COLD WARRIORS ON PARADE AS BUSH PUTS CLOCK BACK IN LATIN AMERICA

President George Bush speaks some Spanish. His accent is as broad as
Texas and his grasp of vocabulary rarely stretches to complete
sentences, but his country's neighbours to the south still appreciate
the effort.

For Latin American leaders, the new president has demonstrated a
lively interest and even a smattering of knowledge about the region,
which came as a relief after eight years of occasional glances from
Bill Clinton.

But for those with concerns about human rights - and memories long
enough to recall the last time the United States was deeply involved
in the affairs of the rest of the continent - the new-found interest
is cause for some anxiety.

That anxiety has deepened many times over as the new administration
has sought to rehabilitate old hands from the Ronald Reagan era
responsible for its discredited, ideologically driven policy in
Central America.

Those selected for prime jobs include key figures from the
Iran-Contra scandal, one of the most embarrassing of recent US
entanglements, and a string of former Reagan operatives whose job it
was to bolster rightwing authoritarian regimes in the region while
helping to cover up their bloody excesses. The poster boy of this
trend is Elliott Abrams, an Iran-Contra veteran who pleaded guilty to
two misdemeanour charges of withholding information from Congress
about the plot to sell arms to the Iranian government to raise funds
for the rightwing Contra rebels in Nicaragua.

Abrams was pardoned in 1992 by George Bush (the elder), whose son has
just gone one step further. Abrams has now been appointed director of
the National Security Council's office for democracy, human rights
and international operations.

The job title is something of a sick joke among human rights
activists in Central America. As assistant secretary of state for
Latin America under Reagan, Abrams stood out for his glib denials of
atrocities carried out by US allies, such as the 1982 massacre of
civilians in a village called El Mozote in El Salvador by the
country's US-backed army.

In 1986 he misled Congress about the US government's role in
supplying the Contra rebels in Nicaragua, and his own piece of
improvised fundraising -- a trip in disguise to London to solicit a
$10 million contribution from the Sultan of Brunei.

Abrams is only one of the dirty war veterans to find a welcome in the
Bush administration. The nominee for assistant secretary of state for
inter-American affairs, Otto Reich, ran something called the Office
for Public Diplomacy under Reagan, running a "white propaganda"
operation, placing positive pieces about the Contras in US papers.

A comptroller-general report at the time concluded that Reich's
office was "engaged in prohibited, covert propaganda activities
designed to influence the media and the public".

Meanwhile Mr Bush's candidate to be his ambassador at the United
Nations is John Negroponte, who also had a bit-part in the
Iran-Contra affair. As ambassador to Honduras in the first half of
the 1980s Negroponte filtered out reports of atrocities carried out
by the local armed forces so as not to jeopardise the country's role
as a Contra base.

Negroponte, and more probably Reich, could be blocked by the new
Democratic majority in the Senate. Abrams's White House appointment,
however, required no congressional confirmation.

Like Donald Rumsfeld, the defence secretary, all these men are old
cold warriors plucked from obscurity to make policy in a post-cold
war world. Their selection says a lot about the administration in
which they have been asked to serve.

First, they are a political pay-off to rightwing Cuban groups in
Florida that helped Bush to win that crucial, disputed state. Reich
is a Cuban exile himself and, along with Roger Noriega, the nominee
to become US representative to the Organisation of American States,
all are fervent supporters of the Helms-Burton embargo on Cuba.

Second, they reflect the Bush II administration as an ideological
restoration, not so much of Bush I, but of the Reagan court. Simply
having served in the conservatives' version of Camelot is seen as
qualification enough to serve again today.

The ascent of these throwback figures reflects a nostalgia for the
certainties of the Reagan era, when the world was more neatly divided
into friends and enemies, and Central America in particular was
categorised along those simple lines. There is no succour for those
perceived as being on the wrong side of the line, and no offence
against human rights too egregious for those friends on the right
side. It is a policy of choosing sides and then shutting eyes.

This does not bode well for anyone hoping for the US to help find
constructive solutions to intractable problems in Latin America,
where poverty and entrenched social systems are more likely to be at
the root of the problems than the various militant groups roaming the
mountains and jungles. In this respect the Bush team is ideally
suited to pursuing a policy inherited from the Clinton administration
that emphasises a military over a socio-economic approach to Latin
American woes - Plan Colombia.

The plan, earmarked for $1.3bn in US funds, pays lip service to
providing support to Colombian farmers as an alternative to growing
drugs, but on the ground the troops and crop-sprayers have arrived
long ahead of the agricultural extension workers. In its
implementation, the plan also lumps drug lords, leftwing guerrillas
and their local supporters together as one amorphous enemy, while
providing cover for rightwing paramilitaries to commit atrocities
against civilians in pursuit of their own agenda.

All this is, of course, familiar to those who survived Reagan's
policies in the region. It looks as if very little has been learnt
from all the bloodshed and brutality that came from using Latin
America as a battleground for proxy struggles. The transformation of
Colombia's tragedy into a military crusade is a means of imposing
cold war thinking on a complex and troublesome part of the world. And
the new president has just the right men for the job.