Institute's Board of Visitors a 'smokescreen'

BY MATTHEW SMUCKER
Special to the Ledger-Enquirer

Latin American governments and societies have, fortunately, grown less tolerant of covert subversion of the democratic process, as was displayed in April by the unified condemnation of the failed coup in Venezuela. What has not changed, though, is the determination of men like Assistant Secretary of State for Western Hemisphere Affairs Otto Reich to operate outside of democratic norms, and even, when deemed necessary, act against them. And now Reich has been tapped to serve on the Board of Visitors of the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation (formerly known as the School of the Americas, and known pejoratively as the "School of Coups.")

Long involved in the anti-Castro movement, Cuban-American Otto Reich first gained notoriety throughout Latin America and among U.S. human rights groups for his role as head of the Office of Public Diplomacy during the Reagan administration. This office launched a covert propaganda campaign against the Sandinista government, illegally designed to influence the U.S. public to embrace the administration's agenda for Central America. Later, as U.S. ambassador to Venezuela, Reich used his office to help Orlando Bosch ? a convicted terrorist who helped shoot down a Cuban civilian airliner, killing 73 ? get into the U.S.

Since Reich's controversial nomination by the current administration to Assistant Secretary of State for Western Hemisphere Affairs, he has stayed true to his record. In his capacity, Reich advised Venezuelan businessman and coup leader Pedro Carmona during his failed attempt to seize power in mid-April. He also met with generals who planned the coup in the months preceding. Two of the generals, Army Commander in Chief Efrain Vasquez and General Ramirez Poveda, have received training at the School of the Americas (SOA).

The SOA, renamed the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation (WHINSEC), is a military training school for Latin American soldiers, located at Fort Benning. Its graduates have been involved in documented human rights abuses and atrocities, including the massacre of over 900 civilians at El Mozote, the rape and murder of four U.S. church women in El Salvador and the 1998 murder of Bishop Gerardi in Guatemala. In 1996, the Pentagon was forced to publicly release training manuals used at the school that advocated torture, extortion and execution. In total, the school has been attended by 11 Latin American students who went on to be dictators, several of whom overturned democratically elected governments to assume their hegemony. These include Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega, Hugo Banzer of Bolivia, and Hector Gramajo of Guatemala.

Now Otto Reich has been named to the Board of Visitors. The Institute's charter requires the board to monitor the school, to ensure that the curriculum emphasizes "human rights, the rule of law, due process, civilian control of the military, and the role of the military in a democratic society." We are thus led to believe that the WHINSEC is a wholly new and improved institution over its predecessor, the SOA.

But the renaming of the SOA in 2000 was a cynical attempt to deflect public criticism and disassociate the school from its dubious reputation, right at a time when its opponents were poised to win a Senate vote on legislation that would have dismantled it. The "new" school has failed to produce a shred of credible evidence that it is substantially different from the old one. Even some of the school's supporters say that the changes in the institution are cosmetic. Appointing a monitoring board that is itself unaccountable is a public relations ploy, not a genuine policy change.

And Reich on a board charged with monitoring the human rights integrity of an institution as notorious as this one is like the fox guarding the henhouse. His appointment to this position exposes the rubber-stamp character and hypocritical function of such a board.

The Institute has heralded its Board of Visitors as an "independent oversight" mechanism. However, stacked with military officials, such as Otto Reich, and reporting solely to Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, the board is a smokescreen of accountability. By design, its charter renders the new institution as unaccountable as its predecessor. The underlying objective of both the school and Mr. Reich is to continue to control the economic and political systems of Latin America by training and arming Latin American militaries.

Matthew Smucker is a global justice activist who works with SOA Watch, a human rights organization that seeks to abolish the WHINSEC.