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For The Record  

FTR #736 Taqqiya Sunrise: More about the Muslim Brotherhood and the Piggy-Back Coup in the Middle East

NB: This descrip­tion con­tains mate­r­i­al not includ­ed in the orig­i­nal broad­cast.

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MP3 Side 1 | Side 2

Intro­duc­tion: Since the tur­moil in the Mid­dle East began, we have been treat­ed to numer­ous media pre­sen­ta­tions assur­ing us that the Mus­lim Broth­er­hood would­n’t be com­ing to pow­er in the Mid­dle East and/or that if they did come to pow­er, it would­n’t be so bad because they have adopt­ed  a “demo­c­ra­t­ic,” “par­lia­men­tar­i­an,” “plu­ral­is­tic” polit­i­cal view­point. This appears to be an exam­ple of Taqqiya, a prin­ci­ple of Islam­ic war­fare and polit­i­cal strug­gle that oblig­es Mus­lim faith­ful to lie to non-Mus­lims about mat­ters of impor­tance.

After exam­in­ing Wik­iLeaks king­pin Julian Assange’s claims of being tar­get­ed by an inter­na­tion­al “Jew­ish con­spir­a­cy,” we view two op-ed columns print­ed by The New York Times on suc­ces­sive days in Feb­ru­ary, 2011. Authored by Broth­er­hood founder Has­san Al-Ban­na’s grand­son Tar­qiq Ramadan and Egypt­ian Broth­er­hood offi­cial Essi­am el-Erri­an, the columns lied brazen­ly about the his­to­ry and method­ol­o­gy of the Broth­er­hood.

Por­tray­ing this fas­cist orga­ni­za­tion as hav­ing been opposed to the Axis in World War II (they were allies of Hitler and Mus­soli­ni), Ramadan lies fun­da­men­tal­ly about the group, adding that it has been com­mit­ted to prin­ci­ples of non-vio­lence (except for fight­ing against Israel). The group is noth­ing if not vio­lent, as even a cur­so­ry looks at its his­to­ry will reveal.

The Times’ pub­li­ca­tion of these lies and refusal to print numer­ous rebut­tals that were sub­mit­ted sug­gests that the “Grey Lady” is ful­fill­ing its role as the CIA’s num­ber one pro­pa­gan­da asset, sup­port­ing an oper­a­tion aimed at installing free-mar­ket ide­o­log­i­cal prin­ci­ples in the Mus­lim world, the Mid­dle East in par­tic­u­lar. The Broth­er­hood’s cham­pi­oning of the ide­ol­o­gy of Ibn Khal­dun (viewed by the World Bank as the first advo­cate of pri­va­ti­za­tion) appears to be cen­tral to its appeal to transna­tion­al cor­po­rate inter­ests. Khal­dun might be thought of as “The Mil­ton Fried­man of the Islam­ic World.”

Recall that the term “Pig­gy-Back Coup” alludes to the influ­ence of the Tunisian upris­ing on the Egypt­ian pop­u­lar revolt and also to the prob­a­bil­i­ty that the Cor­po­ratist Mus­lim Broth­er­hood will be the ben­e­fi­cia­ry of the demo­c­ra­t­ic activism of The Jas­mine Rev­o­lu­tion and Tahrir Square, with dire con­se­quences for our civ­i­liza­tion.

Much of the pro­gram sets forth the activ­i­ties of non-vio­lent the­o­reti­cian Gene Sharp and his finan­cial bene­fac­tor Peter Ack­er­man. One of the ide­o­log­i­cal men­tors and sources of inspi­ra­tion for the Tunisian and Egypt­ian pro­test­ers, Sharp’s resume sug­gests that he has been uti­lized by the intel­li­gence com­mu­ni­ty to effect some of the “col­ored rev­o­lu­tions.”

Sharp’s finan­cial backer Peter Ack­er­man has an inter­est­ing back­ground as well. For­mer right-hand man to junk bond king Michael Milken, Ack­er­man has numer­ous con­nec­tions to intel­li­gence-linked insti­tu­tions, as well as right-wing think tanks such as the Koch Broth­ers’ Cato Insti­tute.

Pro­gram High­lights Include: Gene Sharp’s con­nec­tions to Har­vard Insti­tute of Inter­na­tion­al Stud­ies; that orga­ni­za­tion’s co-found­ing by for­mer Deputy Direc­tor of Cen­tral Intel­li­gence and John J. McCloy pro­tege Rober­rt R. Bowie; Ack­er­man’s links to the Unit­ed States Insti­tute of Peace, whose Mus­lim World Ini­tia­tive has been scored by con­ser­v­a­tives as a repos­i­to­ry for Mus­lim Broth­er­hood extrem­ists; review of the links between Amer­i­can Uni­ver­si­ty in Cairo and pro-Mus­lim Broth­er­hood the­o­reti­cians of the Ibn Khal­dun stripe; review of the role played in the Egypt­ian upris­ing by Wael Ghon­im, Google mar­ket­ing exec­u­tive, Amer­i­can Uni­ver­si­ty grad­u­ate and icon of the April 6 move­ment; Mus­lim Broth­er­hood-con­trolled Al Jazeer­a’s release of infor­ma­tion [about the recent peace nego­ti­a­tions dam­ag­ing to the Pales­tin­ian Author­i­ty  (alleged by both PA and Israeli author­i­ties to be dis­tort­ed and mis­lead­ing.)

1a. Evi­dent­ly feel­ing the heat, Wik­iLeaks chief Julian Assange has shown some­thing of his true nature–not the altru­is­tic “war­rior for truth” that he rep­re­sents him­self as being. In an arti­cle in Pri­vate Eye (UK), Assange posit­ed a Jew­ish con­spir­a­cy against Wik­iLeaks, react­ing to crit­i­cism of his selec­tion of a cel­e­bra­to­ry anti-Semi­te, Holo­caust denier and inti­mate of the Swedish Nazi milieu Joran Jer­mas, aka “Israel Shamir.”

Defend­ing this overt fas­cist, who has stat­ed that “It is the duty of all good Chris­tians and Mus­lims to deny the Holo­caust,” Assange ini­tial­ly blamed the bad pub­lic­i­ty the  group has received over this Nazi on a “Jew­ish con­spir­a­cy.” Con­sid­er­ing that The Guardian (UK) was one of his tar­gets in that rhetor­i­cal flour­ish, the com­ment is as ludi­crous as it is offen­sive and reveal­ing–The Guardian is fierce­ly anti-Israel.

Assange echoed the sub­stance of his remarks about Jermas/“Shamir” in an arti­cle in The New York Times.

. . . . He was espe­cial­ly angry about a Pri­vate Eye report that Israel Shamir, an Assange asso­ciate in Rus­sia, was a Holo­caust denier. Mr. Assange com­plained that the arti­cle was part of a cam­paign by Jew­ish reporters in Lon­don to smear Wik­iLeaks.

A lawyer for Mr. Assange could not imme­di­ate­ly be reached for com­ment, but in a state­ment lat­er released on the Wik­iLeaks Twit­ter feed, Mr. Assange said Mr. His­lop had “dis­tort­ed, invent­ed or mis­re­mem­bered almost every sig­nif­i­cant claim and phrase.”

The Pri­vate Eye arti­cle quot­ed Mr. Assange as say­ing the con­spir­a­cy was led by The Guardian and includ­ed the newspaper’s edi­tor, Alan Rus­bridger, and inves­ti­ga­tions edi­tor, David Leigh, as well as John Kampfn­er, a promi­nent Lon­don jour­nal­ist who recent­ly reviewed two books about Wik­iLeaks for The Sun­day Times of Lon­don.

When Mr. His­lop point­ed out that Mr. Rus­bridger was not Jew­ish, Mr. Assange coun­tered that The Guardian’s edi­tor was “sort of Jew­ish” because he and Mr. Leigh, who is Jew­ish, were broth­ers-in-law. . . .

“Report Says Assange Com­plains of Jew­ish Smear Cam­paign” by Ravi Somaiya; The New York Times; 3/1/2011.

1b. As the Egypt­ian upris­ing was gath­er­ing momen­tum, the Mus­lim Broth­er­hood-affil­i­at­ed Al Jazeera net­work aired a leaked doc­u­ment con­cern­ing the Israeli/Palestinian Author­i­ty nego­ti­a­tions for a Pales­tin­ian state. Charged by both Israeli and Pales­tin­ian Author­i­ty with selec­tive­ly edit­ing the doc­u­ments in such a way as to fun­da­men­tal­ly mis­rep­re­sent the sub­stance of the nego­ti­a­tions, Al Jazeera has strength­ened the hand of Hamas–the Mus­lim Broth­er­hood affil­i­ate in Gaza.

It is unclear how Al-Jazeera got the doc­u­ments. Were they leaked by Wik­iLeaks and Joran Jer­mas aka “Israel Shamir?”

Clas­si­fied doc­u­ments leaked by al- Jazeera sig­nal that Israeli and Pales­tin­ian peace posi­tions may have been clos­er than pre­vi­ous­ly per­ceived.

Al-Jazeera tele­vi­sion said it had been giv­en access to thou­sands of pages of mem­os and e‑mails of pri­vate meet­ings that show Pales­tin­ian nego­tia­tors were pre­pared to give up claims to parts of east Jerusalem and swap some Jew­ish set­tle­ments in the West Bank for ter­ri­to­ry with­in Israel in 2008 talks. Al-Jazeera did­n’t say how it obtained the doc­u­ments, which cov­ered the peri­od from 1999 to 2010.

Chief Pales­tin­ian nego­tia­tor Saeb Erakat called the reports “unfound­ed, twist­ed and tak­en out of con­text” in a tele­phone inter­view yes­ter­day. Yass­er Abed Rab­bo, a mem­ber of the Pales­tine Lib­er­a­tion Orga­ni­za­tion’s Exec­u­tive Com­mit­tee, said at a press con­fer­ence that it was “an orga­nized cam­paign to dis­tort the posi­tions of the Pales­tin­ian lead­er­ship.” . . .

“Leak Shows Israel, Pales­tini­ans May Not Have Been so Far Apart” [Bloomberg]; The San Fran­cis­co Chron­i­cle; 1/24/2011.

2a. A stun­ning op-ed piece was penned for The New York Times and car­ried by oth­er pub­li­ca­tions. In it, Tariq Ramadan lies through his teeth about the his­to­ry of the Mus­lim Broth­er­hood.

The Mus­lim Broth­ers began in the 1930s as a legal­ist, anti-colo­nial­ist and non­vi­o­lent move­ment that claimed legit­i­ma­cy for armed resis­tance in Pales­tine against Zion­ist expan­sion­ism dur­ing the peri­od before World War II. The writ­ings from between 1930 and 1945 of Has­san al-Ban­na, founder of the Broth­er­hood, show that he opposed colo­nial­ism and strong­ly crit­i­cized the fas­cist gov­ern­ments in Ger­many and Italy. [Ital­ics are mine–D.E.] He reject­ed use of vio­lence in Egypt, even though he con­sid­ered it legit­i­mate in Pales­tine, in resis­tance to the Zion­ist Stern and Irgun ter­ror gangs. . . .

. . . .Today’s Mus­lim Broth­er­hood draws these diverse visions togeth­er. But the lead­er­ship of the move­ment — those who belong to the found­ing gen­er­a­tion are now very old — no longer ful­ly rep­re­sents the aspi­ra­tions of the younger mem­bers, who are much more open to the world, anx­ious to bring about inter­nal reform and fas­ci­nat­ed by the Turk­ish exam­ple. Behind the uni­fied, hier­ar­chi­cal facade, con­tra­dic­to­ry influ­ences are at work. No one can tell which way the move­ment will go.  . . .

“Whith­er the Mus­lim Broth­er­hood?” by Tariq Ramadan; The New York Times; 2/8/2011.

2b. Ramadan’s op-ed piece in The New York Times was fol­lowed, the next day,  by an equal­ly disin­gen­u­ous col­umn by a key mem­ber of the Egypt­ian Mus­lim Broth­er­hood, who also lied about the Broth­er­hood and its “peace­ful” ori­gins, inten­tions and method­ol­o­gy.

In more than eight decades of activism, the Mus­lim Broth­er­hood has con­sis­tent­ly pro­mot­ed an agen­da of grad­ual reform. Our prin­ci­ples, clear­ly stat­ed since the incep­tion of the move­ment in 1928, affirm an unequiv­o­cal posi­tion against vio­lence. . . .

“What the Mus­lim Broth­ers Want” by Essam el-Erri­an; The New York Times; 2/9/2011.

2c. Aside from the Broth­er­hood’s long asso­ci­a­tion with the Axis and the Under­ground Reich, its vio­lent ori­en­ta­tion could not be more  clear from the his­tor­i­cal record. In Cairo to Dam­as­cus, John Roy Carl­son infil­trat­ed the Broth­er­hood in the imme­di­ate after­math of World War II, chron­i­cling its fun­da­men­tal vio­lence toward Egyp­tians who did­n’t sup­port its polit­i­cal agen­da.

Note that Carl­son infil­trat­ed the Broth­er­hood and obtained an inter­view with Has­san al-Ban­na.

He [Has­san el-Ban­na, the Moor­shid or supreme guide] also had a spe­cial assas­sin squad, entrust­ed with the duty
of liq­ui­dat­ing polit­i­cal oppo­nents. El Ban­na resent­ed a ver­dict
that Judge Ahmed el Khazin­dar Bey met­ed out against a
Moslem Broth­er, and ordered him liq­ui­dat­ed. One of the
Moor­shid’s hench­men took care of this assign­ment, aid­ed by
an assis­tant who pumped six bul­lets into the judge.

Under pub­lic pres­sure Cairo’s police chief staged a few
raids and made a few arrests. El Ban­na was annoyed. He
ordered his ter­ror squad to “teach the police chief a les­son.”
The lat­ter was prompt­ly killed by a hand grenade while on a
tour of inspec­tion of Fouad Uni­ver­si­ty.

When the pres­i­dent of Fouad com­plained, he was denounced as a “Euro­pean,”
pub­licly insult­ed, and nar­row­ly missed being shot.
El Ban­na played for high stakes. Not con­tent with liq­ui­dat­ing
a judge and a police chief, he ordered Abdel Maguid
Ahmed Has­san, a twen­ty-three year old stu­dent and a mem­ber
of his ter­ror squad, to car­ry out his duty to Allah. A reli­gious
sheikh told Has­san that the Koran sanc­tioned the
mur­der of the “ene­mies of Islam and of Ara­bism,” where­upon
Has­san duti­ful­ly swore to kill any trai­tor the Moor­shid named.

Has­san retired and spent his days in med­i­ta­tion, prayer, and
prepa­ra­tion. On the tenth day after his oath he donned a
police­man’s uni­form and went to the Min­istry of Inte­ri­or,
where he wait­ed for the Egypt­ian prime min­is­ter, Mah­moud
Fah­my el Nokrashy Pasha, to emerge. As soon as Nokrashy
Pasha appeared, fol­lowed by his body­guard, Abdel whipped
out a pis­tol and shot the min­is­ter dead, his duty to the Moor­shid
and to Allah ful­filled, his place in heav­en assured. . . .

