-
US
policy toward Latin America.
Testimony of The Honorable Otto
J. Reich
President, Otto Reich Associates, LLC
Former Assistant Secretary of State for the Western
Hemisphere
March 10, 2010
House Committee on
Foreign Affairs,
Subcommittee on the Western
Hemisphere
Thank you, Mr. Chairman, for this
opportunity to address the topic of
US policy toward Latin America. The overriding objective of US policy - in Latin America
and elsewhere - should be to advance US national
interests, not to win international popularity contests.
If we can be liked while advancing our interests, so
much the better. But let’s be realistic: when we
try to befriend undemocratic leaders and ignore their
belligerence, we are neither liked nor do
we advance our interests. Some of the despots in this
hemisphere to whom the Obama Administration extended an
open hand only to encounter a clenched fist include the
rulers of Cuba, Venezuela, Bolivia, Nicaragua, Ecuador,
and Honduras’ former President Zelaya.
Foremost
among our national interests is security. Without
security we cannot promote other goals such as
democracy, human rights and socio-economic growth.
I believe the US Government today is underestimating the
security threats in the Western
Hemisphere. Rather, we seem to be
fighting the ghosts of dictatorships past and trying too
hard to be liked.
The main threat to the
peace, freedom, prosperity and security of the US and
the hemisphere does not come from military coups, but
from a form of creeping totalitarianism self-described
as 21St Century Socialism and allied with some of the
most virulent forms of tyranny and anti-western ideology
in the world.
Today in
Latin America, democracy is being undermined
by a new gang of autocrats who, counseled by the oldest
dictator in history, gain power through elections and
then dismantle democracy from within. Following
Fidel Castro’s direction, that has already happened in Venezuela and
Bolivia; is happening in
Nicaragua
and Ecuador;
almost happened in
Honduras, and could happen in any
other nation that falls into the grasp of something
called ALBA, or the Bolivarian Alternative for the
Americas.
ALBA’s ruling pattern is clear: after gaining power
democratically, they use force to intimidate political
adversaries and the media; politicize the police and the
military and place them at the orders of the ruling
party; pack the judiciary with compliant judges; rewrite
electoral laws to eliminate opposition candidates and
parties; seize private property or force businesses to
close using bogus charges; incite mob violence to force
potential opponents into silence or exile; and attack
the churches, civic associations, the press, labor
unions and any other civil institution that dares to
challenge the government. Their stated model is
Cuba, and the result
will be an Orwellian dictatorship, a pauperized
prison-nation whose citizens risk everything to flee.
ALBA was conceived in Havana
and is financed by Venezuela’s
petrodollars. It is actually the revival of Fidel
Castro’s half-century goal of uniting international
radical and terrorist movements of the developing world
under his leadership, a movement that in the 1960’s he
financed and called “The Tricontinental.”
The first foreign country Fidel Castro visited after the
overthrow of the Batista dictatorship, in 1959, was Venezuela. While there, he
secretly asked Venezuelan President Romulo Betancourt
for $300 million (about 3 Billion in today’s dollars) to
“undermine the Yankees (the US)…” in Latin America.
Betancourt, a center-left leader but a committed
democrat, flatly turned Castro down. Three years
later Castro was supporting guerrilla warfare in Venezuela and
sending an armed expedition of Cuban soldiers to join
Marxist rebels in an attempt to destroy Venezuelan
democracy and acquire its oil wealth. Today thanks
to Hugo Chavez, Castro has finally achieved his goal.
Castro also targeted
Bolivia
in the 1960’s, because of its strategic location and
enormous mineral wealth.
Bolivia has land borders with
Argentina,
Brazil, Paraguay, Peru
and Chile
– more than two thirds of South
America. In 1967 Castro’s lieutenant
Ernesto (Che) Guevara, selected Bolivia as the site to begin his
communist takeover of the continent. Guevara
failed miserably, but today a Castro disciple, Evo
Morales, is turning Bolivia into one of those 21st
Century dictatorships.
US
policy cannot be solely focused on the ALBA Axis, but
neither can we ignore it, because the Havana-Caracas-La
Paz Axis is undermining the peace and prosperity of the
rest of the hemisphere.
