Press Memorandum: Bad Piece of Fruit from Moscoso's Panamanian Banana Republic

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Council On Hemispheric Affairs
Monitoring Political, Economic and Diplomatic Issues Affecting the Western Hemisphere
Memorandum to the Press 04.60	Thursday, 16 September, 2004

Word Count: 1400

 

As part of our continuing series “Welcome to Washington, Mr. President,” the Council on Hemispheric Affairs will issue a press memorandum coinciding with the arrival Peruvian president Alejandro Toledo to Washington, DC on September 20, 2004.

 

 

 

Bad Piece of Fruit from Moscoso’s Panamanian Banana Republic

• Former Panamanian president Mireya Moscoso’s eleventh-hour pardons to four incarcerated Cuban-Americans may have been good news for Miami’s anti-Castro extremists, but they created a diplomatic disaster for her successor and dealt a heavy blow to the White House’s crusade against terrorism.

• The four released by Moscoso are experienced terrorists who have been convicted or implicated in numerous violent attacks throughout the hemisphere.

• Moscoso’s rather pathetic justification for her indefensible actions – that she feared the incoming Torrijos administration might extradite the convicted terrorists back to Venezuela or Cuba, where they would be killed – fails to pass scrutiny.

• Unless totally incompetent, Moscoso must have been aware that her “fears” were groundless, given Venezuela’s constitutional ban on capital punishment and the Cuban government’s pledge to not apply the death penalty to the criminals.

• That Moscoso discussed the pardon with a prominent Cuban-American and former U.S. Ambassador to Panama, and that three of the four criminals were flown directly to Miami via private jet upon their release, suggests that the pardons were part of a shady arrangement between cronies rather than a humanitarian action.

• Given that the pardoned four were notorious terrorists, Washington’s curious silence and accommodating attitude regarding the affair is a disturbing indication of how seriously the White House takes its so-called “War on Terror.”

• The Bush administration’s desire to woo swing-state Florida’s Cuban-American constituency at all costs will inevitably undercut its international position in the struggle against terrorism.

America’s War on Terror has been dealt a moral blow by the very leaders who claim to be directing the charge. It is indeed strange that, given its single-minded obsession with terrorism, the Bush administration has failed to cast so much as a disapproving glance in the direction of former Panamanian President Mireya Moscoso, who granted clemency to four convicted terrorists last month. Puzzling still, three of the terrorists, who are U.S. citizens, were allowed to return home to Miami, where they received a hero’s welcome upon their August 26 arrival. Unfortunately, such hypocrisy has long been, and continues to be, the norm for Washington, which conveniently overlooks the violent terrorist activities of anti-Castro Cuban exile groups in a slavishly partisan effort to pander to the political clout and campaign contributions of wealthy Cuban-American voters in southern Florida

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This analysis was prepared by Eric S. Lynn, COHA Research Associate.

September 16 , 2004

The Council on Hemispheric Affairs, founded in 1975, is an independent, non-profit, non-partisan, tax-exempt research and information organization. It has been described on the Senate floor as being “one of the nation’s most respected bodies of scholars and policy makers.” For more information, please see our web page at www.coha.org; or contact our Washington offices by phone (202) 223-4975, fax (202) 223-4979, or email coha at coha.org.