Bush May Dump Anti-Castro Aide In Top Latin Post

by Jim Lobe

The champion of the hard-line, anti-Castro crowd in Miami had hoped that President George W. Bush would have announced his intention to re-nominate him to the position of assistant secretary of state for Western Hemisphere Affairs, the post he held until a week ago when his unusual one-year appointment expired.

After all, with Republicans back in control of the Senate, Bush only had to give the word and the former Cuban exile would be well on his way to the full-blown Senate confirmation hearing that his Democratic foes denied him when they controlled the Senate..

And, despite a number of gaffes committed by Reich during his tenure, neither the president nor even Secretary of State Colin Powell, who opposed his initial appointment, has expressed a lack of confidence -- at least, publicly -- in his ability to get the job done.

But to the growing distress of his Cuban-American supporters, the White House has not indicated whether it intends to re-nominate Reich, and signs are growing that his prospects for returning to his seventh-floor office in the State Department are questionable.

On the day that his appointment expired last week, Powell named him to a new post as "special envoy" to Latin America. Pressed by reporters, Powell's spokesman, Richard Boucher, said he could not describe precisely what the job's responsibilities would include.

Reich was also nowhere in evidence during last week's trip by Powell and several other cabinet secretaries to Mexico City to meet their counterparts in Vicente Fox's administration.

Then came news Wednesday that the new chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, moderate Republican Sen. Richard Lugar, had privately asked the White House to submit someone other than Reich for confirmation as assistant secretary. Lugar, who replaces ultra-right-winger, Jesse Helms as the senior Committee Republican, is close to Powell.

"I think we really need a very, very strong leader who has strong bipartisan confidence," given political turmoil that is roiling the region, Lugar told the Associated Press.

So concerned about the White House's silence was Frank Calzon, director of the Center for a Free Cuba (CFC) and former Washington director of the powerful Cuban American National Foundation (CANF), that he faxed to reporters a copy of a memo he had written to "several friends in the administration" Wednesday evening.

In it he reminded them that Cuban-American voters in south Florida had just voted massively for the re-election of Bush's brother Jeb as Florida governor and that "the non-appointment of Reich will be celebrated in Havana".

It now appears that the administration, whose deep ideological divisions over Iraq colors its foreign policy virtually everywhere else, is having a difficult time deciding what face to present to Latin America over the next two years.

On the one hand, re-nominating Reich would not only reassure Bush's right-wing base, especially in south Florida, where their turnout in 2000 made Bush's election possible, but it would also signal a degree of continuity and steadiness of purpose on the part of a president who does not like to admit mistakes.

On the other hand, the stakes in Latin America are clearly growing, with the sweeping election victories of left-wing populist candidates and parties in Brazil and the Andes, the disenchantment with neo-liberal economic policies, the collapse of the Argentine and Paraguayan economies and the launch of serious negotiations for a Free Trade Agreement for the Americas (FTAA).

"The region is moving to the populist left, but he's a die-hard right-winger," noted Bill Goodfellow of the Washington-based Center for International Policy (CIP) who strongly opposes Reich.

"And his persistent obsession with Cuba and maintaining the (42-year-old U.S. trade) embargo is not shared by any of the Latin American leaders who fear that this obsession only makes it more difficult to tackle more-urgent issues."

Like many of Reich's foes, Goodfellow's opposition arose during the 1980s, when Reich ran the Reagan administration's Office of Public Diplomacy -- which one government investigative agency found to be an illegal, covert operation -- to rally domestic support for the Nicaraguan contras. That role led senior Democrats' last year to deny him a confirmation hearing, thus forcing Bush to appoint him by executive order to a one-year term.

But opposition to Reich now is also rooted in his more recent performance.

Immediately after the attempted coup d'etat against Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez last April, Reich made it appear that the administration welcomed the coup, a suggestion that he furthered by lecturing Latin American ambassadors invited to his office on the importance of supporting the new government (which quickly dissolved in the face of Chavez' return).

While Reich insisted that he never intended to support the coup and had no role in fomenting it, the episode, "badly damage(d) U.S. credibility on democracy questions and revealed that the U.S. had completely isolated itself on this issue," according to Michael Shifter, vice president of the Inter-American Dialogue, a multi-national think tank based here.

Stung by the reaction, Reich has endlessly repeated Washington's rejection of any act in Venezuela that would violate constitutional processes, although he finds it difficult to hide his aversion to Chavez. On Thursday, for example, he told a Caracas television station that if Chavez did not resign after 90 percent of citizens rejected his leadership in a non-biding referendum, the Venezuelan leader "would be, at the very least, putting in doubt his commitment to democracy".

Similarly, on economic issues and the growing rejection of neo-liberalism, Reich has been politically tone-deaf. He has harangued Argentines about their failure to further liberalize their economy, constantly cites El Salvador as a model -- apparently oblivious to the huge role played by remittances from relatives in the United States in keeping the country's economy afloat -- and repeatedly decries efforts by farm-state lawmakers, in particular, to exempt food from the Cuba trade embargo.

Nonetheless, his supporters insist that Reich has diligently carried out the policies of the president and should be rewarded accordingly. "At issue is not Reich's performance but his loyalty to the president and his willingness to defend the president's policy," Calzon wrote to his friends in the administration.