FLASHBACK: Full Disclosure: Buying Venezuela’s Press with US Tax Dollars

The US has been covertly funding opposition-aligned journalists in Venezuela, says Jeremy Bigwood.

Jeremy Bigwood is an investigative reporter whose work has appeared in American Journalism Review, The Village Voice, and several other publications. He covered Latin American conflicts from 1984 to 1994 as a photojournalist.

This article is reproduced, excluding endnotes, from NACLA Report on the Americas (September/October 2010). *Third World Resurgence No. 240/241, August-September 2010, pp 66-69

THE US State Department is secretly funnelling millions of dollars to Latin American journalists, according to documents obtained in June under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). The 20 documents released to this author – including grant proposals, awards, and quarterly reports – show that between 2007 and 2009, the State Department’s little-known Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labour (state.gov/g/drl) channelled at least $4 million to journalists in Bolivia, Guatemala, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela, through the Pan American Development Foundation (PADF, padf.org), a Washington-based grant maker. The documents shed light on one small portion of the overall US effort to covertly fund journalists all over the world.

The records released thus far pertain only to one particular programme, called ‘Fostering Media Freedom in Venezuela’, for which the State Department gave PADF $700,000 for the period 2007-09. The programme provides journalism grants to unnamed individuals and sponsors journalism education programmes at four regional universities. In carrying out this project, PADF collaborated with Venezuelan media NGOs associated with the country’s political opposition, only two of whose names were not redacted from the declassified documents. It is unclear whether the programme has continued. If it has, and the State Department gave PADF the previously awarded amount, the US government will have spent almost $1.5 million on journalism development in Venezuela since 2007.

Both the State Department and PADF declined to comment for this article.

‘Fostering Media Freedom in Venezuela’ is just one small component of the US government’s covert funding of foreign news outlets and journalists. Not only the State Department but also the Department of Defence, the US Agency for International Development (USAID), the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), the Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG), and the US Institute for Peace (USIP) all support ‘media development’ programmes in more than 70 countries. The US government spent $82 million in 2006 alone on global media initiatives (not counting money from the Pentagon, the CIA, or US embassies), according to a 2008 NED report.

These government entities fund hundreds of foreign non-governmental organisations (NGOs), journalists, policy makers, journalist associations, media outlets, training institutes, and academic journalism faculties. Grant sizes range from a few thousand dollars to millions. For some groups and individuals, the funding can come from more than one US government source and can be disbursed either directly from a US embassy or through intermediaries, which are usually US subcontractors or ‘independent international non-profit organisations’, like PADF.

By serving as an intermediary, PADF has until now hidden the State Department’s role in developing Venezuelan media – one of the political opposition’s most powerful weapons against President Hugo Ch vez and his Bolivarian movement. Neither the State Department, PADF, nor the Venezuelans whom they fund have disclosed the programme’s existence. Yet, as one document notes, the State Department’s own policies require ‘all publications’ that it funds to ‘acknowledge the support’. The provision was simply waived for PADF. ‘For the purposes of this award,’ the document reads, ‘ …the recipient is not required to publicly acknowledge the support of the US Department of State.’ The document does not explain how the programme’s purposes – which, among other things, include establishing professional norms in journalism – do not require PADF or its ‘subgrantees’ to acknowledge that they are funded by the US government.

Although $700,000 may not seem like a lot of money, the funds have been strategically designed to underwrite the best of Venezuela’s news media and recruit young journalists. The documents detail a series of grants doled out to unnamed individual journalists, including two kinds of grants ‘for innovative reporting and investigative reporting’, with the winning content disseminated online ‘and to selected independent media audiences’. We don’t know who won these grants, but we do know that they were substantial. One of them consisted of 10 one-year grants of $25,000 each. For many journalists, especially in Latin America, $25,000 a year is a high salary. PADF also holds ‘2 competitions, one per year, for a total of $20,000 in funding awarded to at least six entries’.

PADF’s Venezuela programme also supports journalism education, which is undertaken to produce investigative work ‘via innovative media technologies’. This grant supports ‘a series of trainings for local journalists focused on the basic and advanced skills of Internet-based reporting and investigative reporting’, aiming to engage ‘a wide range of Venezuelan media organisations and news outlets, including four university partners’. A quarterly report from January-March 2009 mentions courses at Andr‚s Bello Catholic University, the Metropolitan University, the Central University of Venezuela, and Santa Mar¡a University. PADF proposes targeting universities in the capital city of Caracas as well as regional campuses in ‘the Andes, Center East, Zulia and the Western region of the country’.

These initiatives have been undertaken with the collaboration of well-connected opposition NGOs that focus on media. Only one of the documents names any of these organisations – which was probably an oversight on the State Department’s part, since the recipients’ names and a lot of other information are excised in the rest of the documents. A 2007 document names Espacio P£blico (espaciopublico.org) and Instituto Prensa y Sociedad (ipys.org.ve) as recipients of ‘subgrants’. Neither of these organisations has disclosed its participation in the PADF Venezuela programme. On its website, Espacio P£blico describes itself as a ‘non-profit, non-governmental civil association that is independent and autonomous of political parties, religious institutions, international organisations or any government’ (emphasis added). The other ‘subgrantee’, the Venezuelan chapter of Instituto Prensa y Sociedad (IPyS-Ve), is a Peru-based journalism organisation funded by USAID and the NED. Both groups strongly criticise the Ch vez government for its alleged assault on free expression and other human rights in Venezuela.

The disclosure in July of these organisations’ collaboration with PADF led to calls in Venezuela for a public investigation, forcing Espacio P£blico and IPyS to issue statements on the matter. ‘In Venezuela, it is in no way a crime’ for NGOs to accept international financing, IPyS declared. The organisation denounced the revelations as the latest example in a series of ‘threats, slanders, and defamatory campaigns… put forward by [pro-Ch vez] political agents with absolute impunity’. This was little more than an attempt, IPyS emphasised, to paint the organisation and its allies as foreign agents of the US government. Espacio P£blico issued a similar statement from the National College of Journalists and the National Press Workers’ Union.

Neither statement addressed the real issue: the NGOs’ failure to disclose the US government’s funding of their activities. Moreover, the documents released thus far do not indicate that the Venezuelan journalists and students who participated in this programme were acting as direct ‘agents’ of the US government. Indeed, those who benefited from the PADF grants and education programmes may not have known that the State Department was funding them. And so far as we know, the State Department was not dictating editorial policy in Venezuela or providing its sponsored journalists with talking points. However, the NGOs that worked with PADF targeted their grants and training programmes at journalists who were disposed to pursue reporting that bolstered the US posture toward Venezuela – while never disclosing the source of their funding.

Traditionally, the leading ‘democracy promoter’ in Venezuela is USAID, followed by the NED, with about a third as much funding. In 2005 an FOIA request yielded documents showing that the two entities were underhandedly directing millions of dollars to Venezuelan opposition NGOs. At the time, USAID’s main intermediary was Development Alternatives Inc. (DAI), a Maryland-based contractor, along with smaller entities associated with the US government, including the National Democratic Institute, the International Republican Institute, and Freedom House. After these findings were published, DAI was forced to close its office in Caracas. With the USAID and NED covers blown wide open, the US government apparently sought new funding channels, at least one of which PADF has provided.