Cairo to Dam­as­cus by John Roy Carl­son; Alfred A. Knopf & Com­pa­ny [HC]; Copy­right 1951 by John Roy Carl­son; pp. 90–91.

3a. Con­sid­er­able insight into the machi­na­tions under­ly­ing the Pig­gy-Back Coup can be gleaned from a New York Times pro­file of Gene Sharp.

. . . . When the non­par­ti­san Inter­na­tion­al Cen­ter on Non­vi­o­lent Con­flict, which trains democ­ra­cy activists, slipped into Cairo sev­er­al years ago to con­duct a work­shop, among the papers it dis­trib­uted was Mr. Sharp’s “198 Meth­ods of Non­vi­o­lent Action,” a list of tac­tics that range from hunger strikes to “protest dis­rob­ing” to “dis­clos­ing iden­ti­ties of secret agents.”

Dalia Zia­da, an Egypt­ian blog­ger and activist who attend­ed the work­shop and lat­er orga­nized sim­i­lar ses­sions on her own, said trainees were active in both the Tunisia and Egypt revolts. She said that some activists trans­lat­ed excerpts of Mr. Sharp’s work into Ara­bic, and that his mes­sage of “attack­ing weak­ness­es of dic­ta­tors” stuck with them.

Peter Ack­er­man, a one­time stu­dent of Mr. Sharp who found­ed the non­vi­o­lence cen­ter and ran the Cairo work­shop, cites his for­mer men­tor as proof that “ideas have pow­er.”

Mr. Sharp, hard-nosed yet exceed­ing­ly shy, is care­ful not to take cred­it. He is more thinker than rev­o­lu­tion­ary, though as a young man he par­tic­i­pat­ed in lunch-counter sit-ins and spent nine months in a fed­er­al prison in Dan­bury, Conn., as a con­sci­en­tious objec­tor dur­ing the Kore­an War. He has had no con­tact with the Egypt­ian pro­test­ers, he said, although he recent­ly learned that the Mus­lim Broth­er­hood had “From Dic­ta­tor­ship to Democ­ra­cy” post­ed on its Web site. . . .

. . . . Mr. Ack­er­man, who became wealthy as an invest­ment banker after study­ing under Mr. Sharp, con­tributed mil­lions of dol­lars and kept it afloat for years. But about a decade ago, Mr. Ack­er­man want­ed to dis­sem­i­nate Mr. Sharp’s ideas more aggres­sive­ly, as well as his own. He put his mon­ey into his own cen­ter, which also pro­duces movies and even a video game to train dis­si­dents. An annu­ity he pur­chased still helps pay Mr. Sharp’s salary. . .

“Shy U.S. Intel­lec­tu­al Cre­at­ed Play­book Used in a Rev­o­lu­tion” by Sheryl Gay Stol­berg; The New York Times; 2/16/2011.

3b. Sharp has enjoyed appoint­ments at Har­vard Uni­ver­si­ty’s Cen­ter for Inter­na­tion­al Stud­ies.

Sharp was born in Ohio.[1] He received a Bach­e­lor of Arts in Social Sci­ences in 1949 from Ohio State Uni­ver­si­ty, where he also received his Mas­ter of Arts in Soci­ol­o­gy in 1951.[3] In 1953–54, Sharp was jailed for nine months after protest­ing the con­scrip­tion of sol­diers for the Kore­an War.[1] In 1968, he received a Doc­tor of Phi­los­o­phy in polit­i­cal the­o­ry from Oxford University.[3]
Sharp has been a pro­fes­sor of polit­i­cal sci­ence at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Mass­a­chu­setts Dart­mouth since 1972. He simul­ta­ne­ous­ly held research appoint­ments at Har­vard University’s Cen­ter for Inter­na­tion­al Affairs since 1965.[1] In 1983 he found­ed the Albert Ein­stein Insti­tu­tion, a non-prof­it orga­ni­za­tion devot­ed to stud­ies and pro­mo­tion of the use of non­vi­o­lent action in con­flicts worldwide.[4] . . .

“Gene Sharp”; wikipedia.org

3c. The Har­vard Cen­ter for Inter­na­tion­al Stud­ies was found­ed by Robert R. Bowie, an indi­vid­ual with numer­ous con­nec­tions to the intel­li­gence com­mu­ni­ty.

Robert R. Bowie (born August 24, 1909) is an Amer­i­can diplo­mat and schol­ar who served as CIA Deputy Direc­tor from 1977–1979.
Robert Bowie grad­u­at­ed from Prince­ton Uni­ver­si­ty in 1931 and received a law degree from Har­vard Uni­ver­si­ty in 1934 and turned down offers to work as a cor­po­rate lawyer with New York’s major law firms, return­ing to Bal­ti­more to work in his father’s law firm, Bowie and Burke. He served in the U.S. Army (1942–1946) as a com­mis­sioned offi­cer with the Pen­ta­gon and in occu­pied Ger­many from 1945 until 1946. In 1946 he resigned as a lieu­tenant-colonel. He taught at Har­vard from 1946–1955. The youngest pro­fes­sor of the school, he was a trust­ed con­fi­dant to John J. McCloy the “unof­fi­cial chair­man of the Amer­i­can estab­lish­ment”. Dur­ing peri­ods of leave from Har­vard between 1950 and 1952 Bowie worked for McCloy as one of his legal advis­ers in Germany.[1]
He served as Direc­tor of Pol­i­cy Plan­ning from 1953–1957; co-founder of Har­vard’s Cen­ter for Inter­na­tion­al Affairs (1958); Coun­selor for the State Depart­ment from 1966–1968. He is a mem­ber of the Coun­cil on For­eign Rela­tions, the Tri­lat­er­al Com­mis­sion, and the Amer­i­can Acad­e­my of Diplo­ma­cy. He is a recip­i­ent of the Legion of Mer­it and the Com­man­der’s Cross of the Order of Mer­it of the Fed­er­al Repub­lic of Ger­many. . . .

“Robert R. Bowie”; wikipedia.org.

4. Ack­er­man has served as an advi­sor to the Unit­ed States Insti­tute of Peace, whose Mus­lim World Ini­tia­tive has  been cit­ed by crit­ics as a the­ater of Islam­ic extrem­ist pen­e­tra­tion and activ­i­ty.

Peter Ack­er­man is on “the U.S. Advi­so­ry Coun­cil of the Unit­ed States Insti­tute of Peace.” [4]

“Unit­ed States Insti­tute of Peace”; Source­watch.

5. Ack­er­man’s resume is inter­est­ing, for a pro­mot­er of social jus­tice.

Peter Ack­er­man was born in New York City, Nov 6 1946, and edu­cat­ed at Col­gate Uni­ver­si­ty and the Fletch­er School of Law and Diplo­ma­cy (Tufts Uni­ver­si­ty) where he earned a PhD in Inter­na­tion­al Relations.[10]

After his grad­u­a­tion he joined the junk-bond deal­ers, Drex­el Burn­ham Lam­bert, and for most of the next fif­teen years, he was the right-hand man to Michael Milken the “Junk-Bond King”. He became the key deal-mak­er and strate­gist for the com­pa­ny, and his inno­v­a­tive approach to deal-mak­ing, togeth­er with his unusu­al aca­d­e­m­ic qual­i­fi­ca­tions, earned him the nick­name “the absent­mind­ed pro­fes­sor”. But the record shows that he was far from absent mind­ed. . . .

“Peter Ack­er­man”; Source­watch.

6. [Upris­ing leader Wael] Ghon­im has been wide­ly pub­li­cized as a grad­u­ate of Amer­i­can Uni­ver­si­ty in Cairo. The broad­cast relates part of an inter­view with Saad Eddin Ibrahim, a pro­fes­sor at Amer­i­can Uni­ver­si­ty who is very pro-Islamist and pro-Broth­er­hood. Inter­est­ing­ly and sig­nif­i­cant­ly, Ibrahim is the founder of the Ibn Khal­dun Cen­ter for Devel­op­ment Stud­ies, named after a 14th cen­tu­ry Islam­ic advo­cate of free mar­kets. Khal­dun is high­ly regard­ed by the Broth­er­hood and that atti­tude has led the cor­po­rate busi­ness com­mu­ni­ty to sup­port the Broth­er­hood.

Note that no less an author­i­ty than the World Bank views Ibn Khaldun—revered by the Brotherhood—as “the first advo­cate of pri­va­ti­za­tion”!

In the days of the caliphate, Islam devel­oped the most sophis­ti­cat­ed mon­e­tary sys­tem the world had yet known. Today, some econ­o­mists cite Islam­ic bank­ing as fur­ther evi­dence of an intrin­sic Islam­ic prag­ma­tism. Though still guid­ed by a Qur’an­ic ban on riba, or inter­est, Islam­ic bank­ing has adapt­ed to the needs of a boom­ing oil region for liq­uid­i­ty. In recent years, some 500 Islam­ic banks and invest­ment firms hold­ing $2 tril­lion in assets have emerged in the Gulf States, with more in Islam­ic com­mu­ni­ties of the West. British Chan­cel­lor of the Exche­quer Gor­don Brown wants to make Lon­don a glob­al cen­ter for Islam­ic finance—and elic­its no howl of protest from fun­da­men­tal­ists. How Islamists might run a cen­tral bank is more prob­lem­at­ic: schol­ars say they would manip­u­late cur­ren­cy reserves, not inter­est rates. The Mus­lim Broth­er­hood hails 14th cen­tu­ry philoso­pher Ibn Khal­dun as its eco­nom­ic guide. Antic­i­pat­ing sup­ply-side eco­nom­ics, Khal­dun argued that cut­ting tax­es rais­es pro­duc­tion and tax rev­enues, and that state con­trol should be lim­it­ed to pro­vid­ing water, fire and free graz­ing land, the util­i­ties of the ancient world. The World Bank has called Ibn Khal­dun the first advo­cate of pri­va­ti­za­tion. [Ital­ics are mine–D.E.] His found­ing influ­ence is a sign of mod­er­a­tion. If Islamists in pow­er ever do clash with the West, it won’t be over com­merce.

“Islam in Office” by Stephen Glain; Newsweek; 7/3–10/2006.

7. Excerpts from the inter­view with Saad Eddin Ibrahim indi­cate his sup­port for Islamists. In fact, Gamal Al-Ban­na, the broth­er of Mus­lim Broth­er­hood founder Has­san Al-Ban­na is on the board of direc­tors of the Ibn Khal­dun Cen­ter for Devel­op­ment Stud­ies!

Saad Eddin Ibrahim: This is one of the projects we are work­ing on in the Ibn
Khal­dun Cen­ter. On our Board of Trustees is Gamal al-Ban­na – the only sur­viv­ing
broth­er of Has­san al-Ban­na, the founder of the Mus­lim Broth­ers. He is in his mid
80s but lucid. . . .

Alan John­son: You have argued for an alliance of sorts between democ­rats and
‘mod­er­ate’ Islamists. In August 2006 you wrote that ‘Main­stream Islamists with
broad sup­port devel­oped civic dis­po­si­tions and ser­vices to pro­vide are the most
like­ly actors in build­ing a new Mid­dle East.’ And in Decem­ber 2006 you com­plained
about an ‘unjus­ti­fied fear of mod­ern Islamists’ and called for a pol­i­cy of dia­logue and
inclu­sion, say­ing ‘Hamas, Hezbol­lah, Mus­lim Broth­ers – these peo­ple you can­not
get rid of; you have to deal with them … the name of the game is inclu­sion.’ You deny
that these organ­i­sa­tions are inim­i­cal to democ­ra­cy, point­ing out that Islamists have
nev­er come to pow­er via elec­tions and then reneged on democ­ra­cy. Warn­ing that
‘the Islamist scare is prop­a­gat­ed and mar­ket­ed by auto­crat­ic regimes to intim­i­date
the mid­dle class and the West, to ward off any seri­ous demo­c­ra­t­ic reforms,’ you
have urged a pos­i­tive response to Hamas and Hezbollah’s par­tic­i­pa­tion in elec­tions.
While you warn that ‘no sober ana­lyst would con­sid­er this a final com­mit­ment by
Islamists to democ­ra­cy,’ you believe ‘the process of trans­form­ing them into Mus­lim
democ­rats is clear­ly under way.’ Now, these views have raised some eye­brows. Can
you set out your think­ing? . . .

“A Pol­i­tics of Inclusion:An Inter­view with Saad Eddin Ibrahim”; Dis­sent Mag­a­zine; Spring/2007.

8. New York Times colum­nist Thomas Fried­man high­light­ed the dif­fi­cul­ties ahead for democ­ra­cy activists in Egypt and else­where.

. . . . But fas­ten your seat belts. This is not going to be a joy ride because the lid is being blown off an entire region with frail insti­tu­tions, scant civ­il soci­ety and vir­tu­al­ly no demo­c­ra­t­ic tra­di­tions or cul­ture of inno­va­tion. The Unit­ed Nations’ Arab Human Devel­op­ment Report 2002 warned us about all of this, but the Arab League made sure that that report was ignored in the Arab world and the West turned a blind eye. But that report — com­piled by a group of Arab intel­lec­tu­als led by Nad­er Fer­gany, an Egypt­ian sta­tis­ti­cian — was prophet­ic. It mer­its re-read­ing today to appre­ci­ate just how hard this demo­c­ra­t­ic tran­si­tion will be.

The report stat­ed that the Arab world is suf­fer­ing from three huge deficits — a deficit of edu­ca­tion, a deficit of free­dom and a deficit of women’s empow­er­ment. A sum­ma­ry of the report in Mid­dle East Quar­ter­ly in the Fall of 2002 detailed the key evi­dence: the gross domes­tic prod­uct of the entire Arab world com­bined was less than that of Spain. Per capi­ta expen­di­ture on edu­ca­tion in Arab coun­tries dropped from 20 per­cent of that in indus­tri­al­ized coun­tries in 1980 to 10 per­cent in the mid-1990s. In terms of the num­ber of sci­en­tif­ic papers per unit of pop­u­la­tion, the aver­age out­put of the Arab world per mil­lion inhab­i­tants was rough­ly 2 per­cent of that of an indus­tri­al­ized coun­try.

When the report was com­piled, the Arab world trans­lat­ed about 330 books annu­al­ly, one-fifth of the num­ber that Greece did. Out of sev­en world regions, the Arab coun­tries had the low­est free­dom score in the late 1990s in the rank­ings of Free­dom House. At the dawn of the 21st cen­tu­ry, the Arab world had more than 60 mil­lion illit­er­ate adults, the major­i­ty of whom were women. Yemen could be the first coun­try in the world to run out of water with­in 10 years.

This is the vaunt­ed “sta­bil­i­ty” all these dic­ta­tors pro­vid­ed — the sta­bil­i­ty of soci­eties frozen in time. . . .

