Latin America

The US Congress is still funding Venezuelan oligarchy darling, Maria Corina Machado all these years later.







🎼 🎶🎵 Still funded after all these years 🎶🎵🎵

Chavez-years Machado:

Chavez’s US-funded rivals in the dock

A Venezuelan opposition figure who was received by US President George Bush is to go on trial with three colleagues, accused of conspiring to change the government using US funds.

7 Jul 2005

Judge Norma Sandoval ruled on Thursday that Maria Corina Machado and three other members of her Sumate group – which helped organise a referendum against Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez nearly a year ago – are being charged with “conspiracy to change Venezuela’s republican system”.

. . .

US funding

Venezuela’s government said the meeting showed Sumate was an “agency” of the Bush administration, which Chavez accuses of plotting to topple or kill him.

Sumate says it received a $31,000 grant from the Na.r acy worldwide. Sumate leaders say they used the funds to organise courses for voters about their electoral rights.

Chavez says the National Endowment for Democracy is a front for the CIA, spearheading US efforts to end his rule over the world’s fifth largest oil exporter.

The US government and leaders of the National Endowment for Democracy deny his accusation.

More:
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2005/7/7/chavezs-us-funded-rivals-in-the-dock

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Some information on the N.E.D.

(It's a good topic for you to research, yourself)

Trojan Horse: The National Endowment for Democracy
How many Americans could identify the National Endowment for Democracy? An organization which often does exactly the opposite of what its name implies. The NED was set up in the early 1980s under President Reagan in the wake of all the negative revelations about the CIA in the second half of the 1970s. The latter was a remarkable period. Spurred by Watergate – the Church committee of the Senate, the Pike committee of the House, and the Rockefeller Commission, created by the president, were all busy investigating the CIA. Seemingly every other day there was a new headline about the discovery of some awful thing, even criminal conduct, the CIA had been mixed up in for years. The Agency was getting an exceedingly bad name, and it was causing the powers-that-be much embarrassment.

Something had to be done. What was done was not to stop doing these awful things. Of course not. What was done was to shift many of these awful things to a new organization, with a nice sounding name – The National Endowment for Democracy. The idea was that the NED would do somewhat overtly what the CIA had been doing covertly for decades, and thus, hopefully, eliminate the stigma associated with CIA covert activities.

It was a masterpiece. Of politics, of public relations, and of cynicism.

Thus it was that in 1983, the National Endowment for Democracy was set up to “support democratic institutions throughout the world through private, nongovernmental efforts”. Notice the “nongovernmental” – part of the image, part of the myth. In actuality, virtually every penny of its funding comes from the federal government, as is clearly indicated in the financial statement in each issue of its annual report. NED likes to refer to itself as an NGO (Non-governmental organization) because this helps to maintain a certain credibility abroad that an official US government agency might not have. But NGO is the wrong category. NED is a GO.

“We should not have to do this kind of work covertly,” said Carl Gershman in 1986, while he was president of the Endowment. “It would be terrible for democratic groups around the world to be seen as subsidized by the C.I.A. We saw that in the 60’s, and that’s why it has been discontinued. We have not had the capability of doing this, and that’s why the endowment was created.”