PADF’s main office is housed within the Organisation of American States (OAS), granting its officers privileged access to the big players in hemispheric affairs. Funded by various US government agencies and a few private sources – including Stanford Financial Group (recently under investigation for bad banking practices and its CIA connections) and ex-Cuban rum maker Bacardi – PADF has worked in Latin America and the Caribbean since 1962, generally focusing on economic development and disaster relief. Its mission statement, however, does leave open the possibility of getting into the ‘democracy promotion’ racket: The online mission statement says the organisation ’empowers disadvantaged people and communities’ not only ‘to achieve sustainable economic and social progress’ but also ‘to strengthen their … civil society’ (emphasis added). ‘Strengthening civil society’, like ‘promoting democracy’, is NGO-speak for meddling in another country’s politics, even promoting so-called regime change. As one of the documents notes, for example, PADF has worked in Cuba ‘with USAID and private funding to nurture the emergence of independent civil society and entrepreneurship and accelerate a democratic transition’ (emphasis added).

PADF emphasised its solid connections and years of experience in its bid to work as the State Department’s intermediary. In one grant proposal, the organisation described itself as ‘affiliated with the OAS’ and said it ‘operates independently of bureaucratic obstacles that could otherwise slow implementation and sub-grant approvals’. PADF added that it already had ‘over two years of experience working in Venezuela to strengthen local civil society groups working in close coordination with the local OAS office with an ongoing USAID/[Office of Transition Initiatives] grant’. It is ‘one of the few major international groups that has been able to provide significant cash grants and technical assistance to Venezuela NGOs’, the proposal said, adding: ‘To date we have provided over 10 grants to strengthen the institutional capacity of local groups that provides us with unique capability and experience to carry out the proposed… project.’

PADF furthermore advertised that it has access to many sources of cash flow: ‘In addition we can facilitate private sector cash and in-kind donations from both US and in-country donors to complement project resources, if and when needed. PADF’s partnerships with regional business and civil society associations and other regional groupings further enhance our capabilities. They provide for rapid access to international agencies, hemispheric leaders and networks of corporate donors and NGO partners.’ PADF even offered a novel way of evading the official Venezuelan exchange rate. ‘By using PADF’s new “bond swap” system to transfer funds to Venezuela,’ PADF noted, ‘we calculate that the additional local currency generated will be sufficient to meet all in-country expenses within the new US$ budget limit.’ In short, PADF offered its services as a dynamic money-laundering machine.

The revelations that the United States is funding journalism in Venezuela and elsewhere in the hemisphere come on the heels of a report released in May by the centre-right think tank FRIDE (fride.org), based in Madrid, which found that since 2002, the United States has funnelled an estimated $3 million to $6 million every year to ‘small projects with political parties and NGOs’ in Venezuela through an alphabet soup of shifting, intertwined channels. (The FRIDE report was removed from the group’s website soon after it was publicised in June.) Thus, the government support for media fits together with a larger, long-term US effort to strengthen its favoured political movement in Venezuela and elsewhere throughout the hemisphere in the era of Latin America’s ‘left turn’.

Today’s US media sponsorship has deep roots in the history of North American interventionism. Clandestine US funding of media in various countries was first exposed in the 1970s during two congressional investigations convened after the Watergate scandal. Media had by then played a critical role in several US interventions in Latin America, especially after the 1954 invasion of Guatemala and overthrow of President Jacobo Arbenz. During that formative operation, a radio station called La Voz de la Liberaci¢n broadcast messages denouncing Arbenz and cheerleading the invasion. It claimed to be Guatemalan but was in fact run by the CIA, airing from Honduras.

The ‘successful’ Guatemala operation quickly became a model emulated in subsequent interventions. As one CIA analyst put it in the 1980s: ‘The language, the arguments, and the techniques of the Arbenz episode were used in Cuba in the early 1960s, in Brazil in 1964, in the Dominican Republic in 1965, and in Chile in 1973.’ Over time, however, US propaganda became more sophisticated and more clandestine. Rather than produce and disseminate its own propaganda, the CIA funded private media companies and journalists, often providing them material to publish or broadcast. During the run-up to the 1973 coup that overthrew Chilean president Salvador Allende, for example, the CIA had established editorial control of El Mercurio, the country’s most prestigious newspaper, which ran constant articles and editorials against the Allende government and in favour of neoliberal economic policies.

As the research of Peter Kornbluh shows, the CIA in less than a year spent $1.95 million on El Mercurio, which was also funded by the ITT Corporation, the CIA’s main private collaborator in Chile. ‘Sustained by the covert funding,’ Kornbluh notes, ‘the Edwards media empire [which owned the paper] became one of the most prominent actors in the downfall of Chilean democracy. Far from being a news outlet, El Mercurio positioned itself as a bullhorn of organised agitation against the government.’ The newspaper was essential, even decisive, in setting the stage for the coup, as the CIA itself recognised. When asked in 2008 if the CIA still funds foreign journalists, agency spokesman Paul Gimigliano said, ‘The CIA does not, as a matter of course, publicly deny or confirm these kinds of allegations.’

After the congressional investigations in the 1970s, the burden of funding overseas media shifted to entities like USAID and the NED, the latter described by the New York Times as ‘a quasi-governmental foundation created by the Reagan Administration in 1983 to channel millions of Federal dollars into anti-Communist private diplomacy’. One of the NED’s first major projects was supporting La Prensa, a major pro-US newspaper in Nicaragua previously funded by the CIA. The NED began funding the paper in 1984 with a grant of two years for $150,000 through a Washington cutout called PRODEMCA.

By early 1987, NED delegations were openly visiting La Prensa. During the 1990 presidential campaign, NED provided the newspaper with at least $1 million, with much of the funding being funnelled through Venezuelan and Costa Rican pass-throughs. Thanks in part to this and other US democracy promotion initiatives, the pro-US candidate Violeta Chamorro – whose family owned La Prensa – was elected president in 1990.

Domestic manipulation

The US government’s use of news media to achieve political outcomes is not limited to efforts abroad. In January 2005 a series of reports revealed that various government agencies had doled out money to at least three US columnists who supported the Bush administration’s social policies, including the No Child Left Behind law and the Healthy Marriage Initiative. And in 2008, the New York Times revealed that the Pentagon had hired more than 75 retired military officers to appear on network and cable news shows to promote the Iraq war.

‘Records and interviews,’ the Times wrote, ‘show how the Bush administration has used its control over access and information in an effort to transform the analysts into a kind of media Trojan horse – an instrument intended to shape terrorism coverage from inside the major TV and radio networks.’ To date, none of the networks that featured these undisclosed Bush administration publicists – ABC, CBS, NBC, MSNBC, CNN, and Fox – have mentioned the Times story, which won a Pulitzer Prize.

Although these commentators failed to disclose their arrangements with the US government, they at least presented themselves as editorialists. Yet perhaps the worst recent example of the US government’s meddling in news media anywhere involved Florida-based ‘reporters’ who covered Cuba, US-Cuban relations, and the Cuban American community. The story was first publicised in September 2006, when the Miami Herald reported that at least 10 South Florida journalists, including three staffers at the Herald’s Spanish-language sister paper, El Nuevo Herald, had been moonlighting for Radio and TV Mart¡, the Miami-based government broadcaster that targets Cuba with US propaganda. New documents released in response to an FOIA request and made public in June show that a handful of these journalists were working for the government while producing unerringly hostile coverage of five Cubans convicted of espionage in 2001. The lawyers for the Cuban Five, as they are known, tried unsuccessfully to have the trial moved out of Miami, where the unsequestered jury was likely to be exposed to the prejudicial coverage.