“If Not Now, When?” by Thomas Fried­man; The New York Times; 2/22/2011.

Discussion

9 comments for “FTR #736 Taqqiya Sunrise: More about the Muslim Brotherhood and the Piggy-Back Coup in the Middle East”

  1. [...] am sug­gest­ing as well Dave Emory’s last show, FTR #736, which con­tin­ues the analy­sis on the coup d’état that was per­pe­trat­ed in Egypt. Bring your [...]

    Posted by The 50-Point Manifesto of Hasan al-Banna: where catholic bigotry meets Soviet Russia and Mussolini’s Corporate State | lys-dor.com | March 23, 2011, 10:40 am
  2. Taqqiya isn’t actu­al­ly a wide­ly held idea in Islam, but rather it is an con­cept that was cre­at­ed by the Ismaili, or more accu­rate­ly the Nizari Ismaili. The sect was hunt­ed by oth­er Mus­lims due to its abil­i­ty to infil­trate and kill not only Cru­saders in their cas­tles but also oth­er Mus­lim lead­ers it saw as being in the way of the Ismaili plans on dom­i­nat­ing all of the coun­tries in the Mid­dle East. If the Mus­lim Broth­er­hood or oth­er islamist groups are employ­ing taqqiya then you can be assured that they them­selves have been infil­trat­ed by a rad­i­cal Mus­lim group that aims to destroy or co-opt both Sun­ni and Shia sects.

    It’s a tan­gled web in the Mid­dle East. Some books you may be inter­est­ed in are:

    The secret order of assas­sins : the strug­gle of the ear­ly Nizârî Ismâʻîlîs against the Islam­ic world by Mar­shall G.S. Hodg­son

    The Assas­sins : a rad­i­cal sect in Islam by Bernard Lewis

    The assas­sins : The sto­ry of Islam’s medieval secret sect
    by W. B. Bar­lett

    The Assas­sins, or Hashis­han­ni, were the impe­tus behind the leg­ends of the Old Man of the Moun­tain in Cru­sad­er lore, as well as pos­si­bly being the source for the image of Heav­en await­ing those who died in Ismaili ser­vice. Their “Heav­en” was pos­si­bly real; it could have been a cer­tain grot­to in one of the many assas­sin cas­tles in the Mid­dle East where assas­sins who were about to be sent out on a mis­sion would be drugged with hashish, then set free among a group of dark haired “angels” who would encour­age the assas­sins to com­plete their mis­sions. The hook was you got to spend time with the “angels” who would be await­ing you, if you were suc­cess­ful in elim­i­nat­ing your tar­get, but only in Heav­en.

    Oth­er than that I think your analy­sis is spot on.

    Posted by Sherman Brennan | March 25, 2011, 1:07 pm
  3. Thank you for ref­er­enc­ing my post. Effec­tive­ly, Hasan al-Ban­na’s 50-Point Man­i­festo is a must read to get the pic­ture about the Mus­lim Broth­er­hood. As you say your­self, “read or bleed, learn or burn”.

    I just have one obser­va­tion to add to enrich the analy­sis on some­thing that is already extreme­ly com­plex and some­times messy, as one of your lis­ten­ers point­ed out.

    First, the Arab pop­u­la­tions have been ruled by auto­crats for thou­sands of years. They don’t know any­thing else. So, in order to have a real tran­si­tion toward democ­ra­cy, social, com­mu­ni­tar­i­an and polit­i­cal struc­tures must be put in place. This process takes years, decades before any attempt to install a viable and work­ing democ­ra­cy can suc­ceed. And the Euro­pean lead­ers know that so there is no rea­son (at least no pro­gres­sive or lib­er­al rea­sons...) to be in such of a hur­ry to top­ple Mid­dle East lead­ers. The local pop­u­la­tions are not ready any­way. Just look at the after­math of the Amer­i­can and French rev­o­lu­tions. Did it change any­thing for the mass­es? I don’t think so. In fact, it took more or less two cen­turies before the real fruits of these rev­o­lu­tions came to ripen. One could argue that now we have much more expe­ri­ence than in the 19th cen­tu­ry. It is true. How­ev­er, those who want human­i­ty to be thrown back into Antiq­ui­ty have much more pow­er and mon­ey than ever before, that is the oth­er side of it. The peo­ple have to open their eyes and ears. Mas­ters of decep­tion are at work.

    Have a great day.

    Posted by Claude | March 26, 2011, 12:08 pm
  4. [...] coun­tries. The dif­fer­ent points he makes present a con­sid­er­able amount of over­lap with Dave Emory‘s assess­ment of the sit­u­a­tion. This inter­view is cer­tain­ly a good com­ple­ment to what Emory [...]

    Posted by Pepe Escobar on the Boiling Frogs: more insights about the Middle East uprisings | lys-dor.com | May 23, 2011, 4:17 pm
  5. The CIA is let­ting us know that there are intel­li­gence offi­cers in Turkey secret­ly work­ing with the arm-traf­fick­ing net­works that are fun­nel­ing weapons to the Syr­i­an rebels. Part of their job appears to be help­ing to fun­nel the weapons to the non-super-scary groups oper­at­ing in Syr­ia:

    C.I.A. Said to Aid in Steer­ing Arms to Syr­i­an Oppo­si­tion
    By ERIC SCHMITT
    Pub­lished: June 21, 2012

    WASHINGTON — A small num­ber of C.I.A. offi­cers are oper­at­ing secret­ly in south­ern Turkey, help­ing allies decide which Syr­i­an oppo­si­tion fight­ers across the bor­der will receive arms to fight the Syr­i­an gov­ern­ment, accord­ing to Amer­i­can offi­cials and Arab intel­li­gence offi­cers.

    The weapons, includ­ing auto­mat­ic rifles, rock­et-pro­pelled grenades, ammu­ni­tion and some anti­tank weapons, are being fun­neled most­ly across the Turk­ish bor­der by way of a shad­owy net­work of inter­me­di­aries includ­ing Syria’s Mus­lim Broth­er­hood and paid for by Turkey, Sau­di Ara­bia and Qatar, the offi­cials said.

    The C.I.A. offi­cers have been in south­ern Turkey for sev­er­al weeks, in part to help keep weapons out of the hands of fight­ers allied with Al Qae­da or oth­er ter­ror­ist groups, one senior Amer­i­can offi­cial said. The Oba­ma admin­is­tra­tion has said it is not pro­vid­ing arms to the rebels, but it has also acknowl­edged that Syria’s neigh­bors would do so.

    ...

    So the weapons are being shipped into Syr­ia via a shad­owy net­work that includes the Syr­i­an Mus­lim Broth­er­hood with the goal of keep­ing the weapons out of the hands of al Qae­da. Good luck with that!

    Posted by Pterrafractyl | June 21, 2012, 8:15 pm
  6. Here’s a major devel­op­ment with a tie in to his­to­ry of Gene Sharp’s regime-change strate­gies:

    The sit­u­a­tion in Venezuela took a turn for the worse after oppo­si­tion leader Juan Guai­do called for a mil­i­tary coup against the Maduro gov­ern­ment. It appears to be a regime change oper­a­tion con­duct­ed in coor­di­na­tion with the US gov­ern­ment and some yet-to-be-revealed fac­tion of the Venezue­lan gov­ern­ment. US Nation­al Secu­ri­ty Advis­er John Bolton is pub­licly claim­ing that three key Venezue­lan offi­cials, includ­ing Maduro’s defense min­is­ter and head of the supreme court, have pri­vate pledged to remove Maduro who alleged­ly pledged to US. And yet, as of the lat­est reports, the mil­i­tary back­ing for this coup appears to be lim­it­ed.

    Anoth­er inter­est­ing aspect of this call for regime change is that it coin­cid­ed with the release of Leopol­do Lopez from house arrest. Lopez is Guaido’s polit­i­cal men­tor and a key right-wing oppo­si­tion activist. Lopez was stand­ing beside Guai­do when he made the calls for regime change today. So a key oppo­si­tion leader was released from house arrest on the same day of this coor­di­nat­ed move for regime change, which would appear to indi­cate at least some degree of back­ing for the coup by the secu­ri­ty forces, and yet there does­n’t actu­al­ly appear to be very much sup­port for this coup in the mil­i­tary so far, which is an inter­est­ing mix of sig­nals:

    Asso­ci­at­ed Press

    Clash­es rock Venezuela as Guai­do urges oppo­si­tion upris­ing

    By SCOTT SMITH and CHRISTOPHER TORCHIA
    04/30/2019

    CARACAS, Venezuela (AP) — Oppo­si­tion leader Juan Guaidó took a bold step to revive his move­ment to seize pow­er in Venezuela, tak­ing to the streets Tues­day to call for a mil­i­tary upris­ing that drew quick sup­port from the Trump admin­is­tra­tion but also fierce resis­tance from forces loy­al to embat­tled social­ist Nico­las Maduro.

    Vio­lent street bat­tles erupt­ed in parts of Cara­cas in what was the most seri­ous chal­lenge yet to Maduro’s rule — kicked off with a video shot at dawn of Guaidó, flanked by sev­er­al heav­i­ly armed nation­al guards­men, urg­ing a final push to top­ple Maduro.

    In one dra­mat­ic inci­dent dur­ing a chaot­ic day, sev­er­al armored vehi­cles plowed into a group of anti-gov­ern­ment demon­stra­tors try­ing to storm the capital’s air base, hit­ting at least two pro­test­ers.

    Still, the rebel­lion, dubbed “Oper­a­tion Free­dom,” seemed to have gar­nered only lim­it­ed mil­i­tary sup­port.

    Mean­while, U.S. Nation­al Secu­ri­ty Advis­er John Bolton said the Trump admin­is­tra­tion was wait­ing for three key offi­cials, includ­ing Maduro’s defense min­is­ter and head of the supreme court, to act on what he said were pri­vate pledges to remove Maduro. He did not pro­vide details.

    The dra­mat­ic events began ear­ly Tues­day when Guaidó, flanked by a few dozen nation­al guards­men and some armored crowd-con­trol vehi­cles, released the three-minute video shot near the Car­lota air base.

    In a sur­prise, Leopol­do Lopez, Guaido’s polit­i­cal men­tor and the nation’s most-promi­nent oppo­si­tion activist, stood along­side him. Detained in 2014 for lead­ing a pre­vi­ous round of anti-gov­ern­ment unrest, Lopez said he had been released from house arrest by secu­ri­ty forces adher­ing to an order from Guaidó.

    “I want to tell the Venezue­lan peo­ple: This is the moment to take to the streets and accom­pa­ny these patri­ot­ic sol­diers,” Lopez declared.

    As the two oppo­si­tion lead­ers coor­di­nat­ed actions from a high­way over­pass, troops loy­al to Maduro fired tear gas from inside the adja­cent air base.

    A crowd that quick­ly swelled to a few thou­sand scur­ried for cov­er, reap­pear­ing lat­er with Guaidó at a plaza a few blocks from the dis­tur­bances. A small­er group of masked youths stayed behind on the high­way, lob­bing rocks and Molo­tov cock­tails toward the air base and set­ting a gov­ern­ment bus on fire.

    Amid the may­hem, sev­er­al armored util­i­ty vehi­cles careened over a berm and drove at full speed into the crowd. Two demon­stra­tors, lying on the ground with their heads and legs blood­ied, were rushed away on a motor­cy­cle as the vehi­cles sped away dodg­ing fire­balls thrown by the demon­stra­tors.

    “It’s now or nev­er,” said one of the young rebel­lious sol­diers, his face cov­ered in the blue ban­dan­na worn by the few dozen insur­gent sol­diers.

    The head of a med­ical cen­ter near the site of the street bat­tles said doc­tors were treat­ing 50 peo­ple, about half of them with injuries suf­fered from rub­ber bul­lets. At least one per­son had been shot with live ammu­ni­tion.

    Lat­er Tues­day, Lopez and his fam­i­ly sought refuge in the Chilean ambassador’s res­i­dence in Cara­cas, where anoth­er polit­i­cal ally has been holed up for over a year. There were also reports that 25 troops who had been with Guaidó fled to Brazil’s diplo­mat­ic mis­sion.

    Amid the con­fu­sion, Maduro tried to project an image of strength, say­ing he had spo­ken to sev­er­al region­al mil­i­tary com­man­ders who reaf­firmed their loy­al­ty.

    “Nerves of steel!” he said in a mes­sage post­ed on Twit­ter.

    Flanked by top mil­i­tary com­man­ders, Defense Min­is­ter Vladimir Padri­no López con­demned Guaido’s move as a “ter­ror­ist” act and “coup attempt” that was bound to fail like past upris­ings.

    “Those who try to take Miraflo­res with vio­lence will be met with vio­lence,” he said on nation­al tele­vi­sion, refer­ring to the pres­i­den­tial palace where hun­dreds of gov­ern­ment sup­port­ers, some of them bran­dish­ing firearms, had gath­ered in response to a call to defend Maduro.

    Mean­while, For­eign Min­is­ter Jorge Arreaza said the “right-wing extrem­ists” would not suc­ceed in frac­tur­ing the armed forces, which have large­ly stood with the social­ist leader through­out the months of tur­moil.

    “Since 2002, we’ve seen the same pat­tern,” Arreaza told The Asso­ci­at­ed Press. “They call for vio­lence, a coup, and send peo­ple into the streets so that there are con­fronta­tions and deaths. And then from the blood they try to con­struct a nar­ra­tive.”

    Pro­test­ers erect­ed bar­ri­cades of debris at sev­er­al down­town inter­sec­tions about 10 blocks from the pres­i­den­tial palace, but police in riot gear moved in quick­ly to clear the roads. Most shops and busi­ness­es were closed and the streets of the cap­i­tal unusu­al­ly qui­et, as peo­ple hud­dled at home to await the out­come of the day’s dra­ma.

    Guaidó said he called for the upris­ing to restore Venezuela’s con­sti­tu­tion­al order, bro­ken when Maduro was sworn in ear­li­er this year for a sec­ond term fol­low­ing elec­tions boy­cotted by the oppo­si­tion and con­sid­ered ille­git­i­mate by dozens of coun­tries.

    He said that in the com­ing hours he would release a list of top com­man­ders sup­port­ing the upris­ing. There were uncon­firmed reports that Gen. Manuel Christo­pher Figuera, who heads the feared intel­li­gence agency respon­si­ble for keep­ing Lopez in state cus­tody, was among mem­bers of the secu­ri­ty forces who had decid­ed to flip.

    “The armed forces have tak­en the right deci­sion,” said Guaidó. “With the sup­port of the Venezue­lan peo­ple and the back­ing of our con­sti­tu­tion they are on the right side of his­to­ry.”

    Anti-gov­ern­ment demon­stra­tors gath­ered in sev­er­al oth­er cities, although there were no reports that Guaidó’s sup­port­ers had tak­en con­trol of any mil­i­tary instal­la­tions.

