Sen. Clinton, if named Secretary of State, can't escape husband's golden tongue

While a vast swath of Latin America exists in the grip of extreme poverty, former President Bill Clinton seems to have had no problem rustling up nearly $2 million in speaking fees in the region since he left office — paid out by various organizations representing the elite business classes of nations such as Mexico, Ecuador and Colombia.

And a good share of the money awarded to former President Clinton for espousing his pecuniary vision of the world on the Latin American stage was doled out by organizations that benefited from policies he pursued while president of the USA.

The proof is in the trail of money.

And to follow that trail, we examined Hillary Clinton’s Senate Financial Disclosure reports for the period of 2001-2007. Those reports include a listing of speaking engagements her husband accepted over that timeframe.

Specifically, we examined speaking fees paid to President Clinton by groups in Latin America. That tally came to a whopping $1.93 million between 2001 and 2006. To put that figure in a Latin American perspective, that’s about 26.5 million Mexican pesos, based on the current exchange rate.

No Latin American speaking engagements were reported in 2007, according to the disclosure reports (though, as you will see, that doesn’t mean President Clinton was absent from the Latin American scene that year.) The 2008 disclosure report is not yet available.

The Golden Tongue

President Clinton’s big breakthrough in the Mexican business-class speaking circuit came in December 2002, when he hauled in $175,000 for speaking at an event sponsored by Value Grupo Financiero out of Monterrey.

Grupo Financeiro is a major Mexican financial services company, with operations in Monterrey, Mexico City, Guadalajara, Chihuahua and Morelia. It provides securities trading and asset-management services. (In plain English, they are in the business of making money off of other people’s money.)

The company’s chairman, Benitez Gomez, is a player in Mexico’s banking industry, having held previous executive or director posts with Banco Regional de Monterrey and Banco Agricola Industrial del Norte.

So, it appears President Clinton was in the door.

The following year, in October 2003, he pocketed another $150,000 as a speaking fee for Banco de Mexico in Mexico City — the nation’s central bank, similar to the U.S. Federal Reserve Bank. The governor (or chairman) of the bank is Guillermo Ortiz Martinez, who served as Secretary of Communications and Transportation and later Secretary of Finance and Public Credit under Mexican President Ernesto Zedillo.

In 1998, Zedillo appointed Ortiz governor of Banco de Mexico. Ortiz was, upon the recommendation of Zedillo’s successor, Vicente Fox, named to another six-year term as the bank’s governor in 2004, after receiving a majority vote of approval from the Mexican Congress.

While Zedillo was president, his country’s financial system melted down during the infamous “peso crisis” of 1994 and President Clinton authorized a $50 billion loan to Mexico to help bail out Zedillo, the Mexican business class, and U.S. investors who had a stake in the nation’s high finances. (The bailout did nothing for the poor, or even many middle class folks and small businesses in Mexico, many of whom lost everything overnight as the crisis struck — a massive devaluation of the peso caused, in part, by lax bank lending policies. (Sound familiar?)

Zedillo took office in 1994 at the same time the free-trade mega-pact NAFTA took effect. He also was president during the Acteal massacre, which journalist Al Giordano described in a prior report for Narco News:

Eleven years ago, on December 22, 1997, paramilitary troops in earshot of a federal military base massacred 45 unarmed civilians - mostly women and children - as they prayed in a Church in the Mexican town of Acteal. The gunmen - every major human rights and media organization now agrees - sliced open the bellies of the pregnant women and shot the 45 Tzotzil-speaking farmers and their children at point blank range. The victims were members of a pacifist Catholic organization known as Las Abejas ("The Bees").

Bill Clinton was the president of the United States, Madeleine Albright his Secretary of State, and the Assistant Secretary of State for the Western Hemisphere was Jeffrey Davidow, a State Department lifer with the dubious record of having been political officer at the US Embassy in Chile during the September 1973 US-backed coup d'etat there.

For more than a week prior to the massacre, non-governmental organizations in Chiapas, Mexico, had warned the US State Department of the impending atrocity. But the deal had already been struck with the Mexican regime that in exchange for its acquiescence to the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), the US would turn a blind eye to all matters of human rights in Mexican territory.

Zedillo landed on his feet after leaving office in late 2000, however, and eventually scored a cushy job in the states, as a professor of economics at Yale University, where he oversees the Yale Center for the Study of Globalization. (An example of you screw up, you teach others how to do the same.)

In some people’s minds, the $150,000 President Clinton took home after his 2003 speaking engagement for the Banco de Mexico might be tainted in a little blood, but then it is what it is.