At a time when US journalism is widely acknowledged to be in decline – with thousands of people laid off from the industry since 2008 – it is ironic that the government has seen fit to pump millions of tax dollars into developing the profession elsewhere, even as calls for a government ‘bailout’ of domestic journalism are ignored or ridiculed as socialistic. Another irony is that undisclosed foreign state support for ostensibly independent reporting violates basic principles of journalism’s professional integrity, yet much of the US funding has been undertaken in the name of fostering professionalism and inculcating journalistic standards.

Reporters in Venezuela and elsewhere in the region can and should hold their governments to account. But they should be wary of grants and seminars administered through US-connected NGOs, since covert funding may in some cases cause unwitting recipients to break their countries’ laws. In the end, US officials will have to ask themselves if all this covert funding is really going to successfully help the opposition and ‘promote democracy’ – or whether it will simply backfire and reveal how in practice, Obama’s stated vision of hemispheric relations as guided by ‘mutual respect and common interests and shared values’ is little more than lip service.

 

Burma is the New NGO Heaven

by Ko Tha Dja

September 20th, 2012

Dissident Voice

What has become today of reforms in Burma will pass while new and unpredictable change will happen after Aung San Suu Kyi and President Thein Sein finish taking their premature victory laps in the United States. No one yet knows what will happen here and nothing is set in stone in Burma. Although it appears that Burma is on the road to democratic nirvana it is not too far from the starting point where it found itself when the almighty savior of the free world, the United States, lifted investment sanctions thus making plunder of Burma’s resources easier for civil society and western corporations. In fact, aside from a move away from automobiles using natural gas to a tsunami of gasoline engine vehicles flooding the streets of Yangon and Mandalay, causing massive traffic jams, high gasoline prices (surprise!) and choking air pollution, upon careful inspection not much has changed at all.

The government is still playing carrot and stick with reforms. Political prisoners are slowly released yet many remain in prison still. Some exiles have returned to press conferences greeting them at the airport while others are extremely skeptical about repatriation, or even a visit, and remain abroad untrusting that the government is sincere in  calling them home. Poverty and land-grabs and crime are running rampant. Although Burma is very safe for foreigners, there is a lot of crime and it’s not for nothing every house not made of bamboo or old wood have a fortress-like look to them complete with tight coils of razor wire surrounding them, making them look like mini prisons for the occupants. Disease is prevalent amongst all stages of  the population and open sewers line the streets with grayish black water everywhere.

Truth be told, Burma is one large mess. Electricity outages still occur daily and clean drinking water in its cities is all but a fantasy. Infrastructure, roads, electricity grids, sanitation, and pollution are enormous problems that will not go away with extractive plunder. No one seems to understand who is in charge except the generals and their cronies who sent the American business cartel packing recently after refusing to give up control over their own resources. How ungrateful, the Americans must’ve thought of the cronies. In some ways, it’s good for Burma that the current rulers aren’t willing to give a small inch of control to outsiders. Why should they? They will be wealthy,   getting wealthier no matter what.

During a visit to the Tuesday evening expat homage for free drinks and teashop slop at a local art gallery one could look over the crowd and see dozens of heads. So many new fresh faces with svelte bodies wearing stylish elitist counter-culture clothing made to look already worn and shabby to give the wearer that self-absorbed and grizzled ex-pat in the third-world look. As amusing as it was, one could equal the visual amusement with audio and hear talks like “starting an NGO, an institute, doing research, tourism training, capacity building, micro finance, sustainable business enterprise, human capital empowerment” and the list of bullshit went on and on.

Only one guy, who happened to be from Germany, had the nerve to mention that the purpose of his four-year project proposal to write a history book for the Burmese people, “so that they could understand their own history and push ahead for reconciliation” had the honesty to tell me, after being questioned, that his project would pay him handsomely and allow him to live in Burma and then go home and live comfortably for a while. Yeah, the Burmese need some ding dong intellectual from Germany who never tasted green tea salad to teach them their own history.

I think that pretty much sums up the gold rush mentality for opportunists and the NGO crowd in Burma. Let’s face it, NGOs pay a lot of money to westerners and foreigners but the locals here in Burma know about the two-sided coin they’re tricked with. Except for the U.N. agencies like UNICEF, UNAIDS, UNDP and UNHCR, which I happen to believe are truly serving the people of Myanmar well, the rest of the NGOs paying salaries for Myanmar nationals suck like leeches in a jungle pond.

The common NGOs and their project chasers are human parasites sucking into Burma from all sides and angles, coming here to draw blood and enrich themselves. To be honest, it all made me sick in the stomach to hear. Does Myanmar, which at one time was the rice basket for all of Asia, really need westerners to teach them “sustainable” farming practices? Neither do they need genetically modified seed and an influx of “assistance” from agribusiness but they are getting that.  Farmers all over Burma are being swindled out of their land and sent packing for civil society/corporate backed development projects only to be replaced by a big AgriCorp from some outside country.

The NGOs are streaming into Burma like flies partying on crap on a hot summer day. They bring with them their self-serving bravado and fantasies of martyrdom in the third world, saving the Burmese and the ethnics and bridging gaps of god knows what kind. Mainly, if one looks at the parasitic website called Reliefweb.com one can read job descriptions of every kind related to the most relevant natural disasters and impoverished places on the planet and seek out employment being a high-paid savior/martyr. One can find the latest seminars on how to raise funds – aha!  Yes, look up any job on the website and stitched into the “qualifications” section one will see the magic potion that’s required of almost every single NGO job. That qualification? Having the ability to raise lots of money. That’s the single most important qualification to working for most NGO anywhere – especially in Burma.

With USAID, AUSAID and the Brits spending huge amounts of money in Burma the leeches of the NGO world and the wannabes and opportunists have flooded the streets of Yangon and brought with themselves huge egos, cultural insensitivity, a party-like mentality, and proposals and projects that make almost no sense at all. Yet, they’ll probably get funded as “civil society” pacifies the Burmese and enables the new world order to set up shop and suck, suck, suck Burma dry until it becomes dependent on western aid and in debt to the max with no way out except to privatize and give away Burma’s commons.

[Ko Tha Dja has worked for over five years in both Thailand and Burma on issues of education and refugee resettlement. Read other articles by Ko Tha Dja.]

 

FLASHBACK: WWF’s Eco Imperialism

Corporate Power and Mining in Mongolia

Some of parts of the environmental movement have long presented a serious obstacle to the destruction wrought on life by the corporate powers that be and their imperial overseers. On the contrary, other influential and well publicized parts of the movement have also played a critical role in undermining the emancipatory potential of environmentalism in order to satisfy imperial interests. Environmental groups that fit comfortably within this latter category of “environmentalists” include those collectively referred to as the Big Green, or the Group of Ten, although only the work of one member of this elite group, the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF), will be examined in this article. (For a comprehensive overview of WWF’s capitalist-friendly agenda, see my recent article “The Philanthropic Roots of Corporate Environmentalism,” Swans, November 3, 2008.)

