U.S. Funds Aid Venezuela Opposition

The United States is using a quasi-governmental organization created during the Reagan years and funded largely by Congress to pump about a million dollars a year into groups opposed to Venezuela President Hugo Chavez, according to officials in Venezuela and a Venezuelan-American attorney.

Some 2,000 pages of newly disclosed documents show that the little-known National Endowment for Democracy is financing a vast array of groups: campesinos, businessmen, former military officials, unions, lawyers, educators, even an organization leading a recall drive against Chavez. Some compare the agency, in certain of its activities, to the CIA of previous decades when the agency was regularly used to interfere in the affairs of Latin American countries.

"It certainly shows an incredible pattern of financing basically every single sector in Venezuelan society," said Eva Golinger, the Brooklyn, N.Y.-based attorney who helped obtain the documents through Freedom of Information Act requests. "That's the most amazing part about it."

Chris Sabatini, the endowment's senior program officer for Latin America and the Caribbean, acknowledged the organization is handing out $922,000 this year, largely (el - almost entirely) to groups opposed to Chavez, and gave out $1,046,323 last year.

In the wake of disclosures about the National Endowment for Democracy, Chavez has dropped his past caution on the topic and now openly accuses the United States of backing the 2002 coup attempt and bankrolling efforts to destabilize and overthrow his government. He is also threatening that Venezuela, one of the world?s top oil suppliers, might cut off shipments to the United States if the Bush administration persists in its efforts to undermine him.

The group's involvement in Venezuela "is in keeping with a pattern from NED's very origins when the Reagan administration used it to do overtly what it was trying to do covertly in Nicaragua -- undermine the Sandinista revolution," said Peter Kornbluh of the National Security Archive in Washington. "The difference of course is that Ch?vez was elected and the Sandinistas were a revolutionary government."

Kornbluh, author of The Pinochet Files and an expert on declassified government documents, added: "The NED was created to supplement the activities of the CIA."

Michael Shifter, a former NED grants officer for Latin America who is now an analyst at the Inter-American Dialogue in Washington, said that if the NED is inserting itself into Venezuela under the premise that Ch?vez is a cruel tyrant who is wiping out democracy and must be stopped, the group "is misreading the situation." While Chavez, a former paratrooper who led his own failed coup in 1992, has shown some troubling autocratic tendencies, Shifter said, democracy remains essentially intact.

The jails hold no political prisoners, he said. The opposition-owned press operates freely, with Chavez critics even calling for coups on national television. Tens of thousands of his opponents regularly protest in the streets. International observers considered the elections that brought Chavez to power free and fair. Foreign investors generally are "happy," Shifter said. Despite significant opposition, Chavez retains a strong base of support.

As for the opposition, he added, "there's this ambivalence about democratic methods."


Bush's Godfather policy - if we like you we'll do nothing otherwise we will bring you down.

Some leaders in [Latin America] are wondering privately whether President Bush has retreated from the American commitment to strengthening their political and economic institutions, a policy of Democratic and Republican administrations for two decades.

Shortly before he left office in 2003, President Fernando Henrique Cardoso of Brazil said in an interview on Mexican television that became famous throughout the region that President Bush "knows nothing about Latin America" and "doesn't have the same web of contacts in the region as previous administrations."

"The first time I talked with President Bush, he showed a complete hands-off attitude" about defending free markets and democratic values, Mr. Cardoso said, adding, "Since we are not a threat, we have been consigned to irrelevance." Today, expressions of such attitudes are a staple in the region's press, and they worry some American experts on Latin America.

To such thinkers a pattern seems to have emerged in which the United States does not come to the rescue of friends of democracy and American policies like Gonzalo S?nchez de Losada in Bolivia or Fernando de la R?a in Argentina, even as it acts to help bring down leaders it cannot stomach, like Mr. Aristide and President Hugo Ch?vez of Venezuela.

As the cases of Argentina, Bolivia and Haiti indicate, the threat to stability today bears little resemblance to the classic Latin American military coup. Instead, the model is one of a popular uproar that forces an elected but unpopular (and in Mr. Aristide's case increasingly autocratic) leader to step down.

So while leaders may no longer look over their shoulders at the barracks, they have to worry about being thrown out of office because an impatient citizenry expects immediate results from a weak state with weak institutions. "That's an extremely disturbing attitude, because it provides no incentive to engage in democratic politics" and "only emboldens and heartens groups that are more interested in violence," said Michael Shifter of Inter-American Dialogue, a Washington-based group.