And President Clinton seems to have gone over well with the bankers, since he landed yet another $150,000 speaking engagement in Mexico, this time in Veracruz, four days after the Banco de Mexico keynote address. A group called Verinvest S.C. booked him “on behalf” of the Mexican Business Summit, which describes itself, according to its Web site, “as a platform where the key issues shaping the future of Mexico and its relationship with its key world partners are considered.”

What better person than former President Clinton to help them do that, no?

Another of President Clinton’s lucrative speaking tours tapped his golden tongue in the service of the gold mine of free trade. During that tour in June 2005, he hauled in some $800,000 at speaking engagements in Mexico City; Bogotá, Colombia; and Sao Paulo, Brazil.

His sponsor was a business group called Gold Service International, an activist proponent of the proposed Colombian Free Trade Agreement. Media reports have previously brought this bit of change in President Clinton’s pocket in the service of free trade to light while also noting that both Sen. Hillary Clinton and President-elect Barack Obama have made statements opposing the Colombian trade pact.

While speaking to a union group last spring during the presidential primary, Obama said he opposed the Colombian free-trade deal "because when organizing workers puts an organizer's life at risk, as it does in Colombia, it makes a mockery of our labor protections."

And President-elect Obama has a point.

Between 2002 (when the current president of Colombia Alvaro Uribe took office) and 2006 (the year after President Clinton earned $800,000 from a group backing the Colombian free trade pact) 510 union activists were murdered in Colombia. And between 2004 and 2006, criminal convictions were reported in only five cases for the 236 trade unionists that were slain during that period.

But President Clinton had no problem taking the money and then a year later, in 2007, accepting a “Colombia is Passion” award from Colombian President Uribe, "for believing in our country and encouraging others to do the same," the AP reported at the time.

President Clinton certainly has proven his “passion” for Colombia over the years, since he ushered in Plan Colombia, which has provided Uribe’s administration with billions of dollars to allegedly fight narco-trafficking — though many critics argue it has failed miserably in stemming the flow of drugs into the U.S. and actually helped to prop up corruption and human-rights abuses in that nation.

And as you might recall, Sen. Clinton, supposedly an opponent of the Colombian free-trade pact, was forced last spring to demote her chief campaign strategist, Mark Penn, after it came to light that he had a side deal with the Colombian government through his PR firm, Burson-Marsteller, to help Uribe advance his free-trade agenda.

Other Gratuities

Though not as high profile as the Mexican and Colombian speaking connections, President Clinton also seems to have mucked up the waters in yet another Latin American nation should President-elect Obama choose his wife to spearhead U.S. diplomacy.

President Clinton enriched himself through a $200,000 speaking fee on behalf of Maruri Communications Group of Guayaquil, Ecuador, in March 2002, according to Sen. Clinton’s financial disclosure report for that year.

Marui Communications was co-founded by Eduardo Maruri, who also happens to be a leader of one of the nation’s political parties, UNO, A New Option. That might create more than a bit of a conflict of interest for the Obama administration should Sen. Clinton be in the position of having to deal with Ecuadorian politicians in the future — a likely probability.

President Clinton also raked in some cash from a few other Latin American speaking engagements that are worth noting:

• Valor Economico S.A. of Sao Paolo, Brazil, one of that nation’s leading business publications — $150,000 in July 2001;

• The Latin American Institute of Education Communication of Monterrey, Mexico — $300,000 in November 2006.

The relationships cemented between the former president and the Latin American business class via these generous gratuities are arguably perceived in that region, by rich and poor alike, as an extension of U.S. policy, since they have been cultivated, in most cases, through actions taken during President Clinton’s term in office — or they have set in motion, at a minimum, perceived conflicts of interest that will likely entangle the Obama administration should it not cut bait with the Clintons.

The potential problems posed by President Clinton’s entangling alliances in Latin America, and elsewhere around the globe, will be solved, press reports indicate, by a simple vetting process, and a promise from President Clinton to submit to prior constraint from the Obama administration with respect to his future foreign ventures.

However, the scales of justice in this world are balanced by history, and no amount of vetting can undue that calculation.

So now we await word from the Obama administration on the much-anticipated announcement of his choice for Secretary of State — reported widely in the media to be Sen. Clinton.

With that possibility in the cards, it is important to consider the path of profit and exclusive alliances her husband, William Jefferson Clinton, has pursued in Latin America, and which the peoples of that land have every reason to presume Sen. Clinton helped to advance as well, since she shared in the spoils.

The new Obama administration will inherit that legacy as a starting point with Sen. Clinton, should she become this nation’s chief diplomat.

The scales of justice — for the victims of Acteal in Mexico and the murdered unionists of Colombia — are in President-elect Obama’s hands now. We can only hope he is not blind to history when making his call.

Stay tuned….