U.S. Diplomat Calls African Dictator a Good Guy
February 14th, 2011Via: AP:
A U.S. diplomat called Equatorial Guinea’s dictator of 31 years one of “the good guys” in leaked diplomatic cables and urged Washington to engage with its third largest oil supplier or risk endangering energy security.
In 2009 cables published by WikiLeaks, Anton K. Smith, the ranking U.S. diplomat at the time, described a country beset by foreign and homegrown predators, “sharks … buccaneers and adventurers,” since U.S. wildcatters discovered oil in 1994.
“There are good guys and bad guys here. We need to strengthen the good guys — for all his faults, President Obiang among them — and undercut the bad guys,” Smith wrote in a May 9, 2009 cable.
President Teodoro Obiang is accused of making his family and a small group of people fabulously wealthy off oil, while U.N. figures show child mortality has increased and a third of children do not finish primary school.
In the space of less than one generation, oil wealth has transformed the tiny West African nation of 600,000 from being one of the world’s poorest to one of its richest.
The per capita income is listed at $31,000 a year, but the average citizen is unlikely to live beyond 50. Yet someone in Brazil — with an average income of less than $10,000 — can expect to live to 72.
The U.S. State Department’s annual country report enumerated multiple human rights abuses in Equatorial Guinea, including torture, arbitrary arrest, severe restrictions on freedom of speech and forced child labor.
It has said that Obiang’s regime has either killed or forced into exile a third of the country’s population.
