Terrorism franchise: The Gene Sharp Method

Printed in the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela

April, 2014

Gene Sharp is a former American military who nowadays teaches political sciences at the University of Massachusetts. He founded the Albert Einstein Institute and is the author of an essay entitled From dictatorship to democracy, which is the result of a pragmatic and political analysis of supposedly non-violent actions as a means to undermine the stability of the constituted power. The work, translated in more than 30 languages, describes methods to overthrow governments; these methods are divided into three big stages: the protest, the non-cooperation, and the intervention, which are always carried out after electoral processes. These three stages are subdivided into five stages that, as it will be seen, have been rigorously applied in Venezuela after the lack of acknowledgment from the opposition of the results obtained during the presidential elections on April 14, 2013.

1. SOFTENING (by means of 4th Generation War): development of opinion matrix focused on real o potential deficit; promotion of conflicts and dissatisfaction; promotion of uneasiness factors, mainly: shortage, criminality, citizens’ safety, dollar manipulation, lockout strikes, corruption complaints; promotion of sectarian intrigues, and unity fracture.

2. DELEGITIMISING: manipulation on anticommunist or antipopulist prejudices; propel of advertising campaigns to defend freedom of press, human rights, and public freedom; accusations of totalitarianism and single systems of values; ethical-politic fracture.

3. STREETS WARMUPS: promote of street mobilization; creation of a fighting platform that globalizes political and social demands; generalization of all kind of protests, propel of government failures and mistakes; coordination of protests, blockage, and take of public institutions (disrespect towards institutions) that turn the confrontation into radical.

4. COMBINATION OF DIFFERENT WAYS OF FIGHTING: organization of loutishes and take of emblematic institutions, with the aim to turn them into advertising platforms; development of operations of psychological war and armed actions in order to justify repressive measures and create an atmosphere of ungovernability; propel of rumors campaigns among military forces and try to demoralize the security bodies; promotion of international isolation and economic siege.

5. institutional fracture : based on street actions, take of institutions, and military uprising, the President is forced to quit. In the case of failure, the pressure on the streets is maintained and armed resistance is assumed, preparing the stage for a military intervention or a prolonged civil war.

This coup protocol has been applied several times around the world against governments that oppose Washington’s rulings with different levels of success. It is clear that in Venezuela this plan is currently in its fourth stage, the most powerful of all since it includes violence by means of armed actions and permanent provocation towards the police forces in order to promote repression.

The main protagonists of this subversive script in Venezuela are the members of a varied group of students referred to as manitas blancas (white hands), made up of youth of the extreme right wing, mainly of private universities.

The students of public universities in Venezuela, which surpass the private universities in enrolments, have had little or none participation in the violent actions, despite their traditions of fight and historical sense of their communities.

The visible heads of the movement known as manitas blancas (their hands are painted white according to the soft coup handbook) are supposedly young people (some of them older than 40 years) who have made student representation in the universities their way of living and have studied endlessly in their institutions, as are the cases of Gaby Arellano and Vilcar Fernández; these two are experts in destabilization thanks to the advices received in training sessions on the soft coup designed by Gene Sharp.

Those are the “students” that, by late January 2014, began a series of so called aggressive actions simultaneously in different regions of the country, which lead to violent actions near the universities chosen to activate the street warm-ups stage of the coup plot. The white hands had received the express order of mobilize from the right-winged leaders Leopoldo

López and María Corina Machado in a bizarre press conference that took place on January 23, and that, at that moment, was seen by distracted analysts as an untimely, politically incompressible act. “The streets must be set on fire”, Machado said to her supporters, while López urged them to keep the protest actions until Nicolás Maduro would leave the Presidency; it happened in a moment of quietness after the widely positive results for the Government during the “plebiscite” that had taken place on December 8.

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Respect Venezuela

Nicolás Maduro Moros

President of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela

Delcy Rodríguez

Minister of People’s Power for Communication and Information

Rolando Corao

Vice-Minister for Communication and Information

William Castillo

Vice-Minister for Television

Francisco Pérez Santana

Vice-Minister for Radio

Felipe Saldivia

Vice-Minister for Printed Media

José Miguel España

Vice-Minister for Social Networking