Let’s check the program, or the Otto Reich Associates web site. After working in USAID from 1981 to 1983, he went on to work for the State Department until his post as US Ambassador to Venezuela ended in 1989. From 1989 to 2001 he went into the private sector “advising clients on international government relations, market access and strategic planning.”
In 2001 President Bush named him Assistant Secretary of State for the Western Hemisphere, post which he held during the failed April 11, 2002 coup attempt against Hugo Chavez in Venezuela. Later in 2002, he became special Envoy for Western Hemisphere Initiatives, reporting to Condoleezza Rice in the National Security Council.
He left government service in June 2004, shortly after the February 2004 coup , backed by the U.S., France and Canada, ousted Haitian president Jean Bertrand Aristide.
Since June 2004 he returned to his work as a consultant to multinational corporations, but doing what? He advises corporations on developing defensive political strategy to “reduce expropriation exposure”, identifying and securing foreign investment and privatization opportunities in Latin America and provides “non-litigious resolution involving commercial and investment disputes for major US corporations which had exhausted the judicial process”.
So how does he do this? His web site is full of photos of himself with Bush administration officials and John McCain. It is influence he is selling.
His name constantly surfaced in reports surrounding the coup in Honduras, especially related to a “corruption” scandal in the state owned telephone company Hondutel, a scandal that has provided political cover for coup. He was reported to make frequent trips and regularly consult with key figures around the coup. And let’s face it, there was a marked rise in the incidence of presidents being forced into airplanes during his last stint in the State Department.
Who are his clients? Past clients include, AT&T, Verizon, Mobil Oil, Lockheed Martin, among others. But, his page notes that he will not disclose current clients.
These “experts” that testify in Congress, and, well, probably the Congress members themselves, should wear racecar driver style jumpsuits that clue us in to their sponsors.
DENOUNCING CORRUPTION?
Otto Reich’s name first came up in association with the Honduran coup because of an association he maintains with a non profit foundation in Washington, DC, the Arcadia Foundation, which according to a Mexican newspaper report, later picked up by Honduran press in 2007, released an enigmatic report with accusations of corruption against Zelaya administration Hondutel executives. Though former Hondutel executives are now being imprisoned, the Honduran judicial system has been so clearly corrupt during and after the coup that the possibility of fair trails seems remote.
Last week, Romeo Vasquez Velasquez, the Honduran General that materially and intellectually authored the June 28, 2009 coup (and who, over a decade ago, was jailed for participation in an organized crime network for auto theft), has been named head of the national telephone company Hondutel, some of Otto Reich former (and current?) clients might have a better chance at buying up the company.
A refreshing highlight of the hearing was the guest performance of Rep Dan Burton (of the Helms-Burton Act) who stopped by to throw in a pitch for helping 14 U.S. businesses which had been ‘de facto expropriated’ in Honduras recover their money, like, as he pointed out, he had been able to do for companies that had invested in Nicaragua. The only company he bothered to name was a cement company that - previous to Zelaya’s election in 2005 - was forced out of the Honduran market.
At least Burton’s agenda is out in the open. A race car jump suit is in order for him not only for his current corporate ‘clients’, but also because he was involved in a 1995 scandal in which he was accused of demanding a $5,000 contribution from a lobbyist for the government of Pakistan, and threatening the lobbyist to make sure none of his friends or colleagues would meet with him if he didn’t come up with the money.
The most vocal fan of the Honduran coup was Minority Chair Connie Mack of South Florida. His district alone gives some clues to where his backing comes from.
Fuente: elquinceavopaso.blogspot.com
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