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Council On Hemispheric Affairs
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Monitoring
Political, Economic and Diplomatic Issues Affecting the Western Hemisphere
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Memorandum to the Press 04.60
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Thursday, 16 September, 2004
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Word Count: 1400
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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.
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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
TO READ THE ENTIRE TEXT OF THIS PRESS RELEASE, CLICK HERE
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,
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