Reply #67: Salon 4/02: Josh Marshall on Venezuelan coup [View All]

http://www.salon.com/politics/bushed/2002/04/17/venezuela/index.html

Bush's Latin diplomacy goes south
The White House is embarrassed after the State Department's Latin American specialist pointedly fails to condemn the Venezuela coup -- and the coup then collapses.

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By Joshua Micah Marshall

April 17, 2002 | For a generation, the United States has been lecturing Latin Americans about the importance of democracy and the rule of law. But last week at the State Department the advice apparently had to go in the other direction.

On Friday afternoon, less than a day after Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez was overthrown in what later turned out to be an unsuccessful military-backed coup d'etat, Otto Reich, the assistant secretary of state for Latin America, summoned senior Latin American diplomats to the State Department to discuss the sudden turn of events in the oil-rich South American country. For months last year, Reich's nomination was stalled in the Senate because, among many reasons, Democratic senators feared Reich was less than fully committed to democracy in Latin America. (Reich had a reputation as a Latin American hard-liner in several posts he held in the Reagan administration.) According to accounts provided by Latin American diplomats who attended the meeting, Reich's performance last Friday would have done little to assuage those fears.

Present at the meeting with Reich were ambassadors and other senior diplomats from most countries in Latin America, and Roger Noriega, America's ambassador to the Organization of American States. Reich began by handing out copies of a State Department press release that blamed Chavez's overthrow on Chavez himself and denied that any coup had even occurred. Reich then gave a tortured reading of the Venezuelan constitution in an attempt to illustrate that Chavez's apparent military overthrow really wasn't unconstitutional at all -- an explanation some diplomats at the meeting thought could only have been rationalized by the coup plotters themselves. Neither Reich nor other State Department officials would comment on the meeting.

Chavez had become increasingly unpopular with the Bush administration, with his pro-Cuba politics and recent threats to the independence of the country's state-owned oil company, which is the third-largest foreign supplier to the United States. Word of his ouster was also greeted positively by Bush spokesman Ari Fleischer.

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