Venezuela's Guaido calls for massive protest as blackout drags on

[Judi Lynn]

65. Maybe they can get some relief when their next payday from N.E.D. arrives for them.)

Here's something I just saw after I started to respond to your post, from the Washington Post:

The U.S. has quietly supported the Venezuelan opposition for years

By Timothy M. Gill
February 19
While Venezuela’s political crisis has sunk below most Americans’ news horizons, the Trump administration has taken several unprecedented steps during the past few weeks.

First, the administration indicated it would support a military overthrow of the socialist government headed by President Nicolás Maduro. Second, the administration, alongside two dozen other countries, recognized opposition leader Juan Guaidó as the legitimate, interim president of Venezuela.

However unprecedented these two actions may be, the United States and Venezuela have had an acrimonious relationship for the past 20 years — in part because the United States has long supported the Venezuelan political opposition. Here’s how this past month’s actions grow from the approaches of the past four presidential administrations.

1. The United States has long been strategizing with opposition political parties
Shortly after Hugo Chávez’s initial election in 1998, the U.S.-funded National Endowment for Democracy (NED) took the lead in training and guiding political parties on how they might best compete against him. One of the NED’s sub-agencies, the International Republican Institute (IRI), led these efforts.

The IRI sponsored such Republican politicians as Darryl Howard, the executive director of the Oregon Republican Party, and Mike Collins, the former Republican Party press secretary, to travel to Venezuela and meet individually with Venezuelan party leaders from the opposition, offering guidance on how they might electorally defeat Chávez. IRI members also ran political workshops for party members on issues such as constructing political platforms and reaching out to youth. One IRI contractor who helped facilitate some of these workshops bluntly described their objective to me: to help the opposition “get [their] s— together so they could defeat Chávez.” In 2006, the IRI brought five technical specialists to assist the campaign of Manuel Rosales, the opposition’s presidential candidate, to monitor elections on the day of the event.

U.S. diplomats, including several ambassadors, also told me how they advised the opposition. One ambassador revealed she “met with the opposition — I can’t tell you how many times. I told them they need to come up with a plan and needed to unite. There were 50 opposition parties registered!” In doing so, she urged the opposition not to splinter its vote and hand Chávez an easy victory.

More:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2019/02/19/the-u-s-has-covertly-supposed-the-venezuelan-opposition-for-years/

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01 March 2014, 1:00am
Does It Matter That the Venezuelan Opposition Is Funded by the US?
Opposition parties in Venezuela have been propped up by millions in US aid.

In the summer of 2007, the vehemently pro–Hugo Chávez journalist and lawyer Eva Golinger got on Venezuelan state TV and, with the help of a flow chart hand-drawn on flimsy poster board, called out several fellow journalists who had allegedly accepted US funding to help bring down the country's famously left-wing, anti-American president.

“These journalists are destabalising agents,” Golinger said, and explained that that they had participated in programs paid for by the US that were designed to promote a pro-American agenda, the goal of which was to create anti-socialist sentiment in Venezuela.

The accusation didn't cause the kind of uproar Golinger was hoping for. The journalists were briefly investigated by a government committee, but that prompted an immediate public outcry – in fact, many Chavistas rejected such McCarthy-like tactics, claiming they made them look bad.

The incident did cause the US Embassy in Caracas some concern, however. In a cable released by Wikileaks titled “IV Participants and USAID Partners Outed, Again” that describes Golinger's TV appearance and the aftermath, an embassy official wrote that people were becoming wary of getting involved with any enterprise funded by the US. “It is particularly hard to persuade Chávez supporters to participate in a program they perceived as potentially career-ending,” the official wrote. In other words, though Golinger embarrassed herself with her shit-stirring, the US was really trying to bring down Chávez by funneling money to his opponents.

Since then, the US has continued its longstanding practice of funding programs that it often claims are aimed at promoting fair elections and human rights, but also strengthen Venezuelan opposition groups – and this money may be influencing the ongoing protests that have helped put the country in a political crisis.

More:
https://www.vice.com/en_uk/article/av44kg/does-the-uss-funding-of-the-venezuelan-opposition-matter

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Buying Venezuela’s Press With U.S. Tax Dollars
The U.S. State Department is secretly funneling millions of dollars to Latin American journalists. Newly released documents show that between 2007 and 2009, the State Department channeled at least $4 million to journalists in Bolivia, Nicaragua, and Venezuela through the Washington-based Pan American Development Foundation (PADF). Thus far, only documents pertaining to Venezuela have been released. They reveal that the PADF, collaborating with Venezuelan NGOs associated with the country’s political opposition, has been supplied with at least $700,000 to give out journalism grants and sponsor journalism education programs. In funding the Venezuelan news media, the United States is funding one of the opposition’s most powerful weapons against President Hugo Chávez.

July 15, 2010

Jeremy Bigwood

https://nacla.org/news/buying-venezuela%E2%80%99s-press-us-tax-dollars

ETC., ETC., ETC., ETC., ETC. . . . .