Right-wing Unleashes Campaign Against Democracy in Latin America http://upsidedownworld.org/main/international-archives-60/3055-right-wing-unleashes-campaign-against-democracy-in-latin-america

US Latin Americanist Cold Warriors and their far-right allies in the region kicked off a propaganda campaign in May to influence Congress and US citizens against Venezuela and fellow ALBA (Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our Americas) countries. With declining attention being paid to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, neoconservatives and neoliberals want to turn our attention to rolling back social and economic advances in Latin America.

The campaign began with a Sunday, May 22, 2011, opinion piece in the Miami Herald penned by Reagan administration chief propagandist Otto Reich and continued with a Congressional briefing that he moderated on May 26. His premise in the Miami Herald article: “Dictatorships are being established in Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador and Nicaragua by an alliance of self-avowed ‘21st-century socialist’ leaders who utilize free elections to reach power and then set about destroying the very institutions of democracy that put them there.”

He claimed that ALBA, which is a trade agreement based on cooperation rather than competition, “has not only managed to survive as a retrograde movement in a modernizing hemisphere, but is now actively exporting its subversive model to neighboring countries.”Background on Otto Reich...Reich knows a lot about subversion. As head of the Office of Public Diplomacy in the Reagan White House, Reich used military PSYOPS techniques to mold congressional and public opinion in favor of Reagan’s illegal Contra War to overthrow the Sandinista government in Nicaragua. 

In a finding dated Sept. 30, 1987, the Comptroller-General of the U.S., a Republican appointee himself, found that efforts of Reich’s office were “prohibited, covert propaganda activities,” “beyond the range of acceptable agency public information activities….” He concluded that Reich’s office had violated “a restriction on the State Department’s annual appropriations prohibiting the use of federal funds for publicity or propaganda purposes not authorized by Congress.”