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WSWS : News & Analysis : North America
Iran-Contra gangsters resurface in Bush administration
By Patrick Martin
1 August 2001
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The Bush administration appealed to Senate Democrats July 27 to
move ahead with the confirmation of two top-level diplomatic
nominees whose appointments have been delayed because of their
role in defending right-wing dictatorships and death squads in
Central America.
Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Joseph Biden (D-
Del) said through a spokesman that a hearing for John Negroponte,
nominated for US ambassador to the United Nations, would be held
as early as next week. No hearing has yet been set for Otto Reich,
nominated for assistant secretary of state for western hemisphere
affairs.
Negroponte and Reich are two of the three Bush administration
appointees with direct operational roles in the Central American
counterinsurgency campaigns of the 1980s. The third is Elliott
Abrams, named as director of the office for democracy, human
rights and international operations at the National Security Council,
a White House position which is not subject to Senate
confirmation. Abrams was convicted of lying to Congress about the
Iran-Contra affair, but was later pardoned by Bush’s father in 1992.
Negroponte was US ambassador to Honduras during the years
when the right-wing Nicaraguan Contra forces were based in
southern Honduras, just across the border from Nicaragua,
supplied and armed illegally by the Reagan administration. Abrams
was assistant secretary of state for western hemisphere affairs
during that period and worked closely with Oliver North in
organizing the illegal arms supplies to the Contras. Reich headed
the Office of Public Diplomacy, a State Department agency which
illegally funded pro-Contra propaganda both in the US and
internationally.
The convicted liar
The selection of Abrams is the most provocative appointment by
Bush since his nomination of John Ashcroft as attorney general.
Appearing frequently at press forums and congressional committee
hearings in the 1980s, Abrams was one of the most belligerent
defenders of Reagan’s policy of arming the Contra fascists, who
waged terrorist assaults on the Nicaraguan population for nearly a
decade, killing an estimated 10,000 people.
As Washington Post columnist Mary McGrory recalled, “Members
of Congress remember Abrams’s snarling appearances at
committee hearings, defending death squads and dictators,
denying massacres, lying about illegal US activities in support of
the Nicaraguan contras. Abrams sneered at his critics for their
blindness and naiveté, or called them ‘vipers’.”
Abrams was not merely a mouthpiece or apologist, but an active
collaborator in illegal actions which led to thousands of deaths and
widespread devastation. He was a regular participant in meetings of
CIA, National Security Council and State Department officials who
planned the arming of the Contras. When Congress adopted two
successive versions of the Boland amendment prohibiting such
arms supplies, the operation continued in defiance of the law, at
Reagan’s direction, with Lt. Col. Oliver North, an NSC official,
taking charge.
As the top Reagan foreign policy official for Latin America, Abrams
repeatedly testified before Congress under oath that the
government was complying with the Boland amendment and that
only “humanitarian” aid was being supplied to the Contras. Given
his operational role, Abrams was neither misled by other officials
nor lying to protect others. Like Oliver North, he was lying to
Congress about illegal activities in which he was a direct personal
participant.
After four years of public vituperation against the investigation of the
Iran-Contra affair, Abrams was finally run to earth in 1991, pleading
guilty to two misdemeanor counts of lying to Congress under oath,
in order to avoid felony charges. White House spokesman Ari
Fleischer called Abrams “an outstanding diplomat” and said the
president considered his legal troubles “a matter of the past.”
It is a measure of the cynicism of the Bush administration and
congressional Republicans that Abrams could be appointed to a
high position with his record. They were willing to impeach Clinton
as president for lying under oath about Monica Lewinsky, but no
such standard applies to lies about an illegal US war which killed
thousands of innocent people. Abrams, a collaborator with death
squads, is now to be put in a high position with responsibility for
addressing human rights issues!