    As events unfold­ed, gov­ern­ments from around the world expressed sup­port for Guaidó while reit­er­at­ing calls to avoid vio­lent con­fronta­tion.

    Bolton declined to dis­cuss pos­si­ble actions — mil­i­tary or oth­er­wise — but reit­er­at­ed that “all options” are on the table as Pres­i­dent Don­ald J. Trump mon­i­tors devel­op­ments “minute by minute.”

    He said he was wait­ing for key pow­er bro­kers includ­ing Padri­no, Supreme Court chief jus­tice Maikel Moreno and head of the pres­i­den­tial guard to make good on their com­mit­ments to achieve the peace­ful trans­fer of pow­er to Guia­do.

    “All agreed that Maduro had to go. They need to be able to act this after­noon, or this evening, to help bring oth­er mil­i­tary forces to the side of the inter­im pres­i­dent,” Bolton said. “If this effort fails, (Venezuela) will sink into a dic­ta­tor­ship from which there are very few pos­si­ble alter­na­tives.”

    ...

    ———-

    “Clash­es rock Venezuela as Guai­do urges oppo­si­tion upris­ing” by SCOTT SMITH and CHRISTOPHER TORCHIA; Asso­ci­at­ed Press; 04/30/2019

    “Vio­lent street bat­tles erupt­ed in parts of Cara­cas in what was the most seri­ous chal­lenge yet to Maduro’s rule — kicked off with a video shot at dawn of Guaidó, flanked by sev­er­al heav­i­ly armed nation­al guards­men, urg­ing a final push to top­ple Maduro.

    Juan Guai­do is final­ly get his coup. Or at least a coup attempt. And it all hap­pened after the sur­prise release of Leopol­do Lopez from house arrest:

    ...
    In a sur­prise, Leopol­do Lopez, Guaido’s polit­i­cal men­tor and the nation’s most-promi­nent oppo­si­tion activist, stood along­side him. Detained in 2014 for lead­ing a pre­vi­ous round of anti-gov­ern­ment unrest, Lopez said he had been released from house arrest by secu­ri­ty forces adher­ing to an order from Guaidó.

    ...

    Lat­er Tues­day, Lopez and his fam­i­ly sought refuge in the Chilean ambassador’s res­i­dence in Cara­cas, where anoth­er polit­i­cal ally has been holed up for over a year. There were also reports that 25 troops who had been with Guaidó fled to Brazil’s diplo­mat­ic mis­sion.
    ...

    Guai­do is even promis­ing to release a list of top mil­i­tary com­man­ders sup­port­ing the coup:

    ...
    Guaidó said he called for the upris­ing to restore Venezuela’s con­sti­tu­tion­al order, bro­ken when Maduro was sworn in ear­li­er this year for a sec­ond term fol­low­ing elec­tions boy­cotted by the oppo­si­tion and con­sid­ered ille­git­i­mate by dozens of coun­tries.

    He said that in the com­ing hours he would release a list of top com­man­ders sup­port­ing the upris­ing. There were uncon­firmed reports that Gen. Manuel Christo­pher Figuera, who heads the feared intel­li­gence agency respon­si­ble for keep­ing Lopez in state cus­tody, was among mem­bers of the secu­ri­ty forces who had decid­ed to flip.
    ...

    John Bolton also dan­gled the promise of high-lev­el coup back­ers. More omi­nous­ly, Bolton warned that “all options” are on the table:

    ...
    Mean­while, U.S. Nation­al Secu­ri­ty Advis­er John Bolton said the Trump admin­is­tra­tion was wait­ing for three key offi­cials, includ­ing Maduro’s defense min­is­ter and head of the supreme court, to act on what he said were pri­vate pledges to remove Maduro. He did not pro­vide details.

    ...

    Bolton declined to dis­cuss pos­si­ble actions — mil­i­tary or oth­er­wise — but reit­er­at­ed that “all options” are on the table as Pres­i­dent Don­ald J. Trump mon­i­tors devel­op­ments “minute by minute.”

    He said he was wait­ing for key pow­er bro­kers includ­ing Padri­no, Supreme Court chief jus­tice Maikel Moreno and head of the pres­i­den­tial guard to make good on their com­mit­ments to achieve the peace­ful trans­fer of pow­er to Guia­do.
    ...

    And his this mil­i­tary sup­port for Guai­do does­n’t appear to actu­al­ly be mate­ri­al­iz­ing, mak­ing Bolton’s warn­ings of “all options” all the more omi­nous:

    ...
    In one dra­mat­ic inci­dent dur­ing a chaot­ic day, sev­er­al armored vehi­cles plowed into a group of anti-gov­ern­ment demon­stra­tors try­ing to storm the capital’s air base, hit­ting at least two pro­test­ers.

    Still, the rebel­lion, dubbed “Oper­a­tion Free­dom,” seemed to have gar­nered only lim­it­ed mil­i­tary sup­port.

    ...

    Flanked by top mil­i­tary com­man­ders, Defense Min­is­ter Vladimir Padri­no López con­demned Guaido’s move as a “ter­ror­ist” act and “coup attempt” that was bound to fail like past upris­ings.

    “Those who try to take Miraflo­res with vio­lence will be met with vio­lence,” he said on nation­al tele­vi­sion, refer­ring to the pres­i­den­tial palace where hun­dreds of gov­ern­ment sup­port­ers, some of them bran­dish­ing firearms, had gath­ered in response to a call to defend Maduro.

    Mean­while, For­eign Min­is­ter Jorge Arreaza said the “right-wing extrem­ists” would not suc­ceed in frac­tur­ing the armed forces, which have large­ly stood with the social­ist leader through­out the months of tur­moil.
    ...

    So we’ll see how this plays out, but giv­en that a coup led by Guai­do and Lopez is actu­al­ly under­way, here’s a fas­ci­nat­ing look at the rise of Juan Guai­do pub­lished by Max Blu­men­thal back in Jan­u­ary of this year. As Blu­men­thal lays out, while Guai­do and his right-wing forces may not be very pop­u­lar in Venezuela (they only have about 20 per­cent of pub­lic sup­port), they are wild­ly pop­u­lar in Wash­ing­ton DC. And that’s in part because Gaui­do is basi­cal­ly a prod­uct of US-backed regime-change groups.

    As the arti­cle lays out, the US regime change plans against Venezuela real­ly got under­way in 2005 when five Venezue­lan “stu­dent lead­ers” trav­eled to Bel­grade, Ser­bia, where they received train­ing from Cen­ter for Applied Non-Vio­lent Action and Strate­gies, or CANVAS. CANVAS is large­ly fund­ed through the Nation­al Endow­ment for Democ­ra­cy and is a spin­off of Otpor, a Ser­bian protest group that mobi­lized the protests that even­tu­al­ly top­pled Slo­bo­dan Milo­se­vic. As Blu­men­thal describes it, Otpor is basi­cal­ly a small cell of regime change spe­cial­ists oper­at­ing accord­ing to the the­o­ries of Gene Sharp. It was in 2005 when CANVAS turned its regime-change sites on Venezuela.

    In 2007, Guai­do grad­u­at­ed from a uni­ver­si­ty in Cara­cas and moved to Wash­ing­ton DC to enroll in the Gov­er­nance and Polit­i­cal Man­age­ment Pro­gram at George Wash­ing­ton Uni­ver­si­ty and stud­ied under Luis Enrique Berrizbeitia, a top Latin Amer­i­can neolib­er­al econ­o­mist. Guai­do helped lead anti-gov­ern­ment ral­lies that year and one of his allies, a street orga­niz­er named Yon Goicoechea, was iden­ti­fied by CANVAS as a “key fac­tor” in the protests. The next year, Goic­ochea was reward­ed with the Cato Institute’s Mil­ton Fried­man Prize for Advanc­ing Lib­er­ty and a $500,000 prize.

    In 2009, Guai­do found­ed the polit­i­cal par­ty Pop­u­lar Will, which was led by Lep­ol­do Lopez. As Blu­men­thal describes it, Lopez is a Prince­ton-edu­cat­ed right-wing fire­brand heav­i­ly involved in Nation­al Endow­ment for Democ­ra­cy pro­grams. He was elect­ed as may­or of a dis­trict in Cara­cas that was one of the wealth­i­est in the coun­try. Lopez was direct­ly descend­ed from Venezue­la’s first pres­i­dent.

    In 2010, Pop­u­lar Will schemed with CANVAS and Strat­for to foment oppo­si­tion to the Venezue­lan gov­ern­ment by exploit­ing the worst drought in decades lead­ing to a col­lapse in hydro­elec­tric ener­gy. The scheme involved some­how col­laps­ing the elec­tric­i­ty sup­plies in the coun­try by 70% and direct­ing pub­lic anger at the gov­ern­ment. In Novem­ber 2010, Guai­do, Goicoechea, and sev­er­al oth­er stu­dent activists attend­ed a secret five-day train­ing ses­sion in Mex­i­co City run by Otpor. While the plan was nev­er exe­cut­ed, it was a step­ping stone down the path towards vio­lent rev­o­lu­tion.

    In 2014, stu­dent demon­stra­tors in a series of protests against the gov­ern­ment. Evi­dence points towards Pop­u­lar Will lead­ing these protests. Protests that became vio­lent and result­ed in dozens of deaths. Guai­do direct­ly par­tic­i­pat­ed in these protests, and even tweet­ed video show­ing him­self wear­ing a hel­met and gas mask and sur­round­ed by masked armed peo­ple who had shut down a high­way. As a result of these vio­lent protests that gov­ern­ment cracked down on Pop­u­lar Will, lead­ing to Lopez’s house arrest.

    In Decem­ber 2018, Guai­do sneaked across the Venezue­lan bor­der and trav­eled to Wash­ing­ton, Colom­bia and Brazil to coor­di­nate the plan to hold mass demon­stra­tions dur­ing the inau­gu­ra­tion of Pres­i­dent Maduro, gen­er­at­ing exten­sive sup­port from US politi­cians in the process. With­in a week Trump agreed that if Guai­do declared him­self pres­i­dent, Trump would back him.

    On Jan­u­ary 21 of this year, Guaido’s wife deliv­ered a video address call­ing on the mil­i­tary to rise up against Maduro.

    So that’s some of the back­ground a Juan Gaui­do: a man who appears to be tai­lor made for this kind of regime change because he was tai­lor made for it thanks to the train­ing of groups like CANVAS and Otpor and the teach­ings of Gene Sharp:

    The Gray­zone

    The Mak­ing of Juan Guaidó: How the US Regime Change Lab­o­ra­to­ry Cre­at­ed Venezuela’s Coup Leader

    Juan Guaidó is the prod­uct of a decade-long project over­seen by Washington’s elite regime change train­ers. While pos­ing as a cham­pi­on of democ­ra­cy, he has spent years at the fore­front of a vio­lent cam­paign of desta­bi­liza­tion.

    By Dan Cohen and Max Blu­men­thal
    Jan­u­ary 29, 2019

    Before the fate­ful day of Jan­u­ary 22, few­er than one in five Venezue­lans had heard of Juan Guaidó. Only a few months ago, the 35-year-old was an obscure char­ac­ter in a polit­i­cal­ly mar­gin­al far-right group close­ly asso­ci­at­ed with grue­some acts of street vio­lence. Even in his own par­ty, Guaidó had been a mid-lev­el fig­ure in the oppo­si­tion-dom­i­nat­ed Nation­al Assem­bly, which is now held under con­tempt accord­ing to Venezuela’s con­sti­tu­tion.

    But after a sin­gle phone call from from US Vice Pres­i­dent Mike Pence, Guaidó pro­claimed him­self pres­i­dent of Venezuela. Anoint­ed as the leader of his coun­try by Wash­ing­ton, a pre­vi­ous­ly unknown polit­i­cal bot­tom-dweller was vault­ed onto the inter­na­tion­al stage as the US-select­ed leader of the nation with the world’s largest oil reserves.

    Echo­ing the Wash­ing­ton con­sen­sus, the New York Times edi­to­r­i­al board hailed Guaidó as a “cred­i­ble rival” to Maduro with a “refresh­ing style and vision of tak­ing the coun­try for­ward.” The Bloomberg News edi­to­r­i­al board applaud­ed him for seek­ing “restora­tion of democ­ra­cy” and the Wall Street Jour­nal declared him “a new demo­c­ra­t­ic leader.” Mean­while, Cana­da, numer­ous Euro­pean nations, Israel, and the bloc of right-wing Latin Amer­i­can gov­ern­ments known as the Lima Group rec­og­nized Guaidó as the legit­i­mate leader of Venezuela.

    While Guaidó seemed to have mate­ri­al­ized out of nowhere, he was, in fact, the prod­uct of more than a decade of assid­u­ous groom­ing by the US government’s elite regime change fac­to­ries. Along­side a cadre of right-wing stu­dent activists, Guaidó was cul­ti­vat­ed to under­mine Venezuela’s social­ist-ori­ent­ed gov­ern­ment, desta­bi­lize the coun­try, and one day seize pow­er. Though he has been a minor fig­ure in Venezue­lan pol­i­tics, he had spent years qui­et­ly demon­strat­ed his wor­thi­ness in Washington’s halls of pow­er.

    “Juan Guaidó is a char­ac­ter that has been cre­at­ed for this cir­cum­stance,” Mar­co Terug­gi, an Argen­tin­ian soci­ol­o­gist and lead­ing chron­i­cler of Venezue­lan pol­i­tics, told The Gray­zone. “It’s the log­ic of a lab­o­ra­to­ry – Guaidó is like a mix­ture of sev­er­al ele­ments that cre­ate a char­ac­ter who, in all hon­esty, oscil­lates between laugh­able and wor­ry­ing.”

    Diego Sequera, a Venezue­lan jour­nal­ist and writer for the inves­tiga­tive out­let Mis­ión Ver­dad, agreed: “Guaidó is more pop­u­lar out­side Venezuela than inside, espe­cial­ly in the elite Ivy League and Wash­ing­ton cir­cles,” Sequera remarked to The Gray­zone, “He’s a known char­ac­ter there, is pre­dictably right-wing, and is con­sid­ered loy­al to the pro­gram.”

    While Guaidó is today sold as the face of demo­c­ra­t­ic restora­tion, he spent his career in the most vio­lent fac­tion of Venezuela’s most rad­i­cal oppo­si­tion par­ty, posi­tion­ing him­self at the fore­front of one desta­bi­liza­tion cam­paign after anoth­er. His par­ty has been wide­ly dis­cred­it­ed inside Venezuela, and is held part­ly respon­si­ble for frag­ment­ing a bad­ly weak­ened oppo­si­tion.

    “‘These rad­i­cal lead­ers have no more than 20 per­cent in opin­ion polls,” wrote Luis Vicente León, Venezuela’s lead­ing poll­ster. Accord­ing to León, Guaidó’s par­ty remains iso­lat­ed because the major­i­ty of the pop­u­la­tion “does not want war. ‘What they want is a solu­tion.’”