I cannot mention
in our limited time all the bilateral relationships we
have in the hemisphere. But the most sensitive
dealings for the US remain those with
Mexico,
Brazil and Colombia.
I contend that these nations and those of the rest of
the hemisphere are confused by the signals sent by the
Obama Administration in its first year. These
three countries are following free market economic
policies, providing greater opportunities for their
population within a framework of civil liberties, and
therefore making steady socio-economic progress.
Yet, with the exception of
Colombia, their foreign
policy seems oddly antagonistic and even self-defeating.
We see Brazil,
for example, distancing itself from the
US
and from Europe on critical matters such as Iran sanctions. Mexico, the
Latin American country closest to the US in geography
and economy, last month hosted a summit of Latin
American leaders that included two military rulers,
General Raul Castro of Cuba and Lieutenant Colonel Hugo
Chavez of Venezuela, both of whom still wear their rank
and uniform at home, but excluded the freely elected
civilian leader of Honduras, Pepe Lobo. This is
bizarre, unless they are trying to send a message that
they do not share our values or else are misreading the
signals sent from
Washington. I believe it
is the latter.
Some observers explain
Brazil’s behavior as diplomatic
“muscle-flexing” by an economically emergent nation, or
in the case of
Mexico
as a return to the traditional nationalistic foreign
policy of decades past. Under the undemocratic
70-year rule of the PRI party, Mexico steered
its foreign policy to the left, so as to distract its
domestic radicals and keep them from interfering with
the management of the more important domestic security
and financial policies. These explanations are
plausible, but US national interests are nevertheless
damaged by the behavior of these friends. And
while Mexico
and
Brazil
are still friends, the ALBA nations are not, and are
openly and actively undermining US interests.
For
example, Venezuela
has played an active destabilizing role in
Ecuador,
Peru, Nicaragua, and above all Colombia, where
Hugo Chavez maintains explicit strategic and political
alliances with the narco-terrorist Revolutionary Armed
Forces of Colombia (FARC). (By the way, the term
narco-terrorist is not mine, it is applied to the FARC
by various agencies of the
US
and European governments.) Just last week the
Spanish Government accused Chavez of supporting with the
Spanish Basque terrorist group ETA as well as the FARC.
Not satisfied with merely supporting the FARC
and allowing guerilla leaders and fighters to hide,
train and recuperate inside Venezuelan territory, Chavez
has repeatedly closed the commercial border and
threatened war against Colombia.
The impact on the Colombian economy has been
devastating. But Chavez is not just involved in
armed intervention against Colombia.
The
US, Colombia, and other governments in the region
have abundant evidence of massive flows of
FARC-controlled cocaine through Venezuela.
Senior Chavez regime officials have been designated by
the US DEA as Drug Kingpins and active collaborators of
FARC drug trafficking. These Kingpins include the
current head of Venezuela’s military intelligence
services, General Hugo Carvajal, former Interior and
Justice Minister Ramon Rodriguez Chacin, and former
political police (Disip) chief Henry Rangel Silva.
Weapons are smuggled to the FARC through Venezuela with the active collusion
of senior Chavez regime officials including Army General
Cliver Alcala Cordones. This is public record.
Last year, Peruvian intelligence services found
evidence that Hugo Chavez actively supported the
indigenous groups responsible for violent protests in
that country. Former Bolivian Presidents Jorge
Quiroga and Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada have charged that
the Chavez regime clandestinely financed and supported
riots in that country as far back as 2002, which toppled
two governments in quick succession and led to the
election of Evo Morales. Chavez also actively
supports radical groups in Ecuador, which under President
Rafael Correa became a command, control, operations and
training base for the Colombian FARC.
In
Central America, Chavez actively supports
the regime of Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega.
Chavez financed and encouraged Manuel Zelaya’s efforts
to violate the constitution and laws of Honduras.
The disruption to the economy of
Central America
of the six-month long Honduran political crisis is said
to have cost hundreds of millions of dollars to those
impoverished economies. Chavez used Venezuela’s oil resources to strengthen El Salvador’s Marxist FMLN party, and poured
millions of dollars into both
El Salvador
and
Panama’s presidential
elections. He succeeded in one and one failed in
the other.
