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<font size=3>Part 1 (of 3)<br>
How United States Intervention Against Venezuela Works<br>
</font><font size=3 color="#666666">Tuesday, Sep 06, 2005<br><br>
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<i>By: Philip Agee<br><br>
</i><b><u>Part 1 of 3<br>
<a href="http://www.venezuelanalysis.com/print.php?artno=1548" eudora="autourl">
http://www.venezuelanalysis.com/print.php?artno=1548<br>
</a>Summary, CIA Electoral Interventions, and Nicaragua as a Model for
Venezuela<br><br>
</u>Summary<br><br>
</b>It is no secret that the government of the United States is carrying
out a program of operations in favor of the Venezuelan political
opposition to remove President Hugo Chávez Frías and the coalition of
parties that supports him from power. The budget for this program,
initiated by the administration of Bill Clinton and intensified under
George W. Bush, has risen from some $2 million in 2001 to $9 million in
2005, and it disguises itself as activities to “promote democracy,”
“resolve conflicts,” and “strengthen civic life.” It consists of
providing money, training, counsel and direction to an extensive network
of political parties, NGO’s, mass media, unions, and businessmen, all
determined to end the bolivarian revolutionary process. The program has
clear short, medium, and long-term goals, and adapts easily to changes in
the fluid Venezuelan political process.<br><br>
The program of political intervention in Venezuela is one more of various
in the world principally directed by the Department of State (DS), the
Agency for International Development (AID), the Central Intelligence
Agency (CIA), and the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) along with
its four associated foundations. These are the International Republican
Institute (IRI) of the Republican Party; the National Democratic
Institute (NDI) of the Democratic Party; the Center for International
Private Enterprise (CIPE) of the US Chamber of Commerce; and the American
Center for International Labor Solidarity (ACILS) of the American
Federation of Labor-Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO), the
main US national union confederation. In addition, the program has the
support of an international network of affiliated organizations.
<br><br>
The various organizations carry out their operations through AID
officials at the U.S. Embassy in Caracas and through three “private”
offices in Caracas under the Embassy’s control: the IRI (established in
2000), the NDI (2001), and a contractor of AID, a U.S. consulting firm
called Development Alternatives, Inc. (DAI) (2002). These three
offices develop operations with dozens of Venezuelan beneficiaries to
which they contribute money originating from the State Department, AID,
NED, and, although no proof is yet available, most probably the
CIA. The operations of the first three are detailed extensively in
hundreds of official documents acquired by U.S. journalist Jeremy Bigwood
through demands under the Freedom of Information Act, a law that requires
the declassification and release of government documents, although many
are censured when released.<br><br>
Venezuelan associates of the U.S. intervention programs participated in
the unsuccessful coup against President Chavez in April 2002, in the
petroleum lockout/strike of December 2002 to February 2003, and in the
recall referendum of August 2004. Having failed in their three
first attempts, the U.S. agencies mentioned above are currently planning
and organizing for the Venezuelan national elections of 2005 and
2006. This analysis seeks to show how this program functions and
the danger it represents.<br><br>
<b>A. Some Historical Precedents<br><br>
</b>The U.S. intervention in the Venezuelan electoral process is nothing
more than the continuation of a practice that began with the
establishment of the CIA in 1947. In October of that year, just a month
after President Truman signed the law establishing the Agency, he ordered
the CIA to begin operations in Italy to prevent a victory of the
Communist Party of Italy (PCI) in the elections planned for April
1948. These would be the first national elections since the end of
World War II, and the communists, who had wide prestige due to their role
in the resistance to fascism, were perceived in Washington as a real
threat to U.S. control of the country. In alliance with the
Vatican, the CIA organized multiple secret operations to discredit the
PCI and to support the Christian Democratic Party. Press reports indicate
that Truman transferred $10 million to the CIA for this intervention, a
lot of money for the time. The result was as desiredthe Christian
Democrats won easily.<br><br>
The practice of secret electoral operations by the CIA continued, and
became a category of routine covert operations, along with the
penetration and manipulation of political parties; unions; student and
youth organizations; cultural, professional and intellectual societies;
women’s and religious organizations; and the communications media.
