Former Ambassador to Venezuela Otto Reich.

On Friday, Ambassador Otto Reich spoke at the annual Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) on a panel entitled “From Fidel to Chavez: How Do We Stop the Resurgence of Socialism in Latin America.”

The topic has garnered greater attention lately, as the alliance between Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez and Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has grown to the point of allowing the Iranian regime to subvert sanctions designed to slow its ability to develop nuclear weapons and to utilize its proxy forces outside its borders.

Since the fall of the Soviet Union and the end of its massive subsidies, the Castro dictatorship has relied on the resale of oil from Venezuela for hard currency, and it has repaid the new source of largess with the only assets that it has developed over the last half century – espionage and subversion.

“The countries that have joined Castro and Chavez in an alliance that they call ALBA (which stands for the Bolivarian Alternative of the Americas) are not peaceful, prosperous, or friendly, because they are not free,” Reich said of this anti-American collaborative effort in the hemisphere. 

Answering the question as to why we should care about Latin America’s leftward shift, Reich posited that, “strategically, Latin America is the soft underbelly of the United States, and this boundary not secure.  Every day drug traffickers and human smugglers violate our borders with their cargo.  They can just as easily bring explosives of unimaginable destructive power ad terrorists into our territory.  This alone is reason to be surrounded by friendly nations, unlike the nations of the Castro-Chavez Alliance.”

The oft-heard retort from supporters of Chavez is that he has been re-elected numerous times. Setting aside the credible and frequent accusations of electoral fraud, both in Venezuela and in the other ALBA countries, Reich noted that, more than manipulated elections, the price of oil, which has gone from $10 a barrel when Chavez was elected to over $100 today, has provided enough vote-buying largess to not only affect Venezuelan elections but also those of his allies.

According to testimony provided to the US Congress in 2011, Chavez has reportedly spent $33 billion to manipulate the politics of neighboring countries. It is also presumed that Chavez was behind large transfers of campaign cash from Colombia’s FARC terrorist group to the presidential campaign of Ecuador’s President Rafael Correa at a crucial period of the 2006 election.  Moreover, in US Federal Court in Miami in 2008, it was proven that Chavez was the source of at least $800,000 in cash to finance the presidential campaign of Argentina’s left-wing president Cristina Kirchner.

Ambassador Reich criticized the failed policy of “benign neglect” that the Obama administration has maintained toward Latin America, while Hugo Chavez has made the region a haven for our enemies. “Almost without exception, [the ALBA countries] have violated the rights of their citizens and interfered in the internal affairs of their neighbors.  Some are involved in narcotics trafficking and some support terrorism.  Some act as door openers for extra-continental trouble-makers like Iran, Russia and Belarus.  Some sell uranium to Iran, and not for medical purposes,” Reich stated. 

What should be the U.S. policy toward an increasingly anti-American bloc in its own hemisphere? Reich said that the United States must adopt “a realistic foreign policy that differentiates between friends and enemies, and treat[s] each accordingly.”

“Unfortunately," continued Reich, “the Obama administration not only does not seem to want to see hostility in the actions of our enemies, but has continuously made diplomatic outreaches to them.” Reich believes that, although diplomacy is useful to a point, “history is replete with examples of hostile governments accepting the diplomatic entreaties of democratic governments only to buy time and later rebuff them.”