    But this is pre­cise­ly why he Guaidó was select­ed by Wash­ing­ton: He is not expect­ed to lead Venezuela toward democ­ra­cy, but to col­lapse a coun­try that for the past two decades has been a bul­wark of resis­tance to US hege­mo­ny. His unlike­ly rise sig­nals the cul­mi­na­tion of a two decades-long project to destroy a robust social­ist exper­i­ment.

    Tar­get­ing the “troi­ka of tyran­ny”

    Since the 1998 elec­tion of Hugo Chávez, the Unit­ed States has fought to restore con­trol over Venezuela and is vast oil reserves. Chávez’s social­ist pro­grams may have redis­trib­uted the country’s wealth and helped lift mil­lions out of pover­ty, but they also earned him a tar­get on his back.

    In 2002, Venezuela’s right-wing oppo­si­tion briefly oust­ed Chávez with US sup­port and recog­ni­tion, before the mil­i­tary restored his pres­i­den­cy fol­low­ing a mass pop­u­lar mobi­liza­tion. Through­out the admin­is­tra­tions of US Pres­i­dents George W. Bush and Barack Oba­ma, Chávez sur­vived numer­ous assas­si­na­tion plots, before suc­cumb­ing to can­cer in 2013. His suc­ces­sor, Nico­las Maduro, has three attempts on his life.

    The Trump admin­is­tra­tion imme­di­ate­ly ele­vat­ed Venezuela to the top of Washington’s regime change tar­get list, brand­ing it the leader of a “troi­ka of tyran­ny.” Last year, Trump’s nation­al secu­ri­ty team attempt­ed to recruit mem­bers of the mil­i­tary brass to mount a mil­i­tary jun­ta, but that effort failed.

    Accord­ing to the Venezue­lan gov­ern­ment, the US was also involved in a plot, code­named Oper­a­tion Con­sti­tu­tion, to cap­ture Maduro at the Miraflo­res pres­i­den­tial palace; and anoth­er, called Oper­a­tion Armaged­don, to assas­si­nate him at a mil­i­tary parade in July 2017. Just over a year lat­er, exiled oppo­si­tion lead­ers tried and failed to kill Maduro with drone bombs dur­ing a mil­i­tary parade in Cara­cas.

    More than a decade before these intrigues, a group of right-wing oppo­si­tion stu­dents were hand-select­ed and groomed by an elite US-fund­ed regime change train­ing acad­e­my to top­ple Venezuela’s gov­ern­ment and restore the neolib­er­al order.

    Train­ing from the “‘export-a-rev­o­lu­tion’ group that sowed the seeds for a NUMBER of col­or rev­o­lu­tions”

    On Octo­ber 5, 2005, with Chávez’s pop­u­lar­i­ty at its peak and his gov­ern­ment plan­ning sweep­ing social­ist pro­grams, five Venezue­lan “stu­dent lead­ers” arrived in Bel­grade, Ser­bia to begin train­ing for an insur­rec­tion.

    The stu­dents had arrived from Venezuela cour­tesy of the Cen­ter for Applied Non-Vio­lent Action and Strate­gies, or CANVAS. This group is fund­ed large­ly through the Nation­al Endow­ment for Democ­ra­cy, a CIA cut-out that func­tions as the US government’s main arm of pro­mot­ing regime change
    ; and off­shoots like the Inter­na­tion­al Repub­li­can Insti­tute and the Nation­al Demo­c­ra­t­ic Insti­tute for Inter­na­tion­al Affairs. Accord­ing to leaked inter­nal emails from Strat­for, an intel­li­gence firm known as the “shad­ow CIA,” CANVAS “may have also received CIA fund­ing and train­ing dur­ing the 1999/2000 anti-Milo­se­vic strug­gle.”

    CANVAS is a spin­off of Otpor, a Ser­bian protest group found­ed by Srd­ja Popovic in 1998 at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Bel­grade. Otpor, which means “resis­tance” in Ser­bian, was the stu­dent group that gained inter­na­tion­al fame — and Hol­ly­wood-lev­el pro­mo­tion — by mobi­liz­ing the protests that even­tu­al­ly top­pled Slo­bo­dan Milo­se­vic.

    This small cell of regime change spe­cial­ists was oper­at­ing accord­ing to the the­o­ries of the late Gene Sharp, the so-called “Clause­witz of non-vio­lent strug­gle.” Sharp had worked with a for­mer Defense Intel­li­gence Agency ana­lyst, Col. Robert Helvey, to con­ceive a strate­gic blue­print that weaponized protest as a form of hybrid war­fare, aim­ing it at states that resist­ed Washington’s unipo­lar dom­i­na­tion.

    Otpor was sup­port­ed by the Nation­al Endow­ment for Democ­ra­cy, USAID, and Sharp’s Albert Ein­stein Insti­tute. Sin­isa Sik­man, one of Otpor’s main train­ers, once said the group even received direct CIA fund­ing.

    Accord­ing to a leaked email from a Strat­for staffer, after run­ning Milo­se­vic out of pow­er, “the kids who ran OTPOR grew up, got suits and designed CANVAS… or in oth­er words a ‘export-a-rev­o­lu­tion’ group that sowed the seeds for a NUMBER of col­or rev­o­lu­tions. They are still hooked into U.S. fund­ing and basi­cal­ly go around the world try­ing to top­ple dic­ta­tors and auto­crat­ic gov­ern­ments (ones that U.S. does not like ;).”

    Strat­for revealed that CANVAS “turned its atten­tion to Venezuela” in 2005, after train­ing oppo­si­tion move­ments that led pro-NATO regime change oper­a­tions across East­ern Europe.

    While mon­i­tor­ing the CANVAS train­ing pro­gram, Strat­for out­lined its insur­rec­tion­ist agen­da in strik­ing­ly blunt lan­guage: “Suc­cess is by no means guar­an­teed, and stu­dent move­ments are only at the begin­ning of what could be a years-long effort to trig­ger a rev­o­lu­tion in Venezuela, but the train­ers them­selves are the peo­ple who cut their teeth on the ‘Butch­er of the Balka­ns.’ They’ve got mad skills. When you see stu­dents at five Venezue­lan uni­ver­si­ties hold simul­ta­ne­ous demon­stra­tions, you will know that the train­ing is over and the real work has begun.”

    Birthing the “Gen­er­a­tion 2007” regime change cadre

    The “real work” began two years lat­er, in 2007, when Guaidó grad­u­at­ed from Andrés Bel­lo Catholic Uni­ver­si­ty of Cara­cas. He moved to Wash­ing­ton, DC to enroll in the Gov­er­nance and Polit­i­cal Man­age­ment Pro­gram at George Wash­ing­ton Uni­ver­si­ty, under the tute­lage of Venezue­lan econ­o­mist Luis Enrique Berrizbeitia, one of the top Latin Amer­i­can neolib­er­al econ­o­mists. Berrizbeitia is a for­mer exec­u­tive direc­tor of the Inter­na­tion­al Mon­e­tary Fund (IMF) who spent more than a decade work­ing in the Venezue­lan ener­gy sec­tor, under the old oli­garchic regime that was oust­ed by Chávez.

    That year, Guaidó helped lead anti-gov­ern­ment ral­lies after the Venezue­lan gov­ern­ment declined to to renew the license of Radio Cara­cas Tele­visión (RCTV). This pri­vate­ly owned sta­tion played a lead­ing role in the 2002 coup against Hugo Chávez. RCTV helped mobi­lize anti-gov­ern­ment demon­stra­tors, fal­si­fied infor­ma­tion blam­ing gov­ern­ment sup­port­ers for acts of vio­lence car­ried out by oppo­si­tion mem­bers, and banned pro-gov­ern­ment report­ing amid the coup. The role of RCTV and oth­er oli­garch-owned sta­tions in dri­ving the failed coup attempt was chron­i­cled in the acclaimed doc­u­men­tary The Rev­o­lu­tion Will Not Be Tele­vised.

    That same year, the stu­dents claimed cred­it for stymy­ing Chavez’s con­sti­tu­tion­al ref­er­en­dum for a “21st cen­tu­ry social­ism” that promised “to set the legal frame­work for the polit­i­cal and social reor­ga­ni­za­tion of the coun­try, giv­ing direct pow­er to orga­nized com­mu­ni­ties as a pre­req­ui­site for the devel­op­ment of a new eco­nom­ic sys­tem.”

    From the protests around RCTV and the ref­er­en­dum, a spe­cial­ized cadre of US-backed class of regime change activists was born. They called them­selves “Gen­er­a­tion 2007.”

    The Strat­for and CANVAS train­ers of this cell iden­ti­fied Guaidó’s ally – a street orga­niz­er named Yon Goicoechea – as a “key fac­tor” in defeat­ing the con­sti­tu­tion­al ref­er­en­dum. The fol­low­ing year, Goic­ochea was reward­ed for his efforts with the Cato Institute’s Mil­ton Fried­man Prize for Advanc­ing Lib­er­ty, along with a $500,000 prize, which he prompt­ly invest­ed into build­ing his own Lib­er­ty First (Primero Jus­ti­cia) polit­i­cal net­work.

    Fried­man, of course, was the god­fa­ther of the noto­ri­ous neolib­er­al Chica­go Boys who were import­ed into Chile by dic­ta­to­r­i­al jun­ta leader Augus­to Pinochet to imple­ment poli­cies of rad­i­cal “shock doctrine”-style fis­cal aus­ter­i­ty. And the Cato Insti­tute is the lib­er­tar­i­an Wash­ing­ton DC-based think tank found­ed by the Koch Broth­ers, two top Repub­li­can Par­ty donors who have become aggres­sive sup­port­ers of the right-wing across Latin Amer­i­ca.

    Wik­ileaks pub­lished a 2007 email from Amer­i­can ambas­sador to Venezuela William Brown­field sent to the State Depart­ment, Nation­al Secu­ri­ty Coun­cil and Depart­ment of Defense South­ern Com­mand prais­ing “Gen­er­a­tion of ’07” for hav­ing “forced the Venezue­lan pres­i­dent, accus­tomed to set­ting the polit­i­cal agen­da, to (over)react.” Among the “emerg­ing lead­ers” Brown­field iden­ti­fied were Fred­dy Gue­vara and Yon Goicoechea. He applaud­ed the lat­ter fig­ure as “one of the stu­dents’ most artic­u­late defend­ers of civ­il lib­er­ties.”

    Flush with cash from lib­er­tar­i­an oli­garchs and US gov­ern­ment soft pow­er out­fits, the rad­i­cal Venezue­lan cadre took their Otpor tac­tics to the streets, along with a ver­sion of the group’s logo, as seen below:
    [see image]

    “Gal­va­niz­ing pub­lic unrest…to take advan­tage of the sit­u­a­tion and spin it against Chavez”

    In 2009, the Gen­er­a­tion 2007 youth activists staged their most provoca­tive demon­stra­tion yet, drop­ping their pants on pub­lic roads and aping the out­ra­geous guer­ril­la the­ater tac­tics out­lined by Gene Sharp in his regime change man­u­als. The pro­test­ers had mobi­lized against the arrest of an ally from anoth­er new­fan­gled youth group called JAVU. This far-right group “gath­ered funds from a vari­ety of US gov­ern­ment sources, which allowed it to gain noto­ri­ety quick­ly as the hard­line wing of oppo­si­tion street move­ments,” accord­ing to aca­d­e­m­ic George Ciccariello-Maher’s book, “Build­ing the Com­mune.”

    While video of the protest is not avail­able, many Venezue­lans have iden­ti­fied Guaidó as one of its key par­tic­i­pants. While the alle­ga­tion is uncon­firmed, it is cer­tain­ly plau­si­ble; the bare-but­tocks pro­test­ers were mem­bers of the Gen­er­a­tion 2007 inner core that Guaidó belonged to, and were clad in their trade­mark Resisten­cia! Venezuela t‑shirts, as seen below:
    [see image]

    That year, Guaidó exposed him­self to the pub­lic in anoth­er way, found­ing a polit­i­cal par­ty to cap­ture the anti-Chavez ener­gy his Gen­er­a­tion 2007 had cul­ti­vat­ed. Called Pop­u­lar Will, it was led by Leopol­do López, a Prince­ton-edu­cat­ed right-wing fire­brand heav­i­ly involved in Nation­al Endow­ment for Democ­ra­cy pro­grams and elect­ed as the may­or of a dis­trict in Cara­cas that was one of the wealth­i­est in the coun­try. Lopez was a por­trait of Venezue­lan aris­toc­ra­cy, direct­ly descend­ed from his country’s first pres­i­dent. He was also the first cousin of Thor Halvorssen, founder of the US-based Human Rights Foun­da­tion that func­tions as a de fac­to pub­lic­i­ty shop for US-backed anti-gov­ern­ment activists in coun­tries tar­get­ed by Wash­ing­ton for regime change.

    Though Lopez’s inter­ests aligned neat­ly with Washington’s, US diplo­mat­ic cables pub­lished by Wik­ileaks high­light­ed the fanat­i­cal ten­den­cies that would ulti­mate­ly lead to Pop­u­lar Will’s mar­gin­al­iza­tion. One cable iden­ti­fied Lopez as “a divi­sive fig­ure with­in the oppo­si­tion… often described as arro­gant, vin­dic­tive, and pow­er-hun­gry.” Oth­ers high­light­ed his obses­sion with street con­fronta­tions and his “uncom­pro­mis­ing approach” as a source of ten­sion with oth­er oppo­si­tion lead­ers who pri­or­i­tized uni­ty and par­tic­i­pa­tion in the country’s demo­c­ra­t­ic insti­tu­tions.

    By 2010, Pop­u­lar Will and its for­eign back­ers moved to exploit the worst drought to hit Venezuela in decades. Mas­sive elec­tric­i­ty short­ages had struck the coun­try due the dearth of water, which was need­ed to pow­er hydro­elec­tric plants. A glob­al eco­nom­ic reces­sion and declin­ing oil prices com­pound­ed the cri­sis, dri­ving pub­lic dis­con­tent­ment.

    Strat­for and CANVAS – key advi­sors of Guaidó and his anti-gov­ern­ment cadre – devised a shock­ing­ly cyn­i­cal plan to dri­ve a dag­ger through the heart of the Boli­var­i­an rev­o­lu­tion. The scheme hinged on a 70% col­lapse of the country’s elec­tri­cal sys­tem by as ear­ly as April 2010.

    “This could be the water­shed event, as there is lit­tle that Chavez can do to pro­tect the poor from the fail­ure of that sys­tem,” the Strat­for inter­nal memo declared. “This would like­ly have the impact of gal­va­niz­ing pub­lic unrest in a way that no oppo­si­tion group could ever hope to gen­er­ate. At that point in time, an oppo­si­tion group would be best served to take advan­tage of the sit­u­a­tion and spin it against Chavez and towards their needs.”

