Bushwhacked_ Life in George W. Bush's America Large Print - Molly Ivins [84]
RODOLFO TERRAGNO could teach Rove a thing or two about integrity. Eleven years after he blew the whistle on Bush and Enron, Terragno was back in government, as cabinet chief for Argentine president-elect Fernando de la Rua, and George W. Bush was poised to win the U.S. presidential election. Again Terragno refused to budge from his story. The former journalist had been forced to live in exile for ten years, until the military dictatorship ended with the election of Alfonsín. Terragno had stood up to death squads and looked into the eyes of his country’s military dictators. He wasn’t going to change his story to accommodate the Bushes. He still says George W. Bush had called him to pressure him to award a multimillion-dollar pipeline contract to Enron. He did allow that it was a very remote possibility that it might have been another son of George Herbert Walker Bush on the other end of the phone line, but as Terragno had called it earlier and as he recalled it later, the son on the phone was George W.
Terragno said Enron had no real presence in Argentina and no capital. They showed up at the last minute with what he described as a laughable outline of a proposal, after other companies had been working for more than a year to win the huge gasoducto project. Enron tried to lock in natural-gas futures at a price far below the market value—which would have allowed them to sell it at a higher market rate, kind of like they did with electricity in California in 2001.
Bush-family lobbying for Enron didn’t stop with a phone call. In 1990 Poppy became the first American president since Eisenhower to visit Argentina. A few days after the visit, his ambassador in Buenos Aires, Terrence Todman, sent a stern letter to Argentina’s minister of finance. If Argentina didn’t stop giving preference to its domestic industries, eight big American corporations would take their money and go home. Enron was at the top of the list of companies Bush’s ambassador was forcing on the people of Argentina. The ambassador even set a deadline, weeks before the new government of the spectacularly corrupt President Carlos Menem would decide which company got the gasoducto. Todman’s letter was marked “urgent” and “confidential.”
Menem—a golf buddy of Poppy and Bush junior—did the deal for Enron and even allowed the Houston company to take advantage of a tax waiver available to Argentine companies working on projects in the national interest. Neil Bush showed up to play tennis with Menem the day after he won his election; Carlos and Poppy still play golf together.
After Poppy Bush left the White House, he could no longer use the diplomatic corps as Enron capos, so he resorted to a more direct approach. In April 1993 the emir of Kuwait sent a Kuwait Airlines plane to pick up Bush and his entourage. The elder Bush wasn’t quite three months into retirement. He was traveling to Kuwait to accept that nation’s highest award for his role in liberating the Kuwaitis from Saddam Hussein. James Baker III and retired lieutenant general Thomas Kelly tagged along on an Enron sales junket that could earn them hundreds of thousands of dollars—and hundreds of millions for Enron.
The disgraceful account of Baker and Kelly turning a quick buck on the blood of American soldiers who died in the Gulf War was laid out by Seymour Hersh in The New Yorker. Baker III was cavalier in his response to Hersh’s questions. His spokesperson said her boss was doing business on behalf of America. Kelly was more blunt. “This is a full-time job. I