Recognition of the imperialist nature of many so-called green nongovernmental organizations has, paradoxically, been widely promoted by conservative commentators. Thus resident scholar at the Center for the Defense of Free Enterprise, Paul Driessen, recently published a controversial book titled Eco-Imperialism: Green Power Black Death (Merril Press, 2003). The introduction to Driessen’s book was penned by Niger Innis, the national spokesperson of the once progressive civil rights group Congress of Racial Equality – an organization which has now warped into a “fraudulent” corporate front group. In his introduction, Innis noted how:

“The ideological environmental movement is a powerful $4 billion-a-year US industry, an $8 billion-a-year international gorilla. Many of its members are intensely eco-centric, and place much higher value on wildlife and ecological values than on human progress or even human life. They have a deep fear and loathing of big business, technology, chemicals, plastics, fossil fuels and biotechnology – and they insist that the rest of world should acknowledge and live according to their fears and ideologies. They are masters at using junk science, scare tactics, intimidation, and bogus economic and health claims to gain even greater power.” (pdf)

Innis is correct in observing that the environmental movement is a multi-billion dollar industry, but like Driessen, he deliberately fails to highlight how the most powerful and well-funded environmental groups driving this industry work hand-in-hand with big business and imperial governments. On the other hand, those environmental organizations that seriously challenge corporate prerogatives receive little funding from the public or even for that matter from ostensibly progressive liberal foundations. Consequently I agree with Innis and Driessen that the best-funded parts of the environmental movement that are regularly talked-up in the mass media promote eco-imperialism, but this is not because they challenge powerful elite interests, but rather because they serve them so effectively. For instance, in 2007 WWF’s Global Networks income was US$0.8 billion; therefore, it should be no surprise that such groups that were founded by powerful corporate and political elites, and are presently funded by those same elites, should first and foremost promote capitalist interests under the cloak of environmentalism. For more on this see Elaine Dewar’s groundbreaking book Cloak of Green: The Links between Key Environmental Groups, Government and Big Business (Lorimer, 1995). →

FLASHBACK: Reporters Without Democracy

Media Watchdog as Democracy Manipulator (Part 4 of 4)

December 16, 2007

[The first two parts of this article firstly investigated Reporters Without Borders (RSF) ‘democratic’ funding ties, and then went on to look at the ‘democratic’ credentials of some of their current and former staff.  The third installment of this article extended this investigation and examined the ‘democratic’ ties of some of the earlier recipients of RSF’s annual Fondation de France Prize, and this concluding part of the article will now continue in this vein and examine the ‘democratic’ ties of some of RSF’s more recent prize winners. Finally, the article will conclude by offering some suggestions for how the issues raised within this article may be acted upon by progressive activists.]

Reporting on ETA

In 2000, Carmen Gurruchaga Basurto, a political reporter for El Mundo, a Madrid-based daily newspaper won the RSF award. Her biography notes that she “writes frequently about the Basque separatist group, ETA.” However, it goes on to note that because “Gurruchaga’s stories have so threatened the terrorist group… since 1984 it has waged a campaign against her, hoping to intimidate her into stopping reporting on their activities.” In 2001, Gurruchaga received awards from two ‘democratically’ connected organizations, Human Rights Watch (from whom she obtained a Hellman/Hammett Grant), and the International Women’s Media Foundation (from whom she was awarded their annual Courage Award).

Regime Change in Iran?

In 2001, Reza Alijani, the editor of Iran-e-Farda – an Iranian newspaper that was banned in 2000 – received RSF’s press freedom award. Although I cannot demonstrate that Alijani has any ‘democratic’ ties, one of his former Iran-e-Farda colleagues, Hojjatoleslam Hasan Yousefi Eshkevari, “was arrested on August 5, 2000 in connection with his participation at an academic and cultural conference held at the Heinrich Boll Institute in Berlin on April 7-9 [2000] entitled ‘Iran after the elections,’ at which political and social reform in Iran were publicly debated”. This is significant because the German political foundations (Stiftungen) are according to Stefan Mair (2000) “without a doubt among the oldest, most experienced and biggest actors in international democracy assistance”. Indeed NED historian David Lowe writes that these Stiftungen provided an “important model for democracy assistance” which helped catalyse the creation of the US’s own democracy promoting organ, the NED.[1]

Armed with this knowledge it is perhaps not so astonishing that the Iranian government would choose to imprison many of the activists who participated in the aforementioned Heinrich Boll conference. Furthermore, it is also predicable that some of the other conference attendees would have ties to the NED and the democracy manipulators: these activists included Akbar Ganji (who in 2000 received an International Press Freedom Award from the Canadian Journalists for Free Expression, that is, the group that manages the ‘democratically’ linked IFEX network, and after spending six years in prison – after attending the conference – Ganji was awarded Rights and Democracy’s 2007 John Humphrey Freedom Award), Ali Afshari (who was a visiting fellow at the NED’s International Forum for Democratic Studies from October 2006 to February 2007), and Mehrangiz Kar (who from 2000 to 2001 held a senior fellowship with the Toda Institute for Global Policy and Peace Research, from October 2001 to August 2002 was a NED Reagan-Fascell Democracy Fellow, in late 2002 served as a scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, and between September 2005 and June 2006 was a fellow at the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy).

A number of other Iranian journalists – who did not attend the Berlin conference – were also arrested in April 2000, and the two who can be linked to the ‘democracy’ community are Mashallah Shamsolvaezin (who in 2000 then received the Committee to Protect Journalists’ International Press Freedom Award), [2] and Emadeddin Baqi (who in 2004 was awarded the Civil Courage Prize, and in 1999 co-wrote a series of articles with Akbar Ganji criticizing the government which “galvanized the public and, within one year of their publication, forced the closing by the government of nearly every reform newspaper in the country”).

Environmental ‘Democracy’ for Russia

The 2002 RSF Fondation de France Prize was awarded to Russian journalist Grigory Pasko, who at the time of receiving the award was serving a prison sentence for exposing the dumping of radioactive waste by the Russian fleet in the Sea of Japan, “expos[ing] corruption inside the fleet” and pass[ing] on public information about both issues to Japanese journalists”. Pasko was eventually set free in 2003, and in 2004 he became the editor-in-chief of the Environmental Rights Center’s (otherwise known as Bellona) Environment and Rights Journal – which has been published since February 2002 and is supported by the NED.

Bringing Human Rights to Haiti, Zimbabwe, and Morocco

In 2003 RSF Fondation de France Prize was given to the following individuals and groups, exiled Haitian journalist, Michèle Montas, to the Zimbabwean newspaper, The Daily News, and to the Moroccan journalist, Ali Lmrabet.

In addition, to being a former director of Radio Haiti Inter, the first RSF winner, Michèle Montas, is also a director of the National Coalition for Haitian Rights – a group that was initially known as the National Emergency Coalition for Haitian Refugees when it was created in 1982. Two of the better known (now deceased) ‘democracy promoting’ founders of the NCHR are Lane Kirkland (who is a former Rockefeller Foundation trustee, and from 1979 to 1995 served as the president of the AFL-CIO – which is a core NED grantee) and Bayard Rustin (who was a former chairman of the executive committee of Freedom House, and former president of the NED-funded A. Philip Randolph Institute). [3] Other notable former directors of NCHR include Michael H. Posner (who is the president of Human Rights First), Michele D. Pierre-Louis (who is the Executive Director of FOKAL which “is the Open Society Institute foundation in Haiti”), and Vernon E. Jordan, Jr. (who is a former director of the Rockefeller Foundation).