    By this point, the Venezue­lan oppo­si­tion was receiv­ing a stag­ger­ing $40–50 mil­lion a year from US gov­ern­ment orga­ni­za­tions like USAID and the Nation­al Endow­ment for Democ­ra­cy, accord­ing to a report by the Span­ish think tank, the FRIDE Insti­tute. It also had mas­sive wealth to draw on from its own accounts, which were most­ly out­side the coun­try.

    While the sce­nario envi­sioned by Stat­for did not come to fruition, the Pop­u­lar Will par­ty activists and their allies cast aside any pre­tense of non-vio­lence and joined a rad­i­cal plan to desta­bi­lize the coun­try.

    Towards vio­lent desta­bi­liza­tion

    In Novem­ber, 2010, accord­ing to emails obtained by Venezue­lan secu­ri­ty ser­vices and pre­sent­ed by for­mer Jus­tice Min­is­ter Miguel Rodríguez Tor­res, Guaidó, Goicoechea, and sev­er­al oth­er stu­dent activists attend­ed a secret five-day train­ing at the Fies­ta Mex­i­cana hotel in Mex­i­co City. The ses­sions were run by Otpor, the Bel­grade-based regime change train­ers backed by the US gov­ern­ment. The meet­ing had report­ed­ly received the bless­ing of Otto Reich, a fanat­i­cal­ly anti-Cas­tro Cuban exile work­ing in George W. Bush’s Depart­ment of State, and the right-wing for­mer Colom­bian Pres­i­dent Alvaro Uribe.

    At the Fies­ta Mex­i­cana hotel, the emails stat­ed, Guaidó and his fel­low activists hatched a plan to over­throw Pres­i­dent Hugo Chavez by gen­er­at­ing chaos through pro­tract­ed spasms of street vio­lence.

    ...

    The alleged Fies­ta Mex­i­cana plot flowed into anoth­er desta­bi­liza­tion plan revealed in a series of doc­u­ments pro­duced by the Venezue­lan gov­ern­ment. In May 2014, Cara­cas released doc­u­ments detail­ing an assas­si­na­tion plot against Pres­i­dent Nicolás Maduro. The leaks iden­ti­fied the Mia­mi-based Maria Cori­na Macha­do as a leader of the scheme. A hard­lin­er with a pen­chant for extreme rhetoric, Macha­do has func­tioned as an inter­na­tion­al liai­son for the oppo­si­tion, vis­it­ing Pres­i­dent George W. Bush in 2005.

    “I think it is time to gath­er efforts; make the nec­es­sary calls, and obtain financ­ing to anni­hi­late Maduro and the rest will fall apart,” Macha­do wrote in an email to for­mer Venezue­lan diplo­mat Diego Arria in 2014.

    In anoth­er email, Macha­do claimed that the vio­lent plot had the bless­ing of US Ambas­sador to Colom­bia, Kevin Whitak­er. “I have already made up my mind and this fight will con­tin­ue until this regime is over­thrown and we deliv­er to our friends in the world. If I went to San Cristo­bal and exposed myself before the OAS, I fear noth­ing. Kevin Whitak­er has already recon­firmed his sup­port and he point­ed out the new steps. We have a check­book stronger than the regime’s to break the inter­na­tion­al secu­ri­ty ring.”

    Guaidó heads to the bar­ri­cades

    That Feb­ru­ary, stu­dent demon­stra­tors act­ing as shock troops for the exiled oli­garchy erect­ed vio­lent bar­ri­cades across the coun­try, turn­ing oppo­si­tion-con­trolled quar­ters into vio­lent fortress­es known as guarim­bas. While inter­na­tion­al media por­trayed the upheaval as a spon­ta­neous protest against Maduro’s iron-fist­ed rule, there was ample evi­dence that Pop­u­lar Will was orches­trat­ing the show.

    “None of the pro­test­ers at the uni­ver­si­ties wore their uni­ver­si­ty t‑shirts, they all wore Pop­u­lar Will or Jus­tice First t‑shirts,” a guarim­ba par­tic­i­pant said at the time. “They might have been stu­dent groups, but the stu­dent coun­cils are affil­i­at­ed to the polit­i­cal oppo­si­tion par­ties and they are account­able to them.”

    Asked who the ring­lead­ers were, the guarim­ba par­tic­i­pant said, “Well if I am total­ly hon­est, those guys are leg­is­la­tors now.”

    Around 43 were killed dur­ing the 2014 guarim­bas. Three years lat­er, they erupt­ed again, caus­ing mass destruc­tion of pub­lic infra­struc­ture, the mur­der of gov­ern­ment sup­port­ers, and the deaths of 126 peo­ple, many of whom were Chav­is­tas. In sev­er­al cas­es, sup­port­ers of the gov­ern­ment were burned alive by armed gangs.

    Guaidó was direct­ly involved in the 2014 guarim­bas. In fact, he tweet­ed video show­ing him­self clad in a hel­met and gas mask, sur­round­ed by masked and armed ele­ments that had shut down a high­way that were engag­ing in a vio­lent clash with the police. Allud­ing to his par­tic­i­pa­tion in Gen­er­a­tion 2007, he pro­claimed, “I remem­ber in 2007, we pro­claimed, ‘Stu­dents!’ Now, we shout, ‘Resis­tance! Resis­tance!’”

    Guaidó has delet­ed the tweet, demon­strat­ing appar­ent con­cern for his image as a cham­pi­on of democ­ra­cy.

    On Feb­ru­ary 12, 2014, dur­ing the height of that year’s guarim­bas, Guaidó joined Lopez on stage at a ral­ly of Pop­u­lar Will and Jus­tice First. Dur­ing a lengthy dia­tribe against the gov­ern­ment, Lopez urged the crowd to march to the office of Attor­ney Gen­er­al Luisa Orte­ga Diaz. Soon after, Diaz’s office came under attack by armed gangs who attempt­ed to burn it to the ground. She denounced what she called “planned and pre­med­i­tat­ed vio­lence.”

    In an tele­vised appear­ance in 2016, Guaidó dis­missed deaths result­ing from guayas – a guarim­ba tac­tic involv­ing stretch­ing steel wire across a road­way in order to injure or kill motor­cy­clists – as a “myth.” His com­ments white­washed a dead­ly tac­tic that had killed unarmed civil­ians like San­ti­a­go Pedroza and decap­i­tat­ed a man named Elvis Durán, among many oth­ers.

    ...

    Crack­ing down on Pop­u­lar Will

    As vio­lence and polit­i­cal polar­iza­tion esca­lat­ed across the coun­try, the gov­ern­ment began to act against the Pop­u­lar Will lead­ers who helped stoke it.

    Fred­dy Gue­vara, the Nation­al Assem­bly Vice-Pres­i­dent and sec­ond in com­mand of Pop­u­lar Will, was a prin­ci­pal leader in the 2017 street riots. Fac­ing a tri­al for his role in the vio­lence, Gue­vara took shel­ter in the Chilean embassy, where he remains.

    Lester Tole­do, a Pop­u­lar Will leg­is­la­tor from the state of Zulia, was want­ed by Venezue­lan gov­ern­ment in Sep­tem­ber 2016 on charges of financ­ing ter­ror­ism and plot­ting assas­si­na­tions. The plans were said to be made with for­mer Colom­bian Pres­i­dent Álavaro Uribe. Tole­do escaped Venezuela and went on sev­er­al speak­ing tours with Human Rights Watch, the US gov­ern­ment-backed Free­dom House, the Span­ish Con­gress and Euro­pean Par­lia­ment.

    Car­los Graffe, anoth­er Otpor-trained Gen­er­a­tion 2007 mem­ber who led Pop­u­lar Will, was arrest­ed in July 2017. Accord­ing to police, he was in pos­ses­sion of a bag filled with nails, C4 explo­sives and a det­o­na­tor. He was released on Decem­ber 27, 2017.

    Leopol­do Lopez, the long­time Pop­u­lar Will leader, is today under house arrest, accused of a key role in deaths of 13 peo­ple dur­ing the guarim­bas in 2014. Amnesty Inter­na­tion­al laud­ed Lopez as a “pris­on­er of con­science” and slammed his trans­fer from prison to house as “not good enough.” Mean­while, fam­i­ly mem­bers of guarim­ba vic­tims intro­duced a peti­tion for more charges against Lopez.

    Yon Goicoechea, the Koch Broth­ers poster­boy and US-backed founder of Jus­tice First, was arrest­ed in 2016 by secu­ri­ty forces who claimed they found found a kilo of explo­sives in his vehi­cle. In a New York Times op-ed, Goicoechea protest­ed the charges as “trumped-up” and claimed he had been impris­oned sim­ply for his “dream of a demo­c­ra­t­ic soci­ety, free of Com­mu­nism.” He was freed in Novem­ber 2017.

    ...

    David Smolan­sky, also a mem­ber of the orig­i­nal Otpor-trained Gen­er­a­tion 2007, became Venezuela’s youngest-ever may­or when he was elect­ed in 2013 in the afflu­ent sub­urb of El Hatil­lo. But he was stripped of his posi­tion and sen­tenced to 15 months in prison by the Supreme Court after it found him cul­pa­ble of stir­ring the vio­lent guarim­bas.

    Fac­ing arrest, Smolan­sky shaved his beard, donned sun­glass­es and slipped into Brazil dis­guised as a priest with a bible in hand and rosary around his neck. He now lives in Wash­ing­ton, DC, where he was hand picked by Sec­re­tary of the Orga­ni­za­tion of Amer­i­can States Luis Alma­gro to lead the work­ing group on the Venezue­lan migrant and refugee cri­sis.

    This July 26, Smolan­sky held what he called a “cor­dial reunion” with Elliot Abrams, the con­vict­ed Iran-Con­tra felon installed by Trump as spe­cial US envoy to Venezuela. Abrams is noto­ri­ous for over­see­ing the US covert pol­i­cy of arm­ing right-wing death squads dur­ing the 1980’s in Nicaragua, El Sal­vador, and Guatemala. His lead role in the Venezue­lan coup has stoked fears that anoth­er blood-drenched proxy war might be on the way.

    ...

    Four days ear­li­er, Macha­do rum­bled anoth­er vio­lent threat against Maduro, declar­ing that if he “wants to save his life, he should under­stand that his time is up.”

    A pawn in their game

    The col­lapse of Pop­u­lar Will under the weight of the vio­lent cam­paign of desta­bi­liza­tion it ran alien­at­ed large sec­tors of the pub­lic and wound much of its lead­er­ship up in exile or in cus­tody. Guaidó had remained a rel­a­tive­ly minor fig­ure, hav­ing spent most of his nine-year career in the Nation­al Assem­bly as an alter­nate deputy. Hail­ing from one of Venezuela’s least pop­u­lous states, Guaidó came in sec­ond place dur­ing the 2015 par­lia­men­tary elec­tions, win­ning just 26% of votes cast in order to secure his place in the Nation­al Assem­bly. Indeed, his bot­tom may have been bet­ter known than his face.

    Guaidó is known as the pres­i­dent of the oppo­si­tion-dom­i­nat­ed Nation­al Assem­bly, but he was nev­er elect­ed to the posi­tion. The four oppo­si­tion par­ties that com­prised the Assembly’s Demo­c­ra­t­ic Uni­ty Table had decid­ed to estab­lish a rotat­ing pres­i­den­cy. Pop­u­lar Will’s turn was on the way, but its founder, Lopez, was under house arrest. Mean­while, his sec­ond-in-charge, Gue­vara, had tak­en refuge in the Chilean embassy. A fig­ure named Juan Andrés Mejía would have been next in line but rea­sons that are only now clear, Juan Guai­do was select­ed.

    “There is a class rea­son­ing that explains Guaidó’s rise,” Sequera, the Venezue­lan ana­lyst, observed. “Mejía is high class, stud­ied at one of the most expen­sive pri­vate uni­ver­si­ties in Venezuela, and could not be eas­i­ly mar­ket­ed to the pub­lic the way Guaidó could. For one, Guaidó has com­mon mes­ti­zo fea­tures like most Venezue­lans do, and seems like more like a man of the peo­ple. Also, he had not been over­ex­posed in the media, so he could be built up into pret­ty much any­thing.”

    In Decem­ber 2018, Guaidó sneaked across the bor­der and jun­ket­ed to Wash­ing­ton, Colom­bia and Brazil to coor­di­nate the plan to hold mass demon­stra­tions dur­ing the inau­gu­ra­tion of Pres­i­dent Maduro. The night before Maduro’s swear­ing-in cer­e­mo­ny, both Vice Pres­i­dent Mike Pence and Cana­di­an For­eign Min­is­ter Chrys­tia Free­land called Guaidó to affirm their sup­port.

    A week lat­er, Sen. Mar­co Rubio, Sen. Rick Scott and Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart – all law­mak­ers from the Flori­da base of the right-wing Cuban exile lob­by – joined Pres­i­dent Trump and Vice Pres­i­dent Pence at the White House. At their request, Trump agreed that if Guaidó declared him­self pres­i­dent, he would back him.

    Sec­re­tary of State Mike Pom­peo met per­son­al­ly with­Guaidó on Jan­u­ary 10, accord­ing to the Wall Street Jour­nal. How­ev­er, Pom­peo could not pro­nounce Guaidó’s name when he men­tioned him in a press brief­ing on Jan­u­ary 25, refer­ring to him as “Juan Gui­do.”

    ...

    By Jan­u­ary 11, Guaidó’s Wikipedia page had been edit­ed 37 times, high­light­ing the strug­gle to shape the image of a pre­vi­ous­ly anony­mous fig­ure who was now a tableau for Washington’s regime change ambi­tions. In the end, edi­to­r­i­al over­sight of his page was hand­ed over to Wikipedia’s elite coun­cil of “librar­i­ans,” who pro­nounced him the “con­test­ed” pres­i­dent of Venezuela.

    Guaidó might have been an obscure fig­ure, but his com­bi­na­tion of rad­i­cal­ism and oppor­tunism sat­is­fied Washington’s needs. “That inter­nal piece was miss­ing,” a Trump admin­is­tra­tion said of Guaidó. “He was the piece we need­ed for our strat­e­gy to be coher­ent and com­plete.”

    “For the first time,” Brown­field, the for­mer Amer­i­can ambas­sador to Venezuela, gushed to the New York Times, “you have an oppo­si­tion leader who is clear­ly sig­nal­ing to the armed forces and to law enforce­ment that he wants to keep them on the side of the angels and with the good guys.”

    But Guaidó’s Pop­u­lar Will par­ty formed the shock troops of the guarim­bas that caused the deaths of police offi­cers and com­mon cit­i­zens alike. He had even boast­ed of his own par­tic­i­pa­tion in street riots. And now, to win the hearts and minds of the mil­i­tary and police, Guai­do had to erase this blood-soaked his­to­ry.

    On Jan­u­ary 21, a day before the coup began in earnest, Guaidó’s wife deliv­ered a video address call­ing on the mil­i­tary to rise up against Maduro. Her per­for­mance was wood­en and unin­spir­ing, under­scor­ing the her husband’s lim­it­ed polit­i­cal prospects.

