Who is Otto Reich?
Bush pick has Nicaraguan blood on his hands
By G.
Dunkel
The Bush administration has proposed the nomination of
Otto J. Reich as assistant secretary of state for the Western
Hemisphere. They must feel they need a skilled propagandist
and covert-action expert to handle the hot crisis in Colombia
and the emerging struggles in Ecuador, Argentina and
Mexico.
Reich is a Cuban exile who made it big in the business
world, peddling his influence as a public relations expert.
Bacardi-Martini paid him $600,000 after he got a provision
into the Helms-Burton Act allowing the company to sue its
foreign competitors in U.S. courts for doing business with
Cuba--an extra twist in tightening the embargo.
He also worked on getting Lockheed permission to sell F-16
jet aircraft to Chile, which broke a two-decade ban on
exporting high-tech weapons to Latin America.
Gov. Jeb Bush also supports him because Reich is an
important figure in the right wing of the Cuban community in
Miami, a bedrock of Republican electoral support in
Florida.
But Reich may be most valued by the new Bush
administration for the role he played in overturning the
Nicaraguan revolution in the 1980s through a dirty and
illegal contra war.
Washington's war on Nicaragua
The Somoza family controlled Nicaragua from 1934, when
Gen. Anastasio Somoza García carried out a coup, to
July 19, 1978. That's when a popular army, led by the
Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN), seized the
capital city of Managua after years of guerrilla
struggle.
The Somozas had relied on the firm and copious support of
the United States to maintain their rule, and certainly
returned the favors. For example, they supplied the bases
from which Cuban mercenaries organized by the Central
Intelligence Agency launched the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba
in 1961.
Founded in 1961, the FSLN led an increasingly popular
struggle against the corrupt and brutal regime. Its appeal
grew especially after the great earthquake of 1972, when the
government did nothing to help the suffering population but
pocket international aid money. The front led mass strikes,
armed actions, big protests and hostage takeovers. It won
over the peasants, who didn't have enough land to support
themselves, and women.
According to Holly Sklar in "Washington's War on
Nicaragua," women not only provided a significant part of the
leadership of the armed wing of the FSLN, they made up about
30 percent of some of its armed units.
When the Sandinistas finally took over in 1979, they faced
an economic, political and social crisis. Some 2 percent of
Nicaragua's people--50,000--had been killed over the previous
two years; cities that hadn't been destroyed in the
earthquake had been destroyed in the fighting. Somoza and his
family and friends looted the banks, taking about $500
million before they fled. Two out of three Nicaraguans lived
in severe poverty, according to the UN, and one out of the
two didn't even earn enough for food.
U.S. government economists, according to Sklar, estimated
Nicaragua would need $800 million in aid to restore the
economy. The Sandinista government certainly didn't get
anything near what it needed, but it was still able to do a
lot. It won a UNESCO prize in 1980 for reducing illiteracy
from over 50 percent to 13 percent. The poorest villages got
clean water and basic medical care. The government
redistributed Somoza's extensive land holdings.
It was certainly willing and anxious to have peaceful
relations with the United States, but most Sandinistas were
far more inspired by Cuban communism than U.S.
capitalism.
Worked with Oliver North
By the end of 1981, the Reagan administration was fully
committed to overthrowing the Sandinistas. It set up a group
of counter-revolutionaries who came to be called the Contras
and began funding and arming them.
In 1982, Otto Reich, then assistant administrator for
Latin America of the Agency for International Development,
testified before Congress that the U.S. was sending aid to
Nicaragua, but not through the usual central banking
channels. It was going directly to groups like the Private
Enterprise Council, the Associations of Cattlemen, Coffee
Growers and Rice Producers, the American School and the Roman
Catholic Church. All these groups opposed the Sandinistas.
(Washington Post, Aug. 4, 1982)
Then Ambassador Reich became head of the U.S. State
Department's Office of Public Diplomacy, where he worked
directly with Lt. Col. Oliver North. North was running the
whole operation against the Sandinistas out of his office in
the basement of the White House. North illegally sold arms to
Iran and used the profits to fund the Contras.
Reich was officially a member of the National Security
Council, headed by President Ronald Reagan and Vice-president
George Bush. The NSC had a number of CIA station chiefs and
Pentagon intelligence operatives on it.
The role of Reich's office was to discredit positive
images of Nicaragua and create negative ones, answering
domestic critics of the administration. He acted as a censor,
monitoring and pressuring the news media; for example, he
called National Public Radio "little Havana on the Potomac"
after it reported on a Contra massacre.
Now his talent for deception and flouting the law in the
interests of imperialist profit is once again in great
demand. The problem his nomination faces is that this
domestic propaganda work was prohibited by Congress at that
time and the Government Accounting Office issued a report in
1987 noting this violation. Since nothing else was done about
it, and the Sandinistas gave up power after 10 years of armed
destruction by the Contras led to an election victory for the
U.S.-supported opposition, Reich could get the
nomination.
Whether or not Reich gets in, the fact that Bush picked a
spy-master and propaganda expert to head U.S. diplomacy in
Latin America says a lot about the way he intends to handle
the growing mass resurgence there.
This article is copyright under a Creative
Commons License.
Workers World, 55 W. 17 St., NY, NY 10011
Email: ww@workers.org
Subscribe wwnews-subscribe@workersworld.net
Support independent news http://www.workers.org/orders/donate.php)
HOME
:: U.S. NEWS ::
WORLD NEWS ::
EDITORIALS
:: SUBSCRIBE ::
DONATE
Email
this article
Printable
page