Hugo! (46 page)

His comments did not repair the damage. The incident marked a
turning point in his relationship with the United States. In the eyes of
the Bush administration, he was violating one of the president's principal
doctrines in the war on terrorism: "Either you are with us, or you
are with the terrorists." Even some of Chávez's supporters complained
that his comments were inappropriate. "Public relations-wise, he's been
screwing up," commented
Congressman Cass Ballenger, a Republican
from North Carolina who hosted Chávez for a barbecue in his hometown.
"I told him the feeling of the American people is that we are at
war. I told him you have to watch what you say."

Hrinak spent a week in Washington, where officials convened an
unusual interagency review of US relations with
Venezuela. Officials
from the National Security Agency, the State Department, and the
Pentagon met November 5 to November 7. When Hrinak returned to
Caracas she asked for a meeting with Chávez. Behind closed doors at
Miraflores Palace she started to read a letter sent from Washington.
According to Chávez's account, it asked him to publicly and officially
retract his statements on the
Afghanistan bombings. As Chávez has told
it, before Hrinak got far he interrupted her. "You are talking to the head
of state of this nation. You are an ambassador in my country. You are
out of line. Please leave my office now." Hrinak was shocked; she hadn't
expected such a reaction to a request from the most powerful nation on
earth. She apologized and asked if she could at least finish reading the
letter. Chávez agreed, but when she was done the meeting was over.

The era of the US "watch what Chávez does, not what he says"
approach was clearly over. In reality, its demise was inevitable from the
day Bush had taken office the previous January. He temporarily named
the architect of the engagement policy, John Maisto, as his top envoy to
Latin America. But he really had his eye on a hard-line Cuban exile and
Cold War warrior who had gained fame during the Central American
wars and Iran-contra scandal of the 1980s, was obsessed with overthrowing
Fidel Castro, and saw Hugo Chávez as his heir apparent.

Otto Reich had been out of government service since the late 1980s,
after the Iran-contra scandal broke. He was a native of Cuba, where his
Jewish father had fled from Austria in 1938 to escape the Nazis, and later
saw ominous parallels to Hitler as Fidel Castro rose to power. Reich's
family soon fled to the United States, where Otto eventually wrote his
master's thesis on the totalitarian trademarks of dictatorships.

His credentials as an ultraconservative anti-Castro and anticommunist
activist helped land him a series of jobs in President Ronald
Reagan's State Department. From 1983 to 1986, at the height of the US-sponsored
wars in Central America, Reich served as head of the
Office
of Public Diplomacy. The office was created in 1983 to counter heavy
criticism of Reagan's policies in Central America. One US newspaper
described it as essentially a "propaganda and disinformation outfit." Its
mission was "gluing black hats on the Sandinistas and white hats" on
the US-created and funded contras, a guerrilla army that was trying to
overthrow Nicaragua's leftist government and raped, murdered, and pillaged
along the way.

Officially his office was part of the State Department, but in fact it
reported to the
National Security Council, where
Lieutenant Colonel
Oliver North was running a covert anti-Sandinista program that
arranged for the secret sale of weapons to Iran and diverted the profits to
the contras — circumventing the Boland Amendment that prohibited
US funds from going to the right-wing rebels. Reich left the Office of
Public Diplomacy in 1986 just as the Iran-contra scandal broke. Reagan
sent him to Venezuela as the US ambassador. He was never convicted
of breaking the law, but the comptroller general of the United States
determined that his office engaged in "prohibited, covert propaganda
activities."

Reich remained in Venezuela through Carlos Andrés Pérez's "coronation"
and the February 1989 Caracazo riots and mass killings. After
that he left government and went into lobbying for US companies,
including rum maker Bacardi-Martini — which paid him more than
$600,000 — and weapons manufacturer Lockheed Martin. Both had
business interests in Latin America. Controversy dogged him about his
alleged help as ambassador in gaining entrance into the United States
for a terrorist named
Orlando Bosch. A former pediatrician, Bosch
helped mastermind the bombing of a Cuban airliner in 1973, killing
all seventy-three passengers aboard. He had been in jail in Venezuela,
where the airplane had departed.