    At a press con­fer­ence before sup­port­ers four days lat­er, Guaidó announced his solu­tion to the cri­sis: “Autho­rize a human­i­tar­i­an inter­ven­tion!”

    ...

    ———–

    “The Mak­ing of Juan Guaidó: How the US Regime Change Lab­o­ra­to­ry Cre­at­ed Venezuela’s Coup Leader” by Dan Cohen and Max Blu­men­thal; The Gray­zone; 01/29/2019

    While Guaidó seemed to have mate­ri­al­ized out of nowhere, he was, in fact, the prod­uct of more than a decade of assid­u­ous groom­ing by the US government’s elite regime change fac­to­ries. Along­side a cadre of right-wing stu­dent activists, Guaidó was cul­ti­vat­ed to under­mine Venezuela’s social­ist-ori­ent­ed gov­ern­ment, desta­bi­lize the coun­try, and one day seize pow­er. Though he has been a minor fig­ure in Venezue­lan pol­i­tics, he had spent years qui­et­ly demon­strat­ed his wor­thi­ness in Washington’s halls of pow­er.”

    A prod­uct of more than a decade of groom­ing at a US-based regime change fac­to­ry. It’s a hel­lu­va resume. And the kind of resume that’s going to make Guai­do a lot more pop­u­lar in places like Wash­ing­ton DC than his own coun­try:

    ...
    “Juan Guaidó is a char­ac­ter that has been cre­at­ed for this cir­cum­stance,” Mar­co Terug­gi, an Argen­tin­ian soci­ol­o­gist and lead­ing chron­i­cler of Venezue­lan pol­i­tics, told The Gray­zone. “It’s the log­ic of a lab­o­ra­to­ry – Guaidó is like a mix­ture of sev­er­al ele­ments that cre­ate a char­ac­ter who, in all hon­esty, oscil­lates between laugh­able and wor­ry­ing.”

    Diego Sequera, a Venezue­lan jour­nal­ist and writer for the inves­tiga­tive out­let Mis­ión Ver­dad, agreed: “Guaidó is more pop­u­lar out­side Venezuela than inside, espe­cial­ly in the elite Ivy League and Wash­ing­ton cir­cles,” Sequera remarked to The Gray­zone, “He’s a known char­ac­ter there, is pre­dictably right-wing, and is con­sid­ered loy­al to the pro­gram.”

    While Guaidó is today sold as the face of demo­c­ra­t­ic restora­tion, he spent his career in the most vio­lent fac­tion of Venezuela’s most rad­i­cal oppo­si­tion par­ty, posi­tion­ing him­self at the fore­front of one desta­bi­liza­tion cam­paign after anoth­er. His par­ty has been wide­ly dis­cred­it­ed inside Venezuela, and is held part­ly respon­si­ble for frag­ment­ing a bad­ly weak­ened oppo­si­tion.

    “‘These rad­i­cal lead­ers have no more than 20 per­cent in opin­ion polls,” wrote Luis Vicente León, Venezuela’s lead­ing poll­ster. Accord­ing to León, Guaidó’s par­ty remains iso­lat­ed because the major­i­ty of the pop­u­la­tion “does not want war. ‘What they want is a solu­tion.’”

    But this is pre­cise­ly why he Guaidó was select­ed by Wash­ing­ton: He is not expect­ed to lead Venezuela toward democ­ra­cy, but to col­lapse a coun­try that for the past two decades has been a bul­wark of resis­tance to US hege­mo­ny. His unlike­ly rise sig­nals the cul­mi­na­tion of a two decades-long project to destroy a robust social­ist exper­i­ment.
    ...

    And much of that train­ing comes from CANVAS, itself a spin­off of Otpor, the Ser­bian group that helped take down Slo­bo­dan Milo­se­vic using the train­ing of Gene Sharp:

    ...
    On Octo­ber 5, 2005, with Chávez’s pop­u­lar­i­ty at its peak and his gov­ern­ment plan­ning sweep­ing social­ist pro­grams, five Venezue­lan “stu­dent lead­ers” arrived in Bel­grade, Ser­bia to begin train­ing for an insur­rec­tion.

    The stu­dents had arrived from Venezuela cour­tesy of the Cen­ter for Applied Non-Vio­lent Action and Strate­gies, or CANVAS. This group is fund­ed large­ly through the Nation­al Endow­ment for Democ­ra­cy, a CIA cut-out that func­tions as the US government’s main arm of pro­mot­ing regime change; and off­shoots like the Inter­na­tion­al Repub­li­can Insti­tute and the Nation­al Demo­c­ra­t­ic Insti­tute for Inter­na­tion­al Affairs. Accord­ing to leaked inter­nal emails from Strat­for, an intel­li­gence firm known as the “shad­ow CIA,” CANVAS “may have also received CIA fund­ing and train­ing dur­ing the 1999/2000 anti-Milo­se­vic strug­gle.”

    CANVAS is a spin­off of Otpor, a Ser­bian protest group found­ed by Srd­ja Popovic in 1998 at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Bel­grade. Otpor, which means “resis­tance” in Ser­bian, was the stu­dent group that gained inter­na­tion­al fame — and Hol­ly­wood-lev­el pro­mo­tion — by mobi­liz­ing the protests that even­tu­al­ly top­pled Slo­bo­dan Milo­se­vic.

    This small cell of regime change spe­cial­ists was oper­at­ing accord­ing to the the­o­ries of the late Gene Sharp, the so-called “Clause­witz of non-vio­lent strug­gle.” Sharp had worked with a for­mer Defense Intel­li­gence Agency ana­lyst, Col. Robert Helvey, to con­ceive a strate­gic blue­print that weaponized protest as a form of hybrid war­fare, aim­ing it at states that resist­ed Washington’s unipo­lar dom­i­na­tion.

    Otpor was sup­port­ed by the Nation­al Endow­ment for Democ­ra­cy, USAID, and Sharp’s Albert Ein­stein Insti­tute. Sin­isa Sik­man, one of Otpor’s main train­ers, once said the group even received direct CIA fund­ing.

    Accord­ing to a leaked email from a Strat­for staffer, after run­ning Milo­se­vic out of pow­er, “the kids who ran OTPOR grew up, got suits and designed CANVAS… or in oth­er words a ‘export-a-rev­o­lu­tion’ group that sowed the seeds for a NUMBER of col­or rev­o­lu­tions. They are still hooked into U.S. fund­ing and basi­cal­ly go around the world try­ing to top­ple dic­ta­tors and auto­crat­ic gov­ern­ments (ones that U.S. does not like ;).”

    Strat­for revealed that CANVAS “turned its atten­tion to Venezuela” in 2005, after train­ing oppo­si­tion move­ments that led pro-NATO regime change oper­a­tions across East­ern Europe.
    ...

    In was 2007 when Guai­do first trav­eled to study in Wash­ing­ton DC under Luis Enrique Berrizbeitia, one of the top neolib­er­al econ­o­mists in Latin Amer­i­ca:

    ...
    Birthing the “Gen­er­a­tion 2007” regime change cadre

    The “real work” began two years lat­er, in 2007, when Guaidó grad­u­at­ed from Andrés Bel­lo Catholic Uni­ver­si­ty of Cara­cas. He moved to Wash­ing­ton, DC to enroll in the Gov­er­nance and Polit­i­cal Man­age­ment Pro­gram at George Wash­ing­ton Uni­ver­si­ty, under the tute­lage of Venezue­lan econ­o­mist Luis Enrique Berrizbeitia, one of the top Latin Amer­i­can neolib­er­al econ­o­mists. Berrizbeitia is a for­mer exec­u­tive direc­tor of the Inter­na­tion­al Mon­e­tary Fund (IMF) who spent more than a decade work­ing in the Venezue­lan ener­gy sec­tor, under the old oli­garchic regime that was oust­ed by Chávez.
    ...

    Then, in 2009, Guai­do helps start the Pop­u­lar Will par­ty along with Leopol­do Lopez, the Prince­ton-edu­cat­ed right-wing fire­brand heav­i­ly involved in Nation­al Endow­ment for Democ­ra­cy pro­grams:

    ...
    In 2009, the Gen­er­a­tion 2007 youth activists staged their most provoca­tive demon­stra­tion yet, drop­ping their pants on pub­lic roads and aping the out­ra­geous guer­ril­la the­ater tac­tics out­lined by Gene Sharp in his regime change man­u­als. The pro­test­ers had mobi­lized against the arrest of an ally from anoth­er new­fan­gled youth group called JAVU. This far-right group “gath­ered funds from a vari­ety of US gov­ern­ment sources, which allowed it to gain noto­ri­ety quick­ly as the hard­line wing of oppo­si­tion street move­ments,” accord­ing to aca­d­e­m­ic George Ciccariello-Maher’s book, “Build­ing the Com­mune.”

    ...

    That year, Guaidó exposed him­self to the pub­lic in anoth­er way, found­ing a polit­i­cal par­ty to cap­ture the anti-Chavez ener­gy his Gen­er­a­tion 2007 had cul­ti­vat­ed. Called Pop­u­lar Will, it was led by Leopol­do López, a Prince­ton-edu­cat­ed right-wing fire­brand heav­i­ly involved in Nation­al Endow­ment for Democ­ra­cy pro­grams and elect­ed as the may­or of a dis­trict in Cara­cas that was one of the wealth­i­est in the coun­try. Lopez was a por­trait of Venezue­lan aris­toc­ra­cy, direct­ly descend­ed from his country’s first pres­i­dent. He was also the first cousin of Thor Halvorssen, founder of the US-based Human Rights Foun­da­tion that func­tions as a de fac­to pub­lic­i­ty shop for US-backed anti-gov­ern­ment activists in coun­tries tar­get­ed by Wash­ing­ton for regime change.

    ...

    Leopol­do Lopez, the long­time Pop­u­lar Will leader, is today under house arrest, accused of a key role in deaths of 13 peo­ple dur­ing the guarim­bas in 2014. Amnesty Inter­na­tion­al laud­ed Lopez as a “pris­on­er of con­science” and slammed his trans­fer from prison to house as “not good enough.” Mean­while, fam­i­ly mem­bers of guarim­ba vic­tims intro­duced a peti­tion for more charges against Lopez.
    ...

    But Pop­u­lar Will could nev­er real­ly gen­er­ate much Pop­u­lar Will, thanks, in part, to the vio­lent protests of 2014 that result­ed in a crack­down on Pop­u­lar Will and Lopez’s house arrest. Flash for­ward to Decem­ber 2018, and we find Guai­do sneak­ing out to DC where he gets assur­ances from the Trump cam­paign that he’ll have the US’s back­ing if he declares him­self pres­i­dent:

    ...
    A pawn in their game

    The col­lapse of Pop­u­lar Will under the weight of the vio­lent cam­paign of desta­bi­liza­tion it ran alien­at­ed large sec­tors of the pub­lic and wound much of its lead­er­ship up in exile or in cus­tody. Guaidó had remained a rel­a­tive­ly minor fig­ure, hav­ing spent most of his nine-year career in the Nation­al Assem­bly as an alter­nate deputy. Hail­ing from one of Venezuela’s least pop­u­lous states, Guaidó came in sec­ond place dur­ing the 2015 par­lia­men­tary elec­tions, win­ning just 26% of votes cast in order to secure his place in the Nation­al Assem­bly. Indeed, his bot­tom may have been bet­ter known than his face.

    ...

    In Decem­ber 2018, Guaidó sneaked across the bor­der and jun­ket­ed to Wash­ing­ton, Colom­bia and Brazil to coor­di­nate the plan to hold mass demon­stra­tions dur­ing the inau­gu­ra­tion of Pres­i­dent Maduro. The night before Maduro’s swear­ing-in cer­e­mo­ny, both Vice Pres­i­dent Mike Pence and Cana­di­an For­eign Min­is­ter Chrys­tia Free­land called Guaidó to affirm their sup­port.

    A week lat­er, Sen. Mar­co Rubio, Sen. Rick Scott and Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart – all law­mak­ers from the Flori­da base of the right-wing Cuban exile lob­by – joined Pres­i­dent Trump and Vice Pres­i­dent Pence at the White House. At their request, Trump agreed that if Guaidó declared him­self pres­i­dent, he would back him.
    ...

    Then, on Jan­u­ary 21, we have Guaido’s wife issu­ing an ear­li­er call for a coup:

    ...
    On Jan­u­ary 21, a day before the coup began in earnest, Guaidó’s wife deliv­ered a video address call­ing on the mil­i­tary to rise up against Maduro. Her per­for­mance was wood­en and unin­spir­ing, under­scor­ing the her husband’s lim­it­ed polit­i­cal prospects.

    At a press con­fer­ence before sup­port­ers four days lat­er, Guaidó announced his solu­tion to the cri­sis: “Autho­rize a human­i­tar­i­an inter­ven­tion!”
    ...

    That ear­li­er call for a coup obvi­ous­ly did­n’t suc­ceed. Will this lat­est call work for Guai­do and his Pop­u­lar Will move­ment? Only time will tell, but if it does suc­ceed it’s pret­ty clear that it won’t hap­pen as a result of gen­uine pop­u­lar sup­port. At least not in Venezuela. And if the lat­est coup attempt does­n’t work it will pre­sum­ably be back to the Gene Sharp regime-change draw­ing board.

    Posted by Pterrafractyl | April 30, 2019, 5:08 pm
  7. @Pterrafractyl–

    One won­ders how much blood will flow from this “Venezue­lan Spring?”

    Also: it won’t be sur­pris­ing to see Maduro, Chavez et al linked in GOP cam­paign pro­pa­gan­da to St. Bernard and AOC, the “social­ists” in the Demo­c­ra­t­ic Par­ty’s left.

    Note also: Saikat Chakrabar­ti and his “Jus­tice Democ­rats” were on fire to have Al Franken resign and be replaced by Kei­th Elli­son, who has one foot in the Mus­lim Broth­er­hood and the oth­er in the Nation of Islam.

    https://alphanewsmn.com/progressive-group-calls-franken-replaced-ellison/

    Of course, Elli­son is now fac­ing his own #MeToo alle­ga­tions.

    Biden’s first #MeToo accuser Lucy Flo­res is a Bernie Bot.

    https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/437116-ex-sanders-staffer-calls-biden-accuser-lucy-flores-a-fraud-and-racist-on

    Keep up the great work!

