The Foreign Service Journal, February 2005

ing the price of the wrong decision. The U.S.-favored candidate was inevitably enthusiastic about free trade and Washington’s Iraq policy, hostile to nationalist eco- nomic policies and, most importantly, ready to fight ter- rorism, usually very expansively defined. An early example of blatant meddling surfaced in November 2001, during the Nicaraguan presidential elections, when U.S. Ambassador Daniel Garza sharply accused Daniel Ortega, the Sandinista leader and Reagan-era nemesis, of supporting international terror- ism. These accusations were recycled from contrived claims made by Washington two decades ago to justify the unleashing of the U.S.-backed Contras. Powell failed to condemn Garza’s comments or similar protocol viola- tions by his colleagues, even though Washington pro- duced no evidence to justify them. During the 2002 presidential election in Bolivia, U.S. Ambassador Manuel Rocha made similarly explosive charges when he warned that the election of Evo Morales, who was then calling for the abandonment of coca eradication and suspension of payments on Bolivia’s foreign debt, would produce retribution in the form of aid cut-offs. Outraged by the U.S. embassy’s boldfaced intervention into their affairs, Bolivians voted for Morales in greater numbers than predicted, and he ultimately lost by only one percentage point. The pattern of interven- tion continued the following year in El Salvador, where Ambassador Rose Likins warned that a victory by the presidential candidate of the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front, a former leftist guerrilla group turned democratic political party, would result in a cessation of U.S. investment and could complicate the scheduled rat- ification of the Central American Free Trade Agreement. Falsely besmirched by a terrorist label, the FMLN lost the election the following year. One of the more notable stains on Powell’s record at State was the department’s indecorous and premature enthusiasm over the military coup that briefly deposed Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez in April 2002. Powell’s hard-line ideological subordinates in the Western Hemisphere bureau had openly supported the Venezuelan middle-class groups behind the coup; in fact, a group of the plotters visited then-acting Assistant Secretary of State Reich only weeks before it was staged. When Chávez subsequently regained his post with the support of key military units, an embarrassed Powell was forced to disavow his subordinates’ imprudent endorse- ment of Chávez’s ouster, offering platitudes about Washington’s steadfast support for democratization. Equally embarrassing to Powell, Chávez went on to win a resounding victory in an August 2004 referendum, with the overwhelming support of Venezuela’s chronically neglected impoverished classes. Not surprisingly, he received only pro forma congratulations from Washing- ton, which continues to regard him as a Castroite rabble- rouser and a potential threat to its access to Venezuela’s crucial oil reserves. Passive In the Face of Recklessness The Venezuela affair typified the disturbing passivity with which Powell responded to the ill-considered actions of his subordinates in a rogue Western Hemisphere Affairs bureau led first by Otto Reich and then Roger Noriega, after the former was denied Senate confirmation. (Thereafter, Reich worked to advance his ultraconservative agenda from a White House post not requiring confirmation.) Not only did Powell fail to protest these rash appointments that threatened the dig- nity of his department, he made no effort to control the appointees’ machinations. To the contrary, he declared Reich to be an “honorable man” despite formidable evi- dence that he had narrowly escaped being jailed for his illegal Contra activities. He similarly ignored indications that Noriega, like his colleagues a protégé of Senator Jesse Helms, R-N.C., was an opportunistic ideologue whose appointment was a political payoff to the rightist segment of the Cuban-American community. The White House’s commandeering of relations with Cuba (making Cuba a matter of domestic not foreign pol- icy) pre-empted the State Department, forcing it to pan- der to Miami politicos by supporting their boilerplate embargo strategy and reckless schemes to confront Castro. Perhaps most embarrassingly for Powell, Under Secretary of State for Arms Control and International Security John Bolton, the department’s most radical ideo- logue, attempted to fuse the administration’s pathological hatred of Cuba with the war on terror. Powell covered for Bolton in 2003 after he declared that Havana was devel- oping biological weapons for export to rogue states. Needless to say, this outlandish charge was not supported F O C U S 42 F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L / F E B R U A R Y 2 0 0 5 Larry Birns is the director of the Washington-based Council on Hemispheric Affairs, where Jessica Leight serves as a research fellow.