{"id":43248,"date":"2019-01-28T08:10:11","date_gmt":"2019-01-28T13:10:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=43248"},"modified":"2019-01-28T08:10:13","modified_gmt":"2019-01-28T13:10:13","slug":"the-dirty-hand-of-the-national-endowment-for-democracy-in-venezuela","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=43248","title":{"rendered":"The Dirty Hand of the National Endowment for Democracy in Venezuela"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

The Dirty Hand of the National Endowment for Democracy in Venezuela<\/a><\/h3>\n\n\n\n
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Anti-government protests in Venezuela that seek regime change have been led by several individuals and organizations with close ties to the U.S. government.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Leopoldo Lopez <\/a>and Maria Corina Machado- two of the public leaders behind the violent protests that started in February (2014) \u2013 have long histories as collaborators, grantees and agents of Washington. The National Endowment for Democracy (NED) and the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) have channeled multi-million dollar funding<\/a> to Lopez\u2019s political parties Primero Justicia and Voluntad Popular, and Machado\u2019s NGO Sumate and her electoral campaigns.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

These Washington agencies have also filtered more than $14 million to opposition groups in Venezuela between 2013<\/a> and 2014<\/a>, including funding for their political campaigns <\/a>in 2013 and for the current anti-government protests in 2014. This continues the pattern of financing from the U.S. government to anti-Chavez groups in Venezuela since 2001, when millions of dollars <\/a>were given to organizations from so-called \u201ccivil society\u201d to execute a coup d\u2019etat against President Chavez in April 2002. After their failure days later, USAID opened an Office of Transition Initiatives (OTI) <\/a>in Caracas to, together with the NED, inject more than $100 million in efforts <\/a>to undermine the Chavez government and reinforce the opposition during the following eight years.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

At the beginning of 2011, after being publicly exposed for its grave violations of Venezuelan law and sovereignty, the\u00a0OTI closed its doors in Venezuela\u00a0<\/a>and USAID operations were transferred to its offices in the U.S.. The flow of money to anti-government groups didn\u2019t stop, despite the enactment by Venezuela\u2019s National Assembly of the\u00a0Law of Political Sovereignty and National Self-Determination<\/a>\u00a0at the end of 2010, which outright prohibits foreign funding of political groups in the country. U.S. agencies and the Venezuelan groups that receive their money continue to violate the law with impunity. In the Obama Administration\u2019s Foreign Operations Budgets, between $5-6 million have been included to fund opposition groups in Venezuela through USAID since 2012.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

 \u2026click on the above link to read the rest of the article\u2026<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Dirty Hand of the National Endowment for Democracy in Venezuela Anti-government protests in Venezuela that seek regime change have been led by several individuals and organizations with close ties to the U.S. government. Leopoldo Lopez and Maria Corina Machado- two of the public leaders behind the violent protests that started in February (2014) \u2013 have […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,6],"tags":[6963,24189,21952,24190,9575,851,865],"class_list":["post-43248","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-geopolitics","category-liberty","tag-consortium-news","tag-eva-golinger","tag-national-endowment-for-democracy","tag-us-agency-for-international-development","tag-usaid","tag-venezuela","tag-washington"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43248","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=43248"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43248\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":43249,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43248\/revisions\/43249"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=43248"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=43248"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=43248"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}