By March 2001 George W. Bush had proposed Reich as his assistant
secretary of state for Western Hemisphere affairs — the number
one official in the State Department for Latin America. Leading
Democrats, human rights groups, and progressive Latin America advocacy
organizations were aghast. They viewed Reich as a loose cannon and an
embarrassment. Many saw his proposed
appointment as a payoff to the
Miami Cubans for helping hand Bush the presidency.

Senator Christopher Dodd, a Democrat from Connecticut, a
former Peace Corps volunteer in the Dominican Republic, and the
chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Subcommittee for the
Western Hemisphere, refused to allow the committee to give Reich a
confirmation hearing. Meanwhile Reich gave up his lobbying activities
and went to work at the State Department without salary. The standoff
lasted nearly a year. Finally in January 2002 Bush used a "recess appointment"
while Congress was not in session to circumvent Dodd and his
allies and give Reich a one-year appointment to the post.

The Cuban exile community in Miami was elated. With Castro
still entrenched in Cuba, his protégé Chávez digging in in Venezuela,
the former leftist labor leader Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva poised to be
elected president of Brazil in October, and neo-liberal "model student"
Argentina suffering a financial meltdown after defaulting on its $312 billion
foreign debt, Reich seemed the perfect candidate to turn back — or
least slow down — the rising tide of leftist politicians in Latin America.
"South America is burning up, and we are looking the other way," commented
Congresswoman
Illeana Ros-Lehtinen, a Florida Republican
and standard-bearer of the Cuban exile community. "Otto is going to
be a great
fire extinguisher."

Reich was not the only fire extinguisher Bush was bringing back into
power from the disgraced Iran-contra crowd. As Ronald Reagan's assistant
secretary of state for Latin America, Elliot Abrams was one of the
principal architects of the US dirty wars in Central America in the
1980s and a key player in the Iran-contra scandal. A "pit bull" for the
administration's "better dead than red policy" in Central America, he
was known for his "snarling appearances at [congressional] committee
hearings, defending death squads and dictators, denying massacres,
lying about illegal US activities in support of the Nicaraguan contras,"
one newspaper columnist wrote.

Abrams vigorously defended the US support for the
"death squad"
government of El Salvador, where soldiers and paramilitary forces often
beheaded their victims and stuck their heads on fence posts to terrorize
the population. The war left seventy-five thousand people dead, most of
them victims of the US-financed military or death squads.

Along with other US officials, Abrams tried to cover up the worst
massacre of the war. In December 1981 elite US-trained Salvadoran
troops surrounded the isolated mountain village of
El Mozote and killed
nearly a thousand women, children, and elderly men. They tossed babies
in the air and speared them with rifle bayonets. They raped and then
killed teenage girls. They forced some of the men into a church and set
it on fire. Less than two months later, on February 8, 1982, Abrams told
a Senate committee that front-page stories in
The New York Times
and
The Washington Post
describing the massacre "were not credible." He
suggested the reports were a propaganda exercise by leftist guerrillas to
win sympathy.

Abrams once declared that "the administration's record in El
Salvador is one of fabulous achievement." He said the United States
was fighting communism.

Abrams worked closely with Oliver North on the
contras' offensive
in Nicaragua. He repeatedly told Congress he did not know about the
arms exchange with Iran and diversion of profits to the contras. In 1991
he pleaded guilty to two misdemeanor counts of misleading Congress.
But President George H. W. Bush, in his last days in office in 1992, pardoned
him on Christmas Eve.

He was a disgraced figure. But that didn't prevent Bush's son from
resuscitating his government career and bringing him back to a high-level
post. A few months into his administration, Bush hired Abrams at
the National Security Council, where his job was to promote democracy
and human rights worldwide. A
Newsday
columnist noted that "the
appointment was made with a straight face. The post does not require
Senate approval. All it takes is a president willing to appoint a convicted
criminal and unrepentant liar to high public office."