The current executive director of NCHR is Jocelyn McCalla, who has held this position since 1988 (except for a one year break in 2002) and presently serves on Human Right Watch’s ‘democratically’ connected Americas Advisory Board. Other current NCHR directors with ‘democratic’ ties include Mark Handelman (who is a director of the NED-funded International Campaign for Tibet), Max J. Blanchet (who is a director of the Lambi Fund of Haiti which although progressive is a chapter of USAID-funded Partners of the Americas), Muzaffar A. Chishti, (who is the director of the Migration Policy Institute’s office at New York University School of Law), and Herold Dasque (who is the executive director of the progressive Haitian American United for Progress, but is also connected to Dwa Fanm – a group which has two directors who have previously worked with George Soros’ Open Society Institute).

The second recipient of the 2003 RSF Fondation de France Prize was the Zimbabwean newspaper, The Daily News. This paper was launched by Geoffrey Nyarota in 1999, and it “quickly became the largest selling and most influential newspaper” in Zimbabwe. Therefore, it is significant to note that Nyarota – who “now lives in exile in the United States from where he publishes thezimbabwetimes.com” –was awarded the Committee to Protect Journalists International Press Freedom Award in 2001. In addition, the following year he received the World Association of Newspapers Golden Pen of Freedom award, from 2004 to 2005 he served as a fellow at the US-based Carr Center for Human Rights Policy, and he is presently a director of the World Press Freedom Committee. [4] (The Daily News closed operations in 2004 after “constant harassment by state monitors” and is now being published by the Amnesty International’s Irish Section.)

The third RSF prize for 2003 was awarded to the Moroccan journalist and editor of Demain magazine, Ali Lmrabet, while he was “serving a three-year jail sentence, in part for publishing cartoons critical of King Mohammed VI”. However, while Lmrabet was sentenced in May that year he was released from prison one month after he received the RSF award (which he obtained in December 2003). Here it is perhaps relevant to note that he is presently a member of the Moroccan Association for Human Rights, although he does not appear to hold any leadership role. This is significant because this association is a member of a broader network known as the International Federation for Human Rights – a group whose work is supported by Rights and Democracy, the Westminster Foundation for Democracy, the Ford Foundation, and the Heinrich Boll Foundation.

Promoting ‘Democracy’ in Algeria, China, and Mexico

Three RSF awards were distributed in 2004. The first recipient of the RSF prize was Algerian journalist Hafnaoui Ghoul, who at the time was a correspondent for the daily paper El Youm and was head of the regional office of the Algerian Human Rights League (LADDH). Ghoul’s affiliation to the latter group is noteworthy because LADDH received their first grant from the NED in 2002, and then received further NED grants in both 2004 and 2005.

The second person to receive a RSF award in 2004 was the “former Beijing University philosophy teacher Liu Xiaobo, who heads the Independent Writers’ Association”. At the time of receiving the award Xiaobo was also the chair of the Independent Chinese PEN Center (ICPC), whose members include two members of the editorial board of the NED-funded magazine, Beijing Spring, Kuide Chen and Zheng Yi. It is also significant that Louisa Coan Greve (who is the senior program officer for Asia for the NED) congratulated Xiaobo on receiving his RSF prize, and noted that the award “also honors the ICPC itself, and NED is gratified and humbled to be a supporter of those efforts.” [5]

Finally, the third winner of the RSF’s 2004 award was the weekly newspaper Zeta – a Mexican paper which was cofounded by the 1998 RSF award nominiee J. Jesus Blancornelas. Blancornelas is currently Zeta’s editor in chief, and his previous nomination for the RSF prize is no accident, as throughout his career he has been showered with numerous journalism awards, the earliest of which appears to be the Committee to Protect Journalists International Press Freedom Award which he received in 1995. Zeta appears to have quite an affinity with the Committee to Protect Journalists, because in 2007, Zeta’s director, Navarro Bello, was also awarded the Committee to Protect Journalists International Press Freedom Award.

A Helping Hand for Somali, Afghanistan, and China

In 2005, Omar Faruk Osman received the RSF award on behalf of National Union of Somali Journalists (NUSOJ). This is significant because in 2002 Osman was elected as the secretary-general of the Somali Journalists Network (SOJON), which under his guidance was transformed into NUSOJ. This group is linked to the NED in a number of ways. In 2005 they obtained a grant from the NED to train journalists and “nominate journalists as National Press Freedom Protectors to monitor free press abuses”, while in the same year the International Federation of Journalists received a separate grant from the NED to work with them to organize a journalism conference. More recently, in 2006, Osman “was chosen to be a member of the international jury of the RSF Press Freedom Award”.

Other winners of the RSF’s 2005 Fondation de France Press Freedom Award include the Afghanistan-based Tolo TV (which was launched in 2004 with starter funds provided by USAID, and is reported to be the “most popular station in Kabul” boasting of a “81 percent share of the market”), and New York Times contributor, Zhao Yan.

Zhao Yan is a journalist who worked for China Reform Magazine (from 2002 to March 2004), and has also written for the NED-funded Human Rights in China. Yan stopped working for the China Reform Magazine in March 2004 and “the magazine was subsequently shut down by the government in December 2004”. However, just before the magazine closed down Yan was arrested by the Chinese government for allegedly disclosing state secrets, and then kept in prison until September 2007.

Note that the China Reform Magazine is linked, albeit tenuously, to a NED-supported organization through Professor Tiejun Wen, who is based at the Renmin University of China and was formerly the editor-in-chief for China Reform Magazine. The NED link arises through Professor Wen’s employment as the chief-economist of the China Macroeconomics Network, where he is also a member of their expert group of “more than 130 renowned Chinese macroeconomists” known as The Macrochina Economists 100. It is significant that three other members of this elite group of macroeconomists currently work for the Beijing-based Unirule Institute of Economics – an organization that has received four grants from the NED (which were channelled via the Center for International Private Enterprise in 1996, 1997, 1998, 1999): these three macroeconomists are the Unirule’s president and co-founder Mao Yushi, their director Sheng Hong, and the Institute’s director-general Zhang Shuguang. [6]

Democracy for Four: Burma, Cuba, Russian, the and Democratic Republic of Congo

In 2006 there were four RSF laureates, the Burmese journalist U Win Tin, the Cuban writer Guillermo Farinas Hernandez, the newspaper Novaya Gazeta (Russia), and the group Journaliste En Danger (Democratic Republic of Congo).

U Win Tin, a former member of the central executive committee of the National League for Democracy (where he acted as their secretary), and a close friend of former RSF awardee San San Nweh, received the 2006 RSF press freedom prize. He has been in prison since 1989 because of his affiliation to Burma’s main opposition party, and while San San Nweh was released from prison in 2001, he still languishes behind bars today. As mentioned previously, in 2001 the World Association of Newspapers awarded U Win Tin its annual press freedom prize.

