Hugo Chavez, fasten your seatbelt!

[reprehensor]

The Nature of CIA Intervention in Venezuela

Philip Agee is a former CIA operative who left the agency in 1967 after becoming disillusioned by the CIA’s support for the status quo in the region. Says Agee, “I began to realize that what I and my colleagues had been doing in Latin America in the CIA was no more than a continuation of nearly five-hundred years of this, exploitation and genocide and so forth. And I began to think about what, until then would have been unthinkable, which was to write a book on how it all works.” The book, Inside the Company: CIA Diary, was an instant best-seller and was eventually published in over thirty languages. In 1978, three years after the publication of CIA Diary, Agee and a group of like-minded journalists began publishing the Covert Operations Information Bulletin (now Covert Action Quarterly), as part of a strategy of “guerilla journalism” aimed at destabilizing the CIA and exposing their operations.

Not surprisingly, the response of the US government and the CIA in particular to Agee’s work has been somewhat aggressive, and he has been forced to divide his time since the 1970s between Germany and Cuba. He currently represents a Canadian petroleum technology firm in Latin America.

Despite the recent rash of anti-Chávez editorials in the US media, and threatening statements made by a whole slew of senior US government officials at both the Departments of State and Defense, Agee sees a more cynical US strategy in Venezuela. Building on the work of scholar William I. Robinson on US intervention in Nicaragua throughout the 1980s, and recently published documents detailing CIA and US government activity in Venezuela, Agee suggests that the CIA’s strategy of “democracy promotion” is in full-force in Venezuela.

As with Nicaragua in the 1980s, a series of foundations are providing millions of dollars of funding to opposition forces in Venezuela, meted out by a private consulting firm contracted by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID). Assistant Secretary of State, Bureau of Western Hemisphere Affairs Roger Noriega recently reaffirmed the State Departments commitment to this strategy, telling the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on March 2nd, 2005, “we will support democratic elements in Venezuela so that they can continue to maintain the political space to which they are entitled.” The funding of these “democratic elements” has as its ultimate goal the unification of Venezuela’s splintered opposition (formerly loosely grouped into the Coordinadora Democratica) for the upcoming Presidential elections in 2006. But failing a victory in 2006, cautions Agee, the CIA et al. will remain, their eyes set on the 2012 elections, and the 2018 elections, ad infinitum, “because what’s at stake is the stability of the political system in the United States, and the security of the political class in the United States.”

Continued at link, very enlightening interview...