Otto Reich In Haiti

Kevin Pina of Berkeley's KPFA Radio, writing for the on-line Black Commentator last April, noted that Otto Reich, President Bush's envoy for Western Hemisphere Initiatives, had arrived in Haiti the same week bombs began falling on Iraq. Reich came as part of a delegation representing the Organization of American States and the Caribbean Community Council with a stated mission of brokering an agreement between the Haitian government and the opposition. His visit coincided with reports from the Haitian police that uniformed soldiers of Haiti's abolished army had begun regular armed incursions into the Central Plateau region of the country from the Dominican Republic.


Otto Reich is a veteran of another US-sponsored armed insurgency against a popular government in a small, impoverished Latin American nation. Reich was the director of the State Department's Office of Public Diplomacy (OPD) for Latin America and the Caribbean from 1983 to 1986 – at the height of the Reagan administration's covert wars in Central America. In 1987, he was accused by the Congressional probe into the "Contragate" scandal of engaging in "prohibited, covert propaganda activities" in his efforts to promote the Reagan administration's "contra" guerilla army in Nicaragua. He is today a top ideological and strategic mastermind of the counter-insurgency war in Colombia, and has been named as a behind-the-scenes figure in the failed April 2002 coup against President Hugo Chavez in Venezuela.

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