Another recipient of RSF’s 2006 award was the Cuban cyber-dissident Guillermo Farinas Hernandez, who heads the small Cubanacán Press news agency. As before, RSF support of Cuban dissidents is hardly surprising given the financial support they receive from the NED-funded Center for a Free Cuba, thus it is also not so astonishing that the NED-funded CubaNet media project would publish Guillermo’s work.

The Russian biweekly newspaper Novaya Gazeta is now most famous for formerly being home to Anna Politkovskaya (the journalist who was murdered in October 2006), a journalist whose work was recently recognized by the NED who awarded her one of their 2007 Democracy Awards. [7] In addition, in September 2007 Dmitry Muratov, the editor-in-chief of Novaya Gazeta, was given the Committee to Protect Journalists International Press Freedom Award.

RSF’s “partner organization” Journaliste En Danger (JED), is a member of the IFEX network, was founded in 1997, and is headed by journalists Donat M’Baya Tshimanga and Tshivis Tshivuadi. In what might be considered a conflict of interest, Tshimanga – who is presently JED’s president – also serves on the RSF’s international jury for their Press Freedom Award (and has done so since at least 2002). Also in 2004, Tshivuadi, who is the secretary general of JED, attended an inter-regional workshop that was convened by the NED-linked Panos Institute. [8]

Ending Media Interference Now

“It is very dangerous when press freedom organizations get themselves politically compromised by accepting payment from any government. It is really vital that all such organizations are truly independent.” UK National Union of Journalists

While this article had not demonstrated that RSF receives funding from any government, it has shown how RSF has received funding from the Congressionally funded NED, and it has illustrated how RSF’s work is highly integrated with that of the ‘democracy promoting’ community, much of which is linked to the activities of the NED. Whether RSF is being manipulated to serve as a useful tool of the ‘democracy promoters’, or whether it is itself guiding the media-related priorities of the global ‘democratic’ community is beside the point. What is certain is that RSF’s activities are intimately entwined with those of the NED. The revelations in this article alone therefore provide more than enough reasons for disbanding RSF immediately. However, this is unlikely to happen in the near future given the useful role that RSF currently provides for elite interests determined on promoting low-intensity neoliberal forms of democracy globally.

Undoubtedly future studies will furnish further details concerning RSF’s less than noble ‘democratic’ liaisons, but the question to ask is, will this be enough to close it down permanently, or to even delegitimize their work in the corporate media? Unfortunately, it is all too obvious that such information, without determined action (in the form of grassroots activism) to back it up, will probably not affect the conduct of RSF’s work one iota. This can explained to a large extent by the bipartisan nature (but nonetheless highly political and regressive work) of most ‘democracy promoting’ efforts, which acts to shield their work from critical enquiry. We only have to look to the work of the core NED grantee, the AFL-CIO, to see that ongoing critical reports filed over the past few decades [27] – that have comprehensively documented the AFL-CIO’s involvement in implementing the US’s antidemocratic foreign policies – have had little visible effect on their practices. Indeed, a number of unionists and other activists joined together in the Worker to Worker Solidarity Committee (www.workertoworker.net) have been continuing to campaign to get the AFL-CIO to break any ties it has with the NED. To date, they have been unsuccessful, even though getting the California AFL-CIO State Convention – one-sixth of the entire membership at the time – to unanimously repudiate the AFL-CIO foreign policy program in 2004. At the 2005 National AFL-CIO Convention in Chicago, the AFL-CIO leadership first changed the California resolution to praising their Solidarity Center’s work, and then actively refused to allow anyone to speak on the convention floor in favour of the actual California resolution condemning AFL-CIO foreign policy.

On a more positive note, ideally, the results of this paper will help initiate further critical inquiries into the democracy manipulators colonization of journalism organizations. Yet it is surely an indictment of media scholars and journalists that similar studies have not been conducted years ago. That said, perhaps this judgement is overly harsh, as ignorance concerning antidemocratic funding seems to be a problem of progressive groups’ more generally. Indeed, progressive activists’ seem to have become so fixated on critiquing their ideological opponents that they have neglected to watch the right-ward slide of their would-be-allies. This tactical lapse appears to have left democratic media organizations open to the insidious cooptive assaults waged by those intent on promoting a polyarchal public sphere.

One way to counter the democracy manipulators cynical use of journalism against democracy is for progressive groups to thoroughly investigate the activities of each and every media group working to strengthen the public sphere. This would be a simple project if journalists and media scholars across the world critically examined the work of their local journalism organizations. In this way, a global database might be built up which would enable progressive scholars, activists, and journalists, to lift the rhetorical veil that has so far shielded many media groups’ from criticism. Completion of such studies will then enable keen media reformers to support (and where necessary create new) truly participatory journalism organizations that can effectively challenge the corporate medias’ global hegemony.

 

[Michael Barker is a doctoral candidate at Griffith University, Australia. He can be reached at Michael.J.Barker [at] griffith.edu.au. All four parts of this article and some of his other recent articles can be found right here.[

 

Endnotes

[1] By the 1990s Germany’s Stiftungen or party foundations, “had resident representatives in more than 100 countries and field offices in some of them for well over 30 years. Between 1962 and 1997 they handled in total over DM4.5 billion reaching around DM290 million annually by the 1990s. Although in the period before 1990 it is debatable how much can be called democracy support rather than activities primarily intended to meet other purposes  In Pinto-Duschinsky’s words they were ‘powerful instruments not only for promoting democracy, but also for furthering German interests and contacts’.” Stefan Mair, Germany’s Stiftungen and Democracy Assistance: Comparative Advantages, New Challenges, In: Peter J. Burnell (ed.) Democracy assistance: International Co-operation for Democratization (London, Frank Cass: 2000), pp.128-149.

Heinrich Boll representative, Sascha Müller-Kraenner, was also a signatory to a recent letter (dated November 11, 2004) which was sent by the NED to Venezuela’s president Hugo Chavez to urge him “to reconsider the prosecution of the leadership of Sumate, as well as the proposal to criminalize democracy assistance from abroad”. Sumate is the Venezuelan group that received assistance from the NED to facilitate the unsuccessful ouster of Chavez in 2002.

[2] Another recipient of the Committee to Protect Journalists’ International Press Freedom Award in 2000 was Steven Gan who at the time was the co-founder and editor of the online publication Malaysiakini, a publication which was launched in 1999 by the Southeast Asian Press Alliance (a group that since their founding in 1999 has received annual grants from the NED to support their work in Malaysia).

[3] Also see Tom Barry, ‘The New Crusade of the Democratic Globalists’, International Relations Center, August 3, 2005; Other NCHR leaders in the early 1980s included Father Antoine Adrien, Anthony Cardinal Bevilacqua, Ira Gollobin, Vernon Jordan, Rev. Benjamin Hooks, Rep. Shirley Chisholm, and Bishop Paul Moore.

[4] In 2006 Geoffrey Nyaro published the book Against the Grain: Memoirs of a Zimbabwean Newsman, and in 2006 he also attended the 7^th International Conference on North Korean Human Rights and Refugees – a conference that was also attended by the NED’s president Carl Gershman.

[5] http://www.cicus.org/news/newsdetail.php?id=3514 Accessed December 2006.

