Sen. John McCain, it seems, has a career-enhancing business that involves advocating for the privatization of telecom companies in Latin America. Still unknown is whether associates of his had anything to do with the recent coup that ousted Manuel Zelaya, president of Honduras, who had opposed the privatization of the national telecom company, Hondutel. Roberto Micheletti, who replaced Zelaya, was CEO of Hondutel in the late 1990s and supported privatizing it.
If telephone interests' fingerprints were on this coup, it wouldn't be the first time. Before Salvador Allende was overthrown in Chile in 1973, International Telephone and Telegraph offered the U.S. government a million dollars to get rid of him because he wanted to nationalize Chile's phone company, 70 percent of which IT&T owned.
McCain is chairman of the International Republican Institute, a group financed with public ($78 million in 2006) and private money. It has close ties to the telecom industry. In 2007, when he was running for president, the Associated Press reported, "McCain's presidential campaign has raised at least $670,000 from 2005-06 [IRI] donors and their employees since its fundraising started last year." Those donors include AT&T, a McCain contributor since 1998; it gave the IRI $200,000 in 2006 and McCain $187,000 in 2008.
Robert-Carmona Borjas, a Venezuelan attorney who campaigned loudly for Zelaya's ouster, last fall held a class on Latin American politics at George Washington University in Washington, D. C. that featured Otto Reich, former U.S. Ambassador to Venezuela, as a speaker. Reich was a foreign policy adviser for McCain in his presidential campaign and has also worked as a lobbyist for AT&T and Bell Atlantic. His firm, Otto Reich Associates, lists as one of its missions: "Identify and secure foreign investment and privatization opportunities in Latin America."
Phoning it in: Late in 2007, asked if telecom companies should be immune from prosecution for helping the government spy on U.S. citizens, McCain told CNET News, "I am… a strong supporter of protecting the privacy of Americans." But in February, 2008, he voted not to revoke their immunity. When corporate interests were on the line, it seems, the senator hung up on that right to privacy.