The reach of these operations was global, and practically all
organizations of civil society were targets depending on the political
situation of the moment. The 1976 House of Representatives investigation
of the CIA’s history revealed electoral interventions had been the most
frequent category of CIA covert actions. <br><br>
From the beginning of covert actions, the CIA was plagued by the
perennial difficulty faced by their beneficiaries to justify or conceal
the funds the Agency gave them. To resolve this problem in part,
the CIA established relations with cooperating U.S. foundations through
which it channelled funds to foreign recipients. It also created a
network of its own foundations that sometimes were nothing more than
paper entities managed by lawyers on contract with the Agency.<br><br>
In February 1967 a large portion of the CIA’s covert financing system
collapsed when the U.S. press revealed the names of foundations used and
of many of the subsidized foreign organizations. Two months after this
scandal Congressman Dante Fascell of Miami, well known for his links with
the CIA and the Cuban exile community, proposed in Congress the
establishment of a private foundation to openly finance foreign private
organizations that until then had been financed secretly by the
CIA. But at that time Fascell’s proposal failed to win support, and
the CIA continued as the arm of the government responsible for covert
actions like those that provoked the 1973 military coup in
Chile.<br><br>
Then, beginning in 1975 with the defeat of the United States in Vietnam,
coupled with the investigations of the CIA that took place that year in
both houses of Congress, resulting in constant scandals culminating with
Watergate, a new school of thought among high level American foreign
policy makers emerged. During the administration of Jimmy Carter
(1977-1981) general agreement developed in the foreign policy
establishment that the repressive dictatorships supported by the United
States around the world (Philippines, Iran, the Southern Cone of South
America, Central America, etc.) were not the best solutions to
maintaining the long-term interests of the country. These interests
fundamentally were free access to primary resources, labor, and worldwide
markets especially those of the so-called Third World. This new
concept favoring democracy over authoritarian regimes came to be known as
the Democracy Project. In 1979 the American Political Foundation
(APF) was established with both government and private financing, and
with the participation of both political parties as well as business and
union sectors. Its purpose was to determine how the United States
could better protect its foreign interests through freely elected
civilian governments based on the U.S. federal system or the European
parliamentary model. <br><br>
The APF began studies and investigations under the direction of a
high-ranking CIA official assigned to the National Security
Council. Its conclusions after two years’ work were to adopt
something similar to the practice of the Federal Republic of Germany in
which the Liberal, Social Democratic and Christian Democratic parties
each had private foundations that were financed by the federal
government. These foundations supported political parties and other
organizations abroad that shared their political persuasions. The APF
recommendations were broadly accepted, and in November 1983 Congress
approved a law that established the National Endowment for Democracy
awarding it $14 million for fiscal year 1984. <br><br>
This new foundation, NED, was put under the control of the State
Department, and it would channel its funds, approved annually by
Congress, through four other associated foundations set up for this
purpose: the International Republican Institute (IRI) of the Republican
Party; the National Democratic Institute (NDI) of the Democratic Party;
the Center for International Private Enterprise (CIPE) of U.S. Chamber of
Commerce; and the American Center for International Labor Solidarity
(ACILS) of the AFL-CIO. Dante Fascell, the Miami Congressman who since
1967 had never ceased to promote this program, was named to the NED’s
first Board of Directors.<br><br>
The NED and its associated foundations were conceived as a mechanism to
channel funds toward political parties and other foreign civil society
institutions that favored U.S. interests, above all the neo-liberal
agenda of privatization, deregulation, control of unions, reduction of
social services, elimination of tariffs, and free access to
markets. The entire mechanism was, and is, nothing more than an
instrument of U.S. government foreign policy. Nevertheless the NED
and its associated foundations have always tried to maintain the false
impression that their operations are private, and in fact NED has the