Rounding out the gallery of returned rogues from the Iran-contra era
was
John D. Negroponte, Bush's nominee to serve as the US ambassador
to the United Nations. Bush sent up Negroponte's name in March
2001. Six months later it was still languishing in a congressional committee.
Questions were surfacing about Negroponte's past as ambassador
to
Honduras from 1981 to 1985.

In the 1980s the United States provided extensive training and
financing to the military in
Honduras, which served as a key base for
the contra rebels who were attacking the Nicaragua government. The
CIA provided training to one covert unit in particular, Battalion 316,
which allegedly kidnapped, tortured, and murdered left-wing sympathizers
including one US citizen, Jesuit priest
Joseph Carney. They
tossed some of their victims into secret graves and others allegedly out
of airplanes. In 1995 a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigation by
The
Baltimore Sun
exposed the activities of the military and Battalion 316.

The
Sun
asserted that Negroponte, as the all-powerful US ambassador,
must have known about the abuses. But the newspaper said he
tried to suppress evidence of them. If Honduras was shown to be a
human rights violator, it could not receive US military aid. If it did not
receive US military aid, it could not serve as a launching pad for the
contras.

The controversy over Negroponte's past in Central America, however,
was quickly forgotten when the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks
struck. Three days later the Senate quietly
approved his appointment
to the United Nations.
Los Angeles Times
columnist
Frank del Olmo
wrote that "by putting Negroponte in a key foreign policy post, Bush
has rewarded a US diplomat whom many Latin Americans consider a
terrorist — albeit of the well-bred, Ivy League variety."

Bush didn't simply appoint contra sympathizers to high-level government
posts — he appointed an actual contra.
Rogelio Pardo-Maurer
worked closely with the contra political leadership during the 1980s,
serving as chief of staff at an office they established in Washington, DC.
Bush named him deputy assistant secretary of defense for inter-American
affairs, making him the top Pentagon official for Latin American affairs.
He was Otto Reich's counterpart in the US military.

In late 2001 and early 2002, still waiting in the wings for confirmation
was Bush's nominee to replace Hrinak as ambassador to Venezuela:
Charles Shapiro. The Augusta, Georgia, native served in the US embassy
in El Salvador as a political officer from 1985 to 1988. At one point in 1986
he testified in US District Court in Los Angeles, defending US policies
in El Salvador against a lawsuit by immigrants who were seeking political
asylum. The United States rejected nearly every application for political
asylum filed by Salvadoran refugees. If it approved them, it would in
effect be admitting that the government it was supporting in El Salvador
with $1 million a day at the height of the dirty war was committing gross
human rights abuses. After denouncing the Salvadoran government in
the United States, the refugees who lost their political asylum cases faced
a less-than-friendly reception when they were deported home.

A decade after Shapiro left El Salvador, the
Clinton administration
appointed him in 1999 head of the State Department's Cuba desk, where
he continued the US policy of trying to undermine Fidel Castro. If confirmed
to his newest assignment in Venezuela, Shapiro would report
directly to Otto Reich.

The return of the Iran-contra crowd to Washington was shocking and
repulsive to many left-leaning congressmen, church leaders, and Latin
American policy groups — not to mention to Latin Americans themselves.
"The resurfacing of the Iran-contra culprits has been nothing
short of Orwellian in this administration," stated
Peter Kornbluh of the
National Security Archives, a Washington, DC-based research institute
that specialized in declassified government documents. "These
are not twenty-first century appointments. They are retrograde appointments,
a throwback to an era of interventionism when the United States
was the big bully on the block."

Robert White, who served as US ambassador to El Salvador in
the early 1980s and watched grimly as the bodies of four murdered US
churchwomen were pulled from their clandestine graves, said: "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. To choose men like Elliot Abrams and Otto Reich is
an insult." The media watchdog group
FAIR went farther. "Negroponte
and Abrams have blood on their hands," it declared. "Reich's are mostly
smeared with ink. Negroponte and Abrams coddled torturers, protected
death squads and helped kill peasants in Central America. Reich
messed with the media."