[6] The Unirule Institute president, Mao Yushi, while based at the Unirule Institute between 1996 and 1997 was also an executive officer for the NED-linked Chinese Economists Society, and “[i]n November 2004, Mao was elected by the International Business Review as one of the ten most influential economists in China”. Other well-known ‘democratic’ funders of Unirule’s work include the major liberal philanthropist the Ford Foundation, the Institute for International Economics (whose most ‘democratic’ directors are David Rockefeller and George Soros), “many foreign embassies in Beijing”, and “international public institutions, such as World Bank, International Monetary Fund, Asian Development Bank and African Development Bank”. For further analysis of the Unirule Institute’s ‘democratic’ ties see, Michael Barker, Promoting a Low Intensity Public Sphere: American Led Efforts to Promote a ‘Democratic Media’ Environment in China. A paper to presented at the China Media Centre Conference (Brisbane, Australia: Creative Industries Precinct, 5-6 July 2007).

[7] Novaya Gazeta: “The privately-owned newspaper in which the staff holds 51% of the shares, saw two political figures take over 49% of its capital in June 2006. They were the former Soviet president and originator of glasnost (openness), Mikhail Gorbachev, and Alexander Lebedev, wealthy businessman and member of the Duma.”

[8] The Panos Institute received one grant from the NED in 1997, while more recently in September 2007, the NED’s “Center for International Media Assistance (CIMA) and Panos London launched the Panos Institute’s report entitled At the Heart of Change: The Role of Communication in Sustainable Development.”

Russia Shows USAID the Door

19 September, 2012

http://rt.com/

The United States Agency for International Development (USAID) has announced it will close its offices in Russia.

After 20 years of working in Russia, USAID officials said they were informed by the Russian government that their services were no longer required.

According to the Foreign Ministry, USAID was attempting to manipulate the election processes in the country.

“The character of the agency’s work…did not always comply with the declared aims of cooperation in bilateral humanitarian cooperation,” the Foreign Ministry said on its website. “We are talking about issuing grants in an attempt to affect the course of the political processes in the country, including elections at different levels and institutions in civil society.”

Russian civil society has become fully mature, the Foreign Ministry said, and did not need any “external direction.” Moscow is read to work with USAID in third-party countries, it said.

In an interview to Kommersant, Dmitry Peskov, President Putin’s press-secretary, suggested that the US agency was not abiding by the rules regulating their work with NGOs.

“As all foreign agencies that provide financial support for Russian NGOs, USAID should abide by Russia’s legal regulations,” Peskov said. “As long as the Americans abide by these norms, we obviously couldn’t make a decision to terminate their activities on Russian territory.”

Moscow‘s decision to halt USAID programs comes after Putin in July signed legislation that requires nongovernmental organizations that receive funds from abroad to register as “foreign agents.”

The law requires that Russian-based NGOs provide information as to how funds received from abroad are being used in Russia.

The United States has denied that USAID programs are aimed at interfering in Russia’s domestic affairs.

US State Department Spokeswoman Victoria Nuland announced the termination of USAID’s operations in Russia on Tuesday. The Kremlin notified US officials they have until October 1 to close the mission.

Washington began its USAID operations in Moscow following the unexpected collapse of the Soviet Union. At that time, Russia was a basket case, dependent on IMF loan transfusions just to keep its head above water. USAID spent more than $2.6 billion in Russia on various projects, like cleaning up the environment and fighting against infectious diseases.

Russia’s domestic situation began to turn around, however, when the presidency passed from Boris Yeltsin to Vladimir Putin. Today, Russia has not only returned its debts, but is now a lender of last resort for countries hammered by the 2008 financial crisis.

Although Russia’s reversal of fortunes is often explained by its vast natural resources, political will also played a significant role in the progress.

Since Russia no longer sees itself as a charity case, USAID activities were increasingly viewed as not only redundant, but even a little humiliating.

Aside from the growing irrelevance of such foreign-sponsored activities, there was the nagging suspicion inside Russia that these agencies served as fronts for purely political motives.

This year, for example, USAID was allotted $50 million to finance its Russia activities. Approximately 60 per cent of the budget was to be used for promoting democracy and human rights. This represents a dramatic increase compared with the former Bush administration.

 

A Colossal Fraud

August 22, 2012

Continuity

By Jay Taber

As documented by Jerry Sanders in his book Peddlers of Crisis, Cold War hawks in Washington made their bones by producing and disseminating misperceptions about the Russian threat, that in turn justified the inordinate military buildup by the US and NATO. In essence, says Sanders, the national security military industrial complex, while perhaps warranted at some level, was nevertheless a colossal fraud concocted by Washington insiders at Langley and the Pentagon.

Deliberately falsified information and wildly exaggerated threats were, in fact, used to enable not only the looting of the US Treasury to meet these false threats, but also to promote some notorious characters into the halls of power. People like Henry Kissinger, Dick Cheney and Richard Armitage.

Today, through agencies like National Endowment for Democracy (NED) and USAID, lessons in psychological warfare learned by Cold War hawks and private sector friends like George Soros are still being applied in the interest of US hegemony, albeit in more creative ways. As noted in this article about NED-funded political opposition groups in Russia, the exaggerations, while containing an element of truth, are leveraged to perpetuate popular myths that can be capitalized on by US interests.

With a perfunctory nod to prior creative operators at the National Security Agency (NSA), I have to admit that the Pussy Riot affair must rank right up there. While Cartalucci acknowledges a lack of direct connection, the witness list of the pussy defense is loaded with NED funding.

As illustrated by this article at Wrong Kind of Green, arguing against Russian gangster capitalism, while important, is best left to authentic journalists and human rights activists, not US State Department proteges, Ford or Soros funded puppets. Monitoring Russian elections for fraud is one thing, disturbing the peace and distorting reports in order to destabilize Russian society is best left to the CIA. As seen in the Balkans, the Caucasus and Central Asia, innocent people get hurt.

Players and Pawns

Intercontinental Cry

By Jay Taber

Aug 22, 2012

Image via Deep Green Resistance: “How do you learn the truth when the media lies?”

 

The Imperialism of USAID According to its Statutes

 

It’s no secret that USAID functions as one of the counter-revolutionary mechanisms of the United States. The proofs against it are abundant, but, despite reiterated complaints, it has not been easy to expel it from the countries affected. One gets the impression that the agency works like a virus that is already circulating in the blood stream of the said countries, making it hard for it to be eliminated. There have been cases such as that of Bolivia, whose government has tried to throw out the agency but has run into resistance from the sectors benefited by the “assistance” of USAID. ¿Is this a symptom that the mentioned agency has been unjustly accused of interventionism, or, simply, that it has bought off some  leaders among the social areas in which it has embedded itself?

To analyze this aspect, one needs first to understand that perceptions of reality are hugely influenced by the commercial media, which makes every effort to discredit the position of the governments that seek to expel USAID in lawful defense of national sovereignty. For that purpose, the defenders of looting rest on the “good” reputation of the U.S. agency as an organization created during the Democratic Administration of former president John F. Kennedy, fulfilling the moral obligation of a rich country to a world of poor nations. ¿Who could harbor doubts about so much love? Let’s look, then, at the official goals of the said agency.

The functional statement of USAID at chapter 101.2, Primary Responsibilities, states as follows:

a. The Administrator (A/AID) formulates and executes U.S. foreign economic and development assistance policies and programs, subject to the foreign policy guidance of the President, the Secretary of State, and the National Security Council. Under the direct authority and foreign policy guidance of the Secretary of State, the Administrator serves as a principal advisor to the President and the Secretary of State regarding international development matters. He/she administers appropriations made available under the Foreign Assistance Act of 1961.