legal status of an NGO. <br><br>
The U.S. Agency for International Development (AID), and the CIA as well,
also fully participate in this program “to promote democracy.” In 1984,
the first year of NED operations, AID established a bureau called the
Office of Democratic Initiatives (ODI), which in 1994 was renamed the
Office of Transition Iniciatives (OTI), with the function, apart and in
addition to NED, of channeling funds to civil society and electoral
processes in other countries. Most likely the first officials of OTI were
CIA electoral and civil society operations specialists who were
integrated into AID. Something similar had happened in the early
1960’s when the Office of Public Safety was established in AID to support
and train foreign police officers. Officials of the CIA who had
been working for years in police assistance programs, under the internal
CIA code name of DTBAIL, simply transferred their cover to the new AID
office in order to expand these programs as “technical assistance.” AID
established “Public Safety” offices in many foreign countries and trained
tens of thousands of police officers who became some of the worst abusers
of human rights around the world.<br><br>
Since the 1980’s ODI/OTI has financed projects directly through the four
foundations associated with NED, and in recent years OTI has channeled
much more money to them than has NED. These two funding sources,
OTI and NED, have also channeled funds through an extensive network of
U.S. foundations, consulting, and public relations firms. Such
mechanisms help the final beneficiaries conceal their financing by the
U.S. government that nevertheless maintains complete control over the use
of its funds. <br><br>
Additionally the CIA can provide funds secretly to those “openly”
provided by NED and OTI, for example in the form of supplementary
salaries to assure the loyalty and discipline of foreign project
leaders. Likewise, certain projects are financed only in part by
NED and OTI and require that the beneficiaries seek additional
funds. The CIA can provide these funds as if they were from
individuals, businesses, or other private institutions.<br><br>
Both AID and NED insist that they are prohibited from financing foreign
political parties directly, and thus they cynically maintain that their
activities are not partisan but dedicated to the “strengthening of civil
society.” Nevertheless their programs always support the political forces
that favor U.S. interests and work against those opposed. In doing so
they have no difficulty giving financial and other support to politial
parties via their networks of civil associations, consulting firms and
foundations. <br><br>
<b>B. Nicaragua: the First Operation of the New “Project Democracy”
<br><br>
</b>One of the first priorities of U.S. foreign policy during the decade
of the 1980s was to remove the Sandinista National Liberation Front
(FSLN) from power in Nicaragua. The intervention took two fundamental
approaches. One route was the paramilitary guerrilla force known as the
“contras” that was organized, supplied, and directed first by the CIA and
later by the Oliver North network based in the White House and National
Security Council. The other route was electoral with operations organized
by the CIA, AID, and NED with its four associated foundations. For NED
Nicaragua would be the first test of its ability to channel funds and
direct the development of a political opposition movement that could
triumph at the polls. (This history can be found thoroughly detailed in
<i>A Faustian Bargain: U.S. Intervention in the Nicaraguan Elections</i>
by William I. Robinson, Westview Press, Boulder, Colorado,
1992.)<br><br>
The terrorism, human tragedy, and economic damage in Nicaragua caused by
the contras are well known. Nonetheless, the contras were defeated on the
battlefield. (In addition to Robinson, <i>op.cit., </i>see Holly Sklar,
<i>Washington’s War on Niaragua,</i> South End Press, Boston, 1988.)
During eight years of struggle (1980-1987) the contras could not take and
hold any Nicaraguan village or municipality. But as a result of the
disasterous effects in the entire region of this war and of those in
Guatemala and El Salvador, in 1987 the Central American presidents agreed
to a package of compromises called the Esquipulas Agreements in order to
achieve peace. These agreements sought to transform the military
conflicts into civic-political struggles, and they created an opening for
a massive U.S. intervention in the Nicaraguan electoral process
that resulted in the defeat of the Sandinista Front in 1990. <br><br>
Already the CIA had intervened in the Nicaraguan elections of 1984 when
they organized the presidential candidacy of opposition leader Arturo
Cruz. At the time the Agency was paying Cruz a salary of $6000 a month.
