The Reich Stuff

By Bill Berkowitz, AlterNet. Posted May 6, 2004.

Veteran of the Iran/Contra scandal, apologist for terrorists, Cuba basher, bullying Latin America envoy for President Bush, and lobbyist for the alcohol, tobacco and armaments industries -- Otto Juan Reich has done it all, both inside and outside of government. This week, Reich announced that next month he will be leaving his post as the White House special envoy to the Americas and joining Team Bush’s reelection campaign. While it’s too soon to know how Karl Rove and company will use him, keep your eye on Florida where Reich has longtime connections to the right-wing Cuban exile community.

In late 2001, unable to get his nominee past the Senate, President Bush handed Reich, a native of Cuba and an alumnus of the Iran/Contra scandal, a recess appointment as Assistant Secretary of State for Western Hemisphere affairs. Reich’s term expired in December 2002; a month later, Bush found another spot for him on his Latin American team. Now, Bush figures Reich will be more useful in getting him re-elected.

Reich, along with Elliot Abrams and John Negroponte, was one of a trio of Iran/Contra alumni to re-emerge in the Bush Administration as Latin America policy operatives, something reporter Bart Jones pointed out in a January 2003 piece in the National Catholic Reporter. (In his new book “The Politics of Truth,” former Ambassador Joseph Wilson claims that Abrams, who still works with the administration, may have helped reveal to columnist Robert Novak that Wilson’s wife, Valerie Plame, was a CIA covert operative. Negroponte, a former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, has been nominated to become the first ambassador to Iraq after the June 30 so-called handover. He is expected to be confirmed by the Senate without being held accountable for his mishandling of human rights violations while working in Honduras during the 1980s.)

“There isn’t a single democratic leader in Latin America that doesn’t reject and deplore the role that our government played in Central America during the 1980s,” Robert White, a former U.S. ambassador to El Salvador, told Jones in 2003. “To choose men like Elliot Abrams and Otto Reich is an insult.” Larry Birns of the Washington, DC-based Council on Hemispheric Affairs called the trio the “least talented Latin America team either in Republican or Democratic administrations that I have witnessed in monitoring this scene for 35 years.”

Hemispheric Bully

In his recent incarnation, Reich seamlessly continued his career as an anti-democratic bullying bureaucrat. Questions about his participation in the April 2002 aborted coup in Venezuela remain a he-said, she-said matter: A recent report in Sojourners magazine, citing The Guardian newspaper, said that Abrams “gave the go-ahead to the coup leaders,” and Reich, who was a former U.S. ambassador to Venezuela, “met numerous times with [businessman Pedro] Carmona, the head of the short-lived junta.”

During the recent presidential campaign in El Salvador where Antonio Saca of the conservative ARENA Party, and Schafik Handal, of the party of the former rebels, the FMLN, faced off against each other, Reich told Salvadoran reporters, “We are concerned about the impact that an FMLN victory would have on the commercial, economic, and migration-related relations that the United States has with El Salvador.” An Action Alert issued by the Religious Task Force on Central America and Mexico says, “Reich went on to say that the United States could not have the ‘same confidence in an El Salvador led by a person who is an admirer of Fidel Castro and Hugo Chavez.’”

Still unclear is what role Reich had in the recent forced removal of Haiti’s president Jean-Bertrand Aristide and other efforts to interfere in the electoral process in Bolivia and Nicaragua.

This much is clear: Reich has made a career of harassing and threatening the hemisphere’s countries. During a visit to Barbados shortly after the invasion of Iraq, Reich didn’t disguise his displeasure with the decision of Caricom – the Caribbean Community -- not to support the war. “It is not the kind of support that we expect from friends,” Reich said on Chat Room, the Caribbean Broadcasting Corporation’s TV program. “We listen very carefully to what our friends say and we’re very disappointed by some of the statements. We’re not violating international law, neither is Great Britain or any of the other countries and I would urge Caricom to study very carefully not only what it says, but the consequences of what it says.”

Using the not-so-veiled threat of limiting trade to the U.S. from Caribbean countries that didn’t support the war on Iraq, Reich said, “What do I tell a member of Congress if I go asking for increased access for Caribbean products, for example, and he says, ‘Well, they didn’t support us in our time of need’?”

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