Accordingly, the strict subjection of USAID to “the foreign policy guidance of the President, the Secretary of State, and the National Security Council” is not just real but mandatory. But there is more, for if the funds for those programs are issued under the Foreign Assistance Act of 1961, perhaps we should analyze the purposes of that law. →

WATCH | Will Progressive Latin America Oust USAID?

Aug 14, 2012

 

Convincing Proof Against USAID

Juan Carlos Zambrana Marchetti

Newspaper Cambio

July 28,2012

As hard as we try to expose all of the mechanisms of interventionism, these are so diverse that some of them slip through our fingers after we have had the evidence in hand. This is the curious story of how, after more than a year, I was able to tie down the loose end that had escaped me when I denounced the event called Danger in the Andes: The Threats to Democracy, Human Rights, and Inter-American security.

A few days ago I was interviewed by the renowned journalist Jorge Gestoso for his program, De Frente. With a sharpness of thought perfected through his years of experience, he had made a connection that escaped me. Attempting to give me the opportunity to correct the oversight, he read the following fragment from my article: “During the second panel, on terrorism, the panelists demonized Bolivia, Venezuela, and Ecuador as anti-American, and they described the end of the world caused by those three countries with nuclear arms built with the support of Iran. Obviously, they did not allow me to ask any more questions because Jose Cardenas, the moderator of the first panel, had already passed on the information about me to Otto Reich, the moderator of the second.” After explaining that Otto Reich was the former Assistant Secretary of State for Western Hemisphere Affairs during the government of George W. Bush, Gestoso raised his head and asked me, point-blank: “Who is Jose Cardenas?”

I was dumfounded, not knowing what to answer, because it had not even crossed my mind that the name could be as relevant as that of the other big shots on whom I had concentrated more that afternoon at the Capitol, when I found myself surrounded by the most radical of the Republican hounds who were preparing the invasion of Latin America. I did not remember the name, because in my article I had mentioned him only as the moderator of the first panel, and had bypassed the details of who Jose Cardenas might have been in his professional life. In order to finesse the predicament, I answered with what I had thought when I was writing the article: he is just another politician, of Latin American origin and rightist. I saw the disappointment in Jorge’s face, but, with the professionalism that characterizes him, he let the awkward moment pass. From then on, the interview was somewhat uncomfortable for me, because I could not stop thinking about why the name of Jose Cardenas had not led me to recall anything of relevance.

When I got home, I retrieved the recording of the event and paid attention to the introduction made on behalf of the sponsors –the Hudson Institute, a committee of experts (think tank) in Washington dedicated to “global security, prosperity, and freedom.” It was explained that the event was divided into two panels. The first of these would focus on the internal dangers for three Latin American countries: Venezuela, Ecuador and Bolivia. The second would focus on the external threats to democracy for those same countries, dangers that, according to them, derived from links with the radical Islamism of Iran, drug trafficking, and terrorism.

Jose Cárdenas was the moderator of the first panel, for whom the internal threats to democracy in the mentioned countries were, supposedly, violations of the freedom of the press, violations of human rights, and the concentration of power in the hands of the president. Cardenas explained it this way:  “let me start by saying that we really want to recognize the courage of many of the speakers here today, who actually live in the countries they will be talking about… because many of this speakers that we reached out to have expressed to us a concern, a fear of  speaking out in public for fear of retribution when  they return to their countries. And, just keep that in mind as a backdrop as to why we are here to discuss the internal situation in those countries. Think of it as ostensibly (ph) a democracy where citizens have an overt fear of speaking out in public, for fear of retribution.”

I was surprised at the immense capacity for manipulation shown by the gentleman, and the shamelessness of using such a grotesque lie to influence from the start the receptivity of the audience. In retrospect, his falsity can be demonstrated by the fact that none of the panelists, despite their open campaigns of slander against the mentioned leftist governments, has been persecuted, and far less have there been any attempts against their lives.

The panelists whom Mr. Cardenas presented to prove the internal threat of the democracies in “the Andes” were the following. Guillermo Zuluaga spoke in the name of freedom of the press, and denied his political campaign of media manipulation against President Chávez. The supposed violations of human rights were denounced by Javier El-Hage, speaking for the Human Rights Foundation, an NGO that was involved with the separatism of Santa Cruz through his support for Cruzan rightists in their campaign for autonomy. The accusation of concentration of power was handled by Luis Nunez, President of the Civic Committee for Santa Cruz, an institution opposed to President Morales and linked not only to the dictatorships of the past but also to the right-wing governments and to the secret societies that controlled power in Santa Cruz. The said Civic Committee was also linked to the same movement for autonomy that resulted in the attempted coup d’etat, the planned assassination of President Morales, to the case of terrorism, and the separatism of the eastern departments.

All of these “dignitaries,” who created a Dantesque vision of reality, were being praised, defended, justified, and even portrayed as victims by the moderator of the panel, Mr. Jose Cardenas. It was time, then, to turn to the official document of the event and look for the professional past that I had failed to notice. Jose Cardenas was USAID’s sub-regional director for Latin America during the administration of George W. Bush, but also a member of the National Security Council at the White House during that same administration that made history by adopting the policy of “preemptive strike,” which can be interpreted as the right to attack, without warning or provocation, any country that develops weapons or mechanisms perceived by Washington as dangerous for its “national security.”

How to explain such diversity in the talents of José Cardenas? On one hand, at USAID he carried out the “humanitarian” functions of helping our countries to conquer poverty, but, at the same time, he was part of the National Security Council that granted itself the power of attacking the whole world? We know, according to the same event at the Capitol, that national security is simply another of the excuses with which the United States intends to invade Venezuela, Ecuador and Bolivia. But that’s no surprise, because that has been the Trojan horse of the wars of the United States. What is new in this case is for those plans to be connected openly with USAID, which supposedly carries out only humanitarian functions.

Perhaps the organizers of the event intended to keep hidden USAID’s political-military goal of facilitating in Latin America the dark projects of the “national security” of the United States. But resorting to dividing the panel into two parts and to leave Cardenas in charge of only the first part, was not enough to hide forever the evidence that USAID, unquestionably, functions as one more of the mechanisms for intervention of the United States. Further, it coordinates everything that it does with the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), the governmental agency that promotes a democracy complacent with U.S. interests, and with the NGOs through which it channels ample resources for the same purposes. Those three mechanisms for intervention acted in unison in the incessant campaign of destabilization against the process of change in Bolivia, and they continue to do it in the sister nations that advance similar processes.

The regional decision to expel USAID definitively must materialize as soon as possible, because this agency of the U.S. government serves as a Trojan horse designed to destroy from the inside the governments of its former area of influence, which now resist its policies. Its mask of humanitarianism allows it to draw close to its victims, and to gain the trust of the most humble sectors, in order to make way for the invasion of those same peoples. The case of Jose Cardenas, providing services in two organizations with goals officially so opposed, is also proof of the notorious system of the revolving door, by means of which are rotated in their different organizations the representatives of the different power groups that defend the status quo, which defends by any and all means the interests of capital against the interests of the peoples. USAID must be expelled as soon as possible from Latin America.