But his candidacy was false because the plan was for him to run and then
renounce his candidacy just before the elections, alleging that the
Sandinistas had rigged the electoral process in its favor. Various
parties nevertheless participated, and the Sandinista Front captured 67%
of the vote. For the 1990 elections the United States tried new
techniques based on decades of CIA experience in electoral
processes.<br><br>
The new electoral intervention began in earnest after the Esquipulas
Agreements in 1987, and consisted of developing three principal
mechanisms: 1) A coalition of the main opposition parties backing the
same candidates for the presidency and other positions; 2) A political
front of parties, unions, business organizations, and civil associations;
and 3) A civic society of national scope to promote electoral
participation and monitor elections, supposedly non-partisan but in
reality anti-Sandinista. Below we will see that the United States
at present is applying this same formula in Venezuela in preparation for
the 2005 and 2006 elections in that country.<br><br>
Practically since the Sandinista triumph over Somoza in July 1979, the
opposition, including the newspaper <i>La Prensa,</i> had received secret
funds from the Carter Administration through the CIA. The core of this
opposition was the Superior Council of Private Enterprise (<i>Consejo
Superior de la Empresa Privada, COSEP</i>), a group of right-wing
businessmen, financiers and landowners. In 1981 the Reagan Administration
offered COSEP $1 million in AID funds to establish and fortify the
Nicaraguan Democratic Coordinator (<i>Coordinadora Democrática
Nicaragüense, CDN</i>), which, in addition to COSEP, would include four
conservative parties and two union groups affiliated with AFL-CIO
programs. The CDN would be the vehicle for the aborted 1984
presidential campaign of Arturo Cruz, and for the maintanence of the
political opposition until the elections of 1990. This
political-propaganda program, parallel to the terrorism and the economic
destruction of the contras, was facilitated by $14 million in funds from
the CIA in 1983 and at least $10 million annually from the CIA, AID, and
NED (beginning in 1984, its first year of operations) until 1988 when the
electoral campaign began.<br><br>
The most difficult task for the interventionist troika of the CIA, NED
and AID was to unify the political opposition. In this process NED
played a key role acting through its associated foundations: NDI (the
Democratic Party), IRI (the Republican Party), and ACILS (the AFL-CIO
foundation), and it used as its main instrument the CDN. NDI
and IRI established an office in Managua to direct their
operations. Always using money as the main incentive, NDI, IRI and
ACILS managed to establish unified anti-Sandinista women’s, youth, and
labor union fronts by 1988. In July of the following year, only 6
months before the elections, they were able at last to achieve a
political coalition of 14 of the more than 20 opposition parties. The
front was called the National Opposition Union (<i>Unión Nacional
OpositoraUNO</i>). A month after its formation UNO named Violeta
Chamorro as its presidential candidate. Chamorro, owner of the
CIA-funded opposition newspaper <i>La Prensa</i>, had in fact already
been pre-selected by the Bush administration as itscandidate.<br><br>
<br>
The third necessary political mechanism, after the CDN and UNO, was a
broad civic front, supposedly non-partisan but totally anti-Sandinista,
to encourage people to register to vote and to assure the highest
possible voter participation on election day. Another task for this front
would be to monitor the registration and electoral processes, especially
on election day, in order to assure a clean and transparent election.
