From Right Web
Dated December 2003
Otto J. Reich
U.S. Special Envoy to the Western Hemisphere
Western Hemispheric Institute for Security Cooperation (School of the Americas): Board of Visitors
Head of Reagan's Office of Public Diplomacy
Highlights & Quotes
The Bush administration’s decision to nominate Otto Reich as assistant secretary of state for hemisphere affairs was regarded as one its more serious nomination blunders. Without putting too fine a point on it, Reich is viewed with disdain throughout much of the Americas.
An anti-Castro fanatic who was implicated in the Iran-Contra scandal as a result of his work in Ronald Reagan’s Office of Public Diplomacy, the propaganda outfit that was charged with planting op-eds in newspapers that disparaged critics of the administration’s Latin American policies and lauded Contra leaders, Reich’s nomination was roundly criticized. The San Antonio Express-News opined: "Like a disturbing dream from a not-so-distant past, he floats up out of a time when Ollie North was running guns to the Nicaraguan Contras and Robert McFarlane was bearing a key, a cake, and a Bible to stiff-necked Iranian ayatollahs."
In 2002, not long after he was reappointed as special envoy to the western hemisphere, Reich was also nominated to serve on the board of the Western Hemispheric Institute for Security Cooperation, better known as the School of the Americas, the U.S. Army’s training ground for Latin American dictators and world-class human rights violators, like Manuel Noriega and Argentina’s Leopoldo Galtieri. Said Fr. Roy Bourgeois, founder of the crusading School of the Americas Watch, of Reich’s nomination: “This only renews our conviction that this school of coups, torturers and assassins must be closed down for good.”
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