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It hasn’t been a good two weeks for the Clinton administration’s Latin American diplomacy—such as it is.
Two Saturdays ago, a member of the president’s National Security Council admitted privately that they, as well as their counterparts at the State Department, were caught off base when, in a nationally televised speech, Peru’s President Alberto Fujimori surpassingly announced he would be calling for new elections in which he would not be a candidate.
Back in April, after widespread charges of fraud in the first round of the election in which he was seeking an unprecedented third term, Washington had publicly warned Fujimori that there could be serious consequences for U.S.-Peru relations if the runup to the second round and the election itself turned out to lack the desired fairness and transparency. Nevertheless, Fujimori refused to postpone the second round and won it with 51 percent of the vote in a questionable election.
Having failed in this effort and later in diplomatic maneuvres to “promote a vigorous response” to events in Peru from the Organization of American States, the Clinton administration adopted a low profile on this matter. The NSC official, who didn’t want to be named, said the he was sure the U.S. had not played any role in Fujimori’s surprising reversal, and that the U.S. government had only expressed to the Peruvian authorities and to other “power bases” in Peru—presumable the armed forces—its “profound disgust” by the transfer to the Colombian guerrilla of 10,000 AK-47 assault rifles sold by Jordan to Peru, a transaction in which, it was widely believed, a major role was played by Vladimiro Montesinos, chief of Peru’s National Intelligence Service (SIN) and Fujimori’s close political ally.
Lacking in solid information, the Clinton administration joined in the widespread speculation that Fujimori’s change of mind was prompted by the military, increasingly uncomfortable with Montesinos as head of the SIN, especially after the attempt by members of this service—which was blocked by army forces—to detain a navy chief who presumably had been instrumental in making public a videotape in which Montesinos appeared to be bribing a lawmaker.
But even while the reasons for the Fujimori reversal were being sorted out by the Clinton administration, it was hit by a bombshell: the public revelation that Montesinos, by now at the center of a political scandal in Peru, also had been a source of friction inside the U.S. government over the past decade, when many officials in the Bush and Clinton administrations had opposed any relationship with him but the CIA repeatedly had argued successfully that Montesinos was a valuable and cooperative U.S. ally inside the government of President Fujimori.
“In discussions within the U.S. Embassy in Lima, between the embassy and Washington, and in at least two full-scale interagency reviews here”, the Washington Post reported in a front-page story last week, “the CIA defended Montesinos and dismissed as unproven and irrelevant reports that he orchestrated human rights abuses as part of counter-terrorism operations under the Fujimori government during the early 1990s”.
The Post story went on to say that “by 1995, when the government had vanquished Shining Path guerrillas and turned to the fight against cocaine exports, Montesinos had come to be seen by many U.S. officials, even outside the CIA, as indispensable to U.S. counter-narcotics efforts and Washington's overall relationship with Peru” and resistance to reliance on Montesinos was “gradually reduced . . . despite reports that the National Intelligence Service (SIN) he controlled was responsible for growing repression against Fujimori's political and media opponents.”
The Post reported that it was not until spring that the official U.S. tide, despite CIA resistance, turned against him. “After an interagency review concluded that Montesinos had directed efforts to subvert Peruvian democracy and elect Fujimori to a third term, National Security Adviser Samuel R. ‘Sandy’ Berger and Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright signed off on a directive to sharply reduce U.S. ties with him”, the Post said. Meanwhile, Montesinos appears to have gained refuge in Panama.
In another development that took the Clinton administration by surprise, even as it was seeking to persuade Venezuela to be helpful within the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) in pushing for higher production by the member countries the Venezuelan ambassador to Havana announced a new preferential oil supply agreement for Central American and Caribbean states that will include Cuba, which would be able by the new pact to pay for the oil supplies not just in hard currency but also in trade and services. In addition, future oil industry co-operation between Caracas and Havana includes a project under study to modernize and reactivate a Soviet-built oil refinery at Cienfuegos in Cuba.
To top two weeks in which the Clinton administration’s diplomacy appeared to be out of touch with events in Chile and Venezuela, even as those stories were unfolding in Washington, observers were trying to make sense out of the Clinton administration’s decision to give political asylum to the nine survivors of the crash in Gulf of Mexico waters of a plane in which ten Cubans were fleeing the island—a decision that was inexplicably contrary to the U.S. refusal to provide refugee status to Elian Gonzalez, the six-year-old child who was rescued in similar circumstances. The generally accepted explanation was that the Clinton administration sought to repair damaged relations with Cuban-Americans and thus help Vice President Al Gore in gaining their key support in Florida in the November election.
Claudio Campuzano (claudio-campuzano@hotmail.com) is U.S, correspondent for the Latin American newsweekly Tiempos del Mundo and editorial page editor of the New York daily Noticias del Mundo. He writes weekly for World Tribune.com