Again the CDN played the key role. In August 1989, a month after
the formation of UNO and after more than one year of organizing
activities, Vía Cívica was launched as an organization for “education” in
civic duties; to assure extensive voting; to monitor voting conditions on
election day; to denounce any indication of fraud; and to conduct surveys
and vote counts parallel to the official counts of the Supreme Electoral
Counsel. The activists of Vía Cívica were paid volunteers, and
their member organizations included the women’s, youth, and worker’s
associations that the CDN had established for this purpose. <br><br>
To achieve all these objectives, NED in 1987 brought a U.S. consulting
firm, the Delphi International Group, to Nicaragua. NED had employed this
firm for political tasks in Latin America since 1984, and in Nicaragua
Delphi provided organizers and propagandists, becoming the major
recipient of NED funds while it carried out key tasks in the utilization
of the CDN to form youth and women’s fronts, Vía Cívica and the UNO
political coalition. Delphi was without a doubt the principal U.S. actor
in these operations, and it was additionally in charge of UNO electoral
publicity through <i>La Prensa</i> and various radio and television
stations. <br><br>
To complement and support activities carried out in Nicaraguan, the State
Department, AID, CIA and NED in 1988 established operations centers in
Miami, Caracas and San José. These served mainly to channel funds
toward beneficiaries in Nicaragua and for meetings outside the
country. Carlos Andrés Pérez, who began his second presidency in
Venezuela in February 1989, facilitated these operations through two
foundations in Caracas under his control. In San José NED had already
established in 1984 the Center for Democratic Consultation
(<i>Centro para la Asesoría Democrática, CAD</i>) to promote civic
movements throughout Central America, but in 1987 Nicaragua became its
main focus. CAD channeled funds and publicity materials to Managua and
organized training courses for opposition activists. For the
pre-electoral campaign, beginning in 1988, CAD became the main rearguard
base to assure logistics and communications among the different
opposition organizations. <br><br>
<br>
When the electoral campaign began in autumn of 1989, the new Bush
administration assigned $9 million to NED to support UNO and associated
groups. These funds resulted from a strange pact negotiated by
former president Jimmy Carter with the Sandinista leadership in which the
United States would be permitted to “openly” finance the opposition
through NED, but 50% of the funds would have to go to the Supreme
Electoral Counsel to finance the elections. In return, the United
States promised not to intervene with additional secret funds from the
CIA. The CIA secretly violated this commitment immediately, but
distribution of the “open” funds by NED to UNO proceeded. The total
amount that the United States invested in the Nicaraguan electoral
campaign of 1989-90 has never officially been revealed, but has been
estimated at more than $20 million.<br><br>
When the elections took place in February 1990, Nicaragua already had
suffered 10 years of terrorist war and enormous economic
devastation. The United States had imposed an economic embargo in
1985 to worsen the situation, and in breach of the Esquipulas Agreements,
that included a ceasefire, the contras were not demobilized. They
remained intact and constantly threatened the return of war. During the
electoral campaign the contras carried out constant armed propaganda
actions to remind the population of its presence. The threat of
more war, the economic ruin that affected the great majority of the
population, and the promise from the United States of a large amount of
reconstruction aid for a UNO governmentall these factors took their toll
at the moment of voting. UNO won with 54% of the vote over the Sandinista
Front’s 42%.<br><br>
It is impossible to speculate with certainty what would have been the
results of these elections had it not been for the massive intervention
by the United States. Nevertheless it cannot be denied that the
intervention had an important impact, above all in the formation of the
UNO coalition and in the concentration of opposition activists in Vía
Cívica. Neither can the importance of the major role played by the
consulting firm Delphi International Group be underestimated. What
is certain is that the combined operations of NED, AID and the CIA, as
well as the network of private U.S. contractors, were seen in Washington
as a great success. It was a formula that would be repeated in
future foreign electoral interventions, including Nicaragua again to
assure that the Sandinista Front did not return to power. In fact,
a month after the elections the Bush Administration asked Congress to
approve $300 million in support for Nicaragua that included $5 million
for AID, along with NED, to sustain for future use the organizations
utilized in the 1990 electoral campaign. Next, we will see how this
formula is now being applied in Venezuela.<br><br>
<i>Translated from Spanish by Dawn Gable<br><br>
<dl>
<dd>Part 2:
<a href="http://www.venezuelanalysis.com/articles.php?artno=1549">Use of
a Private U.S. Corporate Structure to Disguise a Government
Program</a>
<a href="http://www.venezuelanalysis.com/articles.php?artno=1549">
<br><br>
</a>
<dd>Part 3: Agency for International Development with the Foundations of
the Republican and Democratic Parties (to come)<br><br>
</dl>Original source / relevant link: <br>
<a href="http://www.rebelion.org/noticia.php?id=18132">Rebelión.org</a>
<br><br>
</i></font><x-sigsep><p></x-sigsep>
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