For years in the House and in his current bid for Senate, Florida GOP Rep. Connie Mack has attacked Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez with a zeal possibly unmatched in Congress. Chávez, the congressman says, is a “thugocrat” and serious national security threat to the United States.

But the full story of Mack’s anti-Chávez campaign doesn’t end there. In a little-noticed and highly unusual episode, a trio of Mack staffers worked with a secretive nonprofit group whose sole purpose appears to be promoting the congressman’s crusade against Chávez. It’s not clear who provided the $150,000 used to bankroll the group, which apparently did little else than produce a 30-minute documentary that aired on a Houston TV station and consisted almost entirely of a Mack speech bashing Chávez.

The bizarre sequence of events could prove significant given the highly charged politics surrounding Chávez among Florida’s large Latino electorate — which Mack is aggressively courting — and the controversial role of outside groups in the Sunshine State’s political universe. Recent polls have shown Mack in a tight race with Democratic Sen. Bill Nelson, whom Mack has attacked for being soft on Chávez. Mack has shown strong support among different Latino communities, fueled at least in part by his unrelenting criticism of Chávez.

The Committee to Free Venezuela Foundation, a nonprofit group, was founded in Aug. 2010 in Delaware. The organization is “dedicated to educating the American public and policymakers about the dangers posed by Venezuela’s Socialist Dictator Hugo Chávez,” according to its Internal Revenue Service filings. →