabuki play," Riordan Roett, director of Latin American studies at Johns Hopkins University, said of the OAS meeting.

"We're all making believe that this organization is important and that these people are going to make important decisions. They know they're not. You and I know they're not. And so we go through this fictitious meeting in which they will pass, as you and I know, resolutions about issues they can't control and then they go home."