Mexico’s intelligence
services have found links between the Chavez regime and
radical groups in that country.
Venezuela’s oil wealth has
been used to influence Caribbean
states through the PetroCaribe program.
PetroCaribe however, merely postpones the payment for
oil purchased today. A few forward-thinking
Caribbean leaders, in Trinidad-Tobago and
Barbados
for example, have warned that the PetroCaribe program is
saddling the Caribbean’s poor island nations with a debt burden they
will never be able to repay. But cheap oil today is
politically appealing to elected leaders who wish to
continue winning elections even at the expense of future
generations.
What PetroCaribe has done is
to allow Chavez to manipulate the OAS, as evidenced
before and during the
Honduras
crisis. This past week Chavez named Honduras’
ousted would-be dictator Mel Zelaya as the head of
PetroCaribe’s “Political Council” – a body that does not
yet exist, obviously a position created to give Zelaya a
salary with which to travel the Americas doing Chavez’s
bidding.
There is another country,
Argentina, that although not a member of ALBA bears
watching because of lack of transparency, massive
official corruption, harassment of private enterprise,
interference with the free market and with the
institutions of democracy, authoritarian tendencies by
its ruling presidential couple and close ties to Cuba
and Venezuela.
It is no secret that
President Cristina Kirchner received millions of dollars
from Hugo Chavez for her election campaign, money that
was taken illegally from the Venezuelan state,
introduced illegally into Argentina, and given to the Kirchner
campaign in violation of Argentine law. We know
much about the transfer of that money because of a
Federal trial that took place in Miami, Florida,
and because of an accidental search of a suitcase by an
Argentine customs officer who was doing her job.
It is well known that similar transfers have taken place
in at least a half dozen countries in this region, but
that have not yet been publicized.
Like Castro’s
before him, Chavez’s ambitions are global, and the
principal goal of his international activities is to
weaken, undermine or cripple US strategic interests in
the world, not just in the Americas. Chavez is very open
about his determination to bring down what he calls the
US Empire.
To this end, Chavez has forged strong
bonds with undemocratic states such as Russia, Belarus,
and
Iran. Chavez has
signed numerous economic and military agreements with
all three countries. He has purchased over $4
Billion in Russian military equipment. He invited
the Russian Navy to maneuver in the Caribbean, which it did, for the first time since the end
of the Cold War.
Russia’s hard-line Prime Minister
Vladimir Putin is going to Venezuela soon, reportedly to sign a
nuclear energy deal with Chavez.
Chavez has
visited Teheran numerous times, has signed many
commercial, financial and other agreements with
Iran, hosted Iranian leader
Ahmadinejad in Caracas,
and sponsored Ahmadinejad’s travel to
Bolivia
and
Nicaragua. He has
supported Iran’s
efforts to acquire nuclear weapons capable of striking
targets in Europe and throughout the
Middle East. He is a vociferous enemy of
Israel
and a supporter of regimes dedicated to the destruction
of Israel and the US,
and the sponsorship of terrorism, such as
Iran
and
Syria.
During
Chavez’s 11 years in power, Hamas and Hezbollah have
established a presence in
Venezuela.
Israeli military intelligence recently disclosed that a
shipment of arms seized last November by Israeli
commandos departed from a Venezuelan port and docked in
an Iranian port before sailing through the Suez Canal
bound for Lebanon. The
weapons, including missiles, reportedly were to be
delivered to Hezbollah.
Chavez also has turned
Venezuela
over to the Castro regime. Today there are between
40,000 and 50,000 Cubans in Venezuela on
official missions, by the Chavez regime’s own admission.
Since 2005 Venezuela’s armed forces have been obliged to
embrace Cuba’s
national security doctrine, which considers the
US
the greatest external threat to the survival of the 21st
Century socialist revolutionary regime in
Caracas.
In spite of its
alliances with Russia, China, Belarus, Iran, Syria,
FARC, Hezbollah and other criminal, terrorist or rogue
governments and non-state actors, there are still
policymakers in Washington, DC who maintain that the
Castro-Chavez-Morales alliance is no more than a
nuisance to US interests.
It is time to care less
about what others think of us and focus more on what
they do to us.
Thank you.