The anti-Castro fanatic
Negroponte and Reich are equally odious figures, although less
well known to the public because they did not become Iran-Contra
defendants. Otto Reich, who left Cuba in 1960 at the age of 15, is a
favorite of the fascistic anti-Castro Cuban exiles in Miami. His
appointment was sponsored by the two Cuban-American
congressmen from Miami, and by Senator Jesse Helms, chairman
of the Senate Foreign Relations at the time Reich was nominated.
The joint House-Senate select committee on Iran-Contra found that
Reich’s unit of the State Department had engaged in “prohibited,
covert propaganda” on behalf of the Contras and violated
restrictions on State Department appropriations, but in keeping
with the overall whitewash of the illegal activity, did not charge
Reich himself with any specific offense. The agency was abolished
and Reich was shipped out of Washington to a three-year stint as
US ambassador to Venezuela, to avoid any further involvement in
the scandal.
For the last decade he has worked as a Washington lobbyist for
anti-Castro interests, including the US-Cuba Business Council and
the US government-funded Center for a Free Cuba. He has also
represented the liquor producer Bacardi & Co., whose Cuban
distillery was nationalized by the Castro government. Bacardi has a
long-running legal dispute with Cuba and the French firm Pernod-
Ricard over rights to use the Havana Club rum trademark.
Reich’s appointment marks, as one commentator put it, the
“Cubanization” of US policy in Latin America, as all political issues
in the hemisphere will be focused through the prism of obsessive
hatred of Fidel Castro. Reich is an adamant opponent of any
relaxation of the US trade sanctions with Cuba. He even
denounced the baseball game between the Baltimore Orioles and
the Cuban national team, comparing it to “playing soccer in
Auschwitz.”
During his diplomatic posting in Venezuela he engineered the
release from a Venezuelan prison of Orlando Bosch, the Cuban-
American terrorist jailed there for plotting the 1976 bombing which
destroyed a Cubana airlines passenger jet in flight, killing everyone
on board. President George H.W. Bush subsequently granted a full
pardon to Bosch.
Among Reich’s other lobbying clients are the British-American
Tobacco company and Lockheed Martin Corporation, which he
assisted in the successful attempt to sell F-16 fighter jets to Chile,
breaking a 20-year US policy of not selling high-tech weapons to
Latin American countries.
The career criminal
The most important of the three appointments is that of Negroponte
to the UN. Negroponte spent his entire working life in the service of
American imperialism, participating in many of the bloodiest crimes
of the post-World War II, including nine years as a State
Department official during the Vietnam War and five years in
Central America.
Much of his career itinerary reads like a dossier for some future war
crimes tribunal:
* 1964-68, political affairs officer at the US Embassy in Saigon;
* 1969-71, aide to Henry Kissinger in the Paris negotiations with
the Vietnamese;
* 1971-73, officer-in-charge for Vietnam in the National Security
Council, under Kissinger;
* 1973-75, assigned to the US Embassy in Ecuador (he reportedly
quit Kissinger’s staff, opposing the Paris settlement as too
favorable to the Vietnamese);
* 1980-81, deputy assistant secretary of state for East Asia and
Pacific affairs;
* 1981-85, ambassador to Honduras;
* 1987-1989, deputy assistant to the president for national security
affairs, reporting to Colin Powell;
* 1989-93, ambassador to Mexico;
* 1993-97, ambassador to the Philippines.
After retiring from the diplomatic corps, he took a well-paid position
as vice president for global markets at McGraw-Hill, the big
publishing company.
Negroponte’s role is best documented for his term as ambassador
to Honduras, a country dominated by US corporations and
completely dependent on the US government politically and
militarily. The US ambassador in Tegucigalpa is the de facto pro-
consul who makes or breaks presidents and generals. At
Negroponte’s direction the Honduran military provided protection
and assistance to the Contra terrorists. With his tacit permission, if
not active encouragement, the Honduran military carried out
systematic murders of refugees from war-torn El Salvador and
among its domestic opponents in Honduras itself.
