Otto Reich in Panama

George W. Bush's special envoy for hemispheric affairs, Otto Reich, recently spent a week in Panama. He visited a number of business organizations, and met with all of the presidential candidates and various government leaders. He appeared on the February 1 edition of TVN’s “Dialogo” show with Luz María Noli.

Reich, an arch-conservative from the Cuban-American community who played a controversial role during the 1980s Central American wars and who has a hard time getting approved for things by the Congress, did not come across as a right-wing fanatic on Noli’s show. Anything but.

Yes, the Cuba issue was raised and Reich defended unilateral US economic measures against the island nation, calling such measures a message both to dictators and to the people they oppress. He scorned Fidel Castro’s dictatorship for its intolerance of an independent press, real labor unions and private business initiatives.

Mostly, though, Reich talked about corruption. “We view corruption as the principal obstacle to development in this hemisphere,” he said on Dialogo. He identified the Bush administration with recent pronouncements by US Ambassador Linda E. Watt and US Secretary of State Colin Powell, and said that American policy is to equate the struggle against corruption with the struggle for democracy. “We can’t punish a government or a people,” Reich warned, but he said that there is a list on which corrupt acts and their perpetrators are listed “one by one,” and people who make that list will lose their visas to visit the United States.

Reich, who also used the interview to encourage free trade between the United States and Panama, highlighted corruption as an impediment to international trade: “You can’t have an interchange between countries that don’t have the same rules” about things like transparency and corruption, he warned. He also noted the Bush administration’s policy to “globalize” its approach to crime.

Reich said that information is a key aspect of the battle against corruption. “One of the problems in fighting corruption,” he noted, “is that those in power have control over the information. He gave as an example disgraced former Nicaraguan President Arnoldo Alemán, who he said looked OK while in office but proved to be corrupt once a new government went through the books it inherited.

“If you want to visit the United States, don’t participate in any act of corruption” was Reich’s bottom-line advice.

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Reich visits Panama, warns about corruption