During Negroponte’s tenure, US military aid to Honduras grew from
$4 million to $77.4 million. Maintaining this aid required the US
Embassy to regularly certify that Honduras was in compliance with
human rights requirements set down in American laws. Although
Jack Binns, who preceded Negroponte as ambassador, had
warned about the repressive measures undertaken by the military-
controlled regime, Negroponte consistently denied the existence of
death squads, political prisoners or politically motivated killings by
the Honduran Armed Forces.
He worked closely with General Gustavo Alvarez Martinez, chief of
the Armed Forces in Honduras, to send Honduran soldiers to the
US-run School of the Americas, where they were trained in
psychological warfare, sabotage and many types of human rights
violations, including torture and kidnapping. In 1983 the US
government awarded the Legion of Merit to General Alvarez.
A CIA-run death squad
The American CIA created the infamous Battalion 3-16 to carry out
the murder of Honduran political opponents of the Contra war
against Nicaragua. General Luis Alonso Discua Elvir, a graduate of
the School of the Americas, was the founder and commander of
Battalion 3-16. According to a detailed investigation in 1995 by the
Baltimore Sun, Battalion 3-16 kidnapped, tortured and killed
hundreds of Hondurans. The unit used “shock and suffocation
devices in interrogations. Prisoners often were kept naked and,
when no longer useful, killed and buried in unmarked graves.”
The Baltimore Sun reporters found that in 1982 alone, during
Negroponte’s first full year as ambassador, the Honduran press
carried at least 318 stories of extrajudicial attacks by the military.
The US embassy, however, certified the country’s record on human
rights in such glowing terms that aides to Negroponte joked that
they were writing about Norway, not Honduras. Rick Chidester, a
former aide, revealed to the Sun that his supervisors had ordered
him to remove allegations of torture and executions from his draft of
the 1982 human rights report. When one Honduran legislator
complained about the US refusal to denounce the repression,
Negroponte told him, “You and others, what you are proposing is to
let communism take over this country.”
Significantly, several members of Battalion 3-16, long resident in
the United States, were suddenly and swiftly deported after
Negroponte’s nomination was announced. In February the State
Department revoked the visa of General Discua, the founder of
Battalion 3-16, who had been deputy ambassador to the UN for
Honduras and stayed on in the US after his term expired. Discua
responded by publicly confirming the US sponsorship of his death
squad operation.
A CIA-trained torturer, Juan Angel Hernández Lara, is in court in
Florida facing a term of up to two years in prison for reentering the
US illegally after being deported. He would be deported again after
serving the sentence. The Honduran exile has sought political
asylum, arguing that it would be dangerous for him to return to
Honduras because his role as an interrogator in the US-sponsored
death squads has become known, and relatives of the victims
might take revenge. A US District Judge in Florida, Wilkie
Ferguson, ruled in May that evidence about Hernández Lara’s role
in Battalion 3-16 would not be admissible.
Despite the massive evidence of Negroponte’s grisly history, the
nomination has considerable support from Democrats as well as
Republicans. Clinton’s last UN Ambassador, Richard Holbrooke,
praised Negroponte, calling his nomination “terrific ... good for the
UN, good for the foreign service, and I believe it will be good for the
United States.” Holbrooke was Negroponte’s roommate in Vietnam
and a coworker on Kissinger’s National Security Council.
Holbrooke pointed out that Negroponte has already been confirmed
several times by Democratic-controlled congresses, in 1989 and
1993, despite opposition sparked by his record in Vietnam and
Central America. “He’s gotten through before in a more liberal
Congress, so I don’t see why he’d have trouble now,” the Clinton
administration official said, adding, “We need a professional on the
job. If professional diplomats are penalized for carrying out the
instructions of their government, then we’re all in trouble.”
The selection of this trio of anticommunist gangsters shows the
real face of American “professional diplomats,” especially in Latin
America. It is an ominous warning that the methods of the
1980s—death squads, subversion, terrorism—are being revived
again by the Bush administration to deal with the mounting political
instability in Colombia, in Ecuador, in Argentina and throughout
that region, as well as internationally.
Copyright 1998-2001
World Socialist Web Site
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