    Dave Emory

    Posted by Dave Emory | April 30, 2019, 5:56 pm
  8. The ques­tion of whether or not a mil­i­tary inter­ven­tion in Venezuela is in the works as a ‘Plan B’ fol­low­ing the failed right-wing coup attempt of April 30th was already a pret­ty urgent ques­tion. But now that the Trump admin­is­tra­tion has once again ramped up the threat of a mil­i­tary con­fronta­tion with Iran less than two weeks after the failed coup attempt in Venezuela, the ques­tion of a ‘Plan B’ mil­i­tary option has sud­den­ly become an become an even more urgent ques­tion. So it’s worth not­ing that, as the fol­low­ing arti­cle points out, it appears that Pres­i­dent Trump has grown frus­trat­ed with John Bolton’s opti­mism that the coup attempt would work and now Trump appar­ent­ly fears that Bolton has boxed him into a cor­ner on Venezuela. But as the arti­cle also notes, the Trump admin­is­tra­tion is still offi­cial­ly leav­ing “all options on the table”:

    The Wash­ing­ton Post

    A frus­trat­ed Trump ques­tions his administration’s Venezuela strat­e­gy

    By Anne Gear­an, Josh Dawsey, John Hud­son and Seung Min Kim
    May 8, 2019

    Pres­i­dent Trump is ques­tion­ing his administration’s aggres­sive strat­e­gy in Venezuela fol­low­ing the fail­ure of a U.S.-backed effort to oust Pres­i­dent Nicolás Maduro, com­plain­ing he was mis­led about how easy it would be to replace the social­ist strong­man with a young oppo­si­tion fig­ure, accord­ing to admin­is­tra­tion offi­cials and White House advis­ers.

    The president’s dis­sat­is­fac­tion has crys­tal­lized around nation­al secu­ri­ty advis­er John Bolton and what Trump has groused is an inter­ven­tion­ist stance at odds with his view that the Unit­ed States should stay out of for­eign quag­mires.

    Trump has said in recent days that Bolton wants to get him “into a war” — a com­ment that he has made in jest in the past but that now betrays his more seri­ous con­cerns, one senior admin­is­tra­tion offi­cial said.

    The administration’s pol­i­cy is offi­cial­ly unchanged in the wake of a fiz­zled pow­er play last week by U.S.-backed oppo­si­tion leader Juan Guaidó. But U.S. offi­cials have since been more cau­tious in their pre­dic­tions of Maduro’s swift exit, while reassess­ing what one offi­cial described as the like­li­hood of a diplo­mat­ic “long haul.”

    U.S. offi­cials point to the president’s sus­tained com­mit­ment to the Venezuela issue, from the first weeks of his pres­i­den­cy as evi­dence that he holds a real­is­tic view of the chal­lenges there and does not think there is a quick fix.

    But Trump has nonethe­less com­plained over the past week that Bolton and oth­ers under­es­ti­mat­ed Maduro, accord­ing to three senior admin­is­tra­tion offi­cials who like oth­ers inter­viewed for this sto­ry spoke on the con­di­tion of anonymi­ty to dis­cuss pri­vate delib­er­a­tions.

    Trump has said that Maduro is a “tough cook­ie” and that aides should not have led him to believe that the Venezue­lan leader could be oust­ed last week, when Guaidó led mass street protests that turned dead­ly.

    Instead, Maduro reject­ed an offer to leave the coun­try and two key fig­ures in his gov­ern­ment backed out of what Bolton said had been a plan to defect. Maduro pub­licly mocked Trump in response and said he wasn’t going any­where, say­ing the Unit­ed States had attempt­ed a “fool­ish” coup.

    Late Wednes­day, masked Venezue­lan intel­li­gence police detained Nation­al Assem­bly Vice Pres­i­dent Edgar Zam­bra­no in a dra­mat­ic oper­a­tion in Cara­cas, mark­ing the first senior oppo­si­tion offi­cial tak­en into cus­tody by the social­ist gov­ern­ment in retal­i­a­tion for the failed effort to incite a mil­i­tary upris­ing. Zam­bra­no is one of 10 oppo­si­tion offi­cials charged with trea­son, con­spir­a­cy and rebel­lion by the pro-Maduro Supreme Court in con­nec­tion to the plot.

    Bolton pub­licly revealed the defec­tion plan to apply pres­sure to Maduro, which U.S. offi­cials said has worked. They claim Maduro is sleep­ing in a bunker, para­noid that close aides will turn on him.

    But Trump has expressed con­cern that Bolton has boxed him into a cor­ner and gone beyond where he is com­fort­able, said a U.S. offi­cial famil­iar with U.S.-Venezuela pol­i­cy.

    Bolton’s tweets egging on Maduro to begin an “ear­ly retire­ment” on a “nice beach” and call­ing for mass defec­tions have been wide­ly viewed as cav­a­lier, rais­ing unre­al­is­tic expec­ta­tion for how quick­ly his ouster can be engi­neered, the U.S. offi­cial said.

    Despite Trump’s grum­bling that Bolton had got­ten him out on a limb on Venezuela, Bolton’s job is safe, two senior admin­is­tra­tion offi­cials said, and Trump has told his nation­al secu­ri­ty advis­er to keep focus­ing on Venezuela.

    Gar­rett Mar­quis, spokesman for the Nation­al Secu­ri­ty Coun­cil, said in a state­ment that Bolton “has repeat­ed­ly stat­ed the President’s desire for a peace­ful tran­si­tion to democ­ra­cy in Venezuela, while also ensur­ing that all options are on the table.”

    “Amer­i­ca stands with the GREAT PEOPLE of Venezuela for how­ev­er long it takes!” Trump tweet­ed Wednes­day as he returned from a cam­paign ral­ly in Flori­da, where some Venezue­lans flee­ing Maduro have set­tled.

    The open threat of U.S. mil­i­tary involve­ment in Venezuela has grown along­side the administration’s increas­ing­ly con­fronta­tion­al approach to Iran, with Bolton announc­ing last week­end that a U.S. air­craft car­ri­er bat­tle group would be deployed to counter Iran­ian plots to harm U.S. forces in the Mid­dle East.

    In both cas­es, the admin­is­tra­tion has adopt­ed a get-tough pol­i­cy that appeals to Trump’s instincts to project Amer­i­can pow­er abroad but that also echoes the kind of mil­i­tary adven­tur­ism he has long ridiculed.

    Trump appears to be more com­fort­able with the Iran pol­i­cy, which is ground­ed in his own strong belief that Pres­i­dent Barack Oba­ma mis­cal­cu­lat­ed in strik­ing a nuclear bar­gain with Tehran. He is less com­fort­able with the esca­lat­ing rhetoric on Venezuela, which does not pose a direct mil­i­tary threat to the Unit­ed States. Any U.S. mil­i­tary involve­ment there risks a proxy fight with Rus­sia, which backs Maduro and has sold him arms.

    ...

    The famous­ly hawk­ish Bolton has been the loud­est voice with­in the admin­is­tra­tion in sup­port of a poten­tial mil­i­tary response to the polit­i­cal and human­i­tar­i­an cri­sis in Venezuela, where esca­lat­ing U.S. sanc­tions have not forced Maduro to cede pow­er. He was not the first, how­ev­er. Trump mused about invad­ing or bomb­ing Venezuela in 2017, com­ments that were at first dis­missed as fan­ci­ful.

    Trump is now not inclined to order any sort of mil­i­tary inter­ven­tion in Venezuela, two offi­cials and an out­side advis­er said.

    ...

    U.S. defense lead­ers regard any mil­i­tary sce­nario involv­ing boots on the ground in Venezuela as a quag­mire and warn that stand­off weapons such as Tom­a­hawk mis­siles run a major risk of killing civil­ians. The White House has repeat­ed­ly asked for mil­i­tary plan­ning short of an inva­sion, how­ev­er.

    Offi­cials said the options under dis­cus­sion while Maduro is still in pow­er include send­ing addi­tion­al mil­i­tary assets to the region, increas­ing aid to neigh­bor­ing coun­tries such as Colom­bia and oth­er steps to pro­vide human­i­tar­i­an assis­tance to dis­placed Venezue­lans out­side of Venezuela. More for­ward-lean­ing options include send­ing Navy ships to waters off Venezuela as a show of force.

    Oth­er steps under dis­cus­sion are intend­ed for after Maduro is gone, when U.S. mil­i­tary per­son­nel might be per­mit­ted inside Venezuela to help with human­i­tar­i­an respons­es.

    John D. Fee­ley, a for­mer U.S. ambas­sador and Uni­vi­sion polit­i­cal ana­lyst, said there is anoth­er rea­son that mil­i­tary inter­ven­tion is unlike­ly.

    “It runs counter to Don­ald Trump’s 2020 reelec­tion nar­ra­tive,” Fee­ley said. “At a time when you’re pulling peo­ple back from Syr­ia, back from Iraq, back from Afghanistan, how do you say we’re going to com­mit 50‑, 100‑, 150,000 of our blood and trea­sure to a coun­try where you can’t tell the bad guys from the good guys?”

    ———-

    “A frus­trat­ed Trump ques­tions his administration’s Venezuela strat­e­gy” by Anne Gear­an, Josh Dawsey, John Hud­son and Seung Min Kim; The Wash­ing­ton Post; 05/08/2019

    “Trump has said in recent days that Bolton wants to get him “into a war” — a com­ment that he has made in jest in the past but that now betrays his more seri­ous con­cerns, one senior admin­is­tra­tion offi­cial said.”

    LOL! Trump appar­ent­ly just found out that Bolton wants to get him “into a war.” The guy’s entire resume is try­ing to get the US into wars, some­times suc­cess­ful­ly, but Trump is only fig­ur­ing this out now. At least that’s the spin.

    And yet, we are told that Bolton’s job is safe and offi­cial­ly all options are on the table. In addi­tion, we’re also informed that the White House has repeat­ed­ly asked for mil­i­tary plan­ning short of an inva­sion, includ­ing send­ing in US mil­i­tary per­son­nel osten­si­bly for human­i­tar­i­an respons­es:

    ...
    Despite Trump’s grum­bling that Bolton had got­ten him out on a limb on Venezuela, Bolton’s job is safe, two senior admin­is­tra­tion offi­cials said, and Trump has told his nation­al secu­ri­ty advis­er to keep focus­ing on Venezuela.

    Gar­rett Mar­quis, spokesman for the Nation­al Secu­ri­ty Coun­cil, said in a state­ment that Bolton “has repeat­ed­ly stat­ed the President’s desire for a peace­ful tran­si­tion to democ­ra­cy in Venezuela, while also ensur­ing that all options are on the table.”

    ...

    U.S. defense lead­ers regard any mil­i­tary sce­nario involv­ing boots on the ground in Venezuela as a quag­mire and warn that stand­off weapons such as Tom­a­hawk mis­siles run a major risk of killing civil­ians. The White House has repeat­ed­ly asked for mil­i­tary plan­ning short of an inva­sion, how­ev­er.

    Offi­cials said the options under dis­cus­sion while Maduro is still in pow­er include send­ing addi­tion­al mil­i­tary assets to the region, increas­ing aid to neigh­bor­ing coun­tries such as Colom­bia and oth­er steps to pro­vide human­i­tar­i­an assis­tance to dis­placed Venezue­lans out­side of Venezuela. More for­ward-lean­ing options include send­ing Navy ships to waters off Venezuela as a show of force.

    Oth­er steps under dis­cus­sion are intend­ed for after Maduro is gone, when U.S. mil­i­tary per­son­nel might be per­mit­ted inside Venezuela to help with human­i­tar­i­an respons­es.
    ...

    That sure sounds like the Trump admin­is­tra­tion has been plan­ning on some sort of US mil­i­tary activ­i­ty in Venezuela, if only as a post-regime change secu­ri­ty force for the new US-backed gov­ern­ment. And as the arti­cle reminds us, Trump mused about a mil­i­tary inva­sion of Venezuela in 2017 (he pub­licly tweet­ed about it in August of 2017):

    ...
    The famous­ly hawk­ish Bolton has been the loud­est voice with­in the admin­is­tra­tion in sup­port of a poten­tial mil­i­tary response to the polit­i­cal and human­i­tar­i­an cri­sis in Venezuela, where esca­lat­ing U.S. sanc­tions have not forced Maduro to cede pow­er. He was not the first, how­ev­er. Trump mused about invad­ing or bomb­ing Venezuela in 2017, com­ments that were at first dis­missed as fan­ci­ful.

    Trump is now not inclined to order any sort of mil­i­tary inter­ven­tion in Venezuela, two offi­cials and an out­side advis­er said.
    ...

    So it’s rather hard to see Trump’s com­plaints about Bolton try­ing to get him into a war in Venezuela as any­thing oth­er than spin and frus­tra­tion that the April 30th US-coor­di­nat­ed coup attempt failed so spec­tac­u­lar­ly.

    But what about the Venezue­lan oppo­si­tion’s views on mil­i­tary inter­ven­tion? Are they are in favor of US forces being involved in a regime-change oper­a­tion or pro­vid­ing some oth­er form of mil­i­tary sup­port? Well, as the fol­low­ing arti­cle from just a few days after the failed coup in forms us, the Venezue­lan oppo­si­tion’s answer to the ques­tion of whether or not they would sup­port US mil­i­tary assis­tance in over­throw­ing the Venezue­lan gov­ern­ment is a strong “maybe, if it’s deemed nec­es­sary”:

    The Wash­ing­ton Post

    Guaidó says oppo­si­tion over­es­ti­mat­ed mil­i­tary sup­port for upris­ing

    By Antho­ny Faio­la
    May 4, 2019

    CARACAS, Venezuela — Venezue­lan oppo­si­tion leader Juan Guaidó on Sat­ur­day acknowl­edged errors made in attempt­ing to stir a mil­i­tary upris­ing, Guaidó says oppo­si­tion over­es­ti­mat­ed mil­i­tary sup­port for upris­ing — say­ing he would take any such offer from Wash­ing­ton to a vote in the country’s Nation­al Assem­bly.

    After a dra­mat­ic week that saw a clan­des­tine plan to oust Pres­i­dent Nicolás Maduro fall apart on Tues­day, Guaidó con­ced­ed that the oppo­si­tion had mis­cal­cu­lat­ed its sup­port with­in the mil­i­tary.

    In an exclu­sive inter­view with The Wash­ing­ton Post, Guaidó sug­gest­ed that he expect­ed Maduro to step down amid a groundswell of defec­tors with­in the mil­i­tary. Instead, Guaidó’s call for the rank and file and senior brass to aban­don Maduro did not pro­duce mass defec­tions. Maduro’s secu­ri­ty forces then quelled street protests and left Guaidó’s U.S.-backed oppo­si­tion on its heels.

    “Maybe because we still need more sol­diers, and maybe we need more offi­cials of the regime to be will­ing to sup­port it, to back the con­sti­tu­tion,” Guaidó said. “I think the vari­ables are obvi­ous at this point.”

    Guaidó — the head of the Nation­al Assem­bly who in Jan­u­ary declared Maduro a usurp­er and claimed the legit­i­mate man­tle of nation­al lead­er­ship — did not back uni­lat­er­al U.S. mil­i­tary inter­ven­tion. He made clear that any Amer­i­can mil­i­tary sup­port must be along­side Venezue­lan forces who have turned against Maduro, but gave no fur­ther specifics on what would be accept­able.

    The Trump admin­is­tra­tion has said all options are on the table, and its hawks have pressed the Pen­ta­gon for pos­si­ble mil­i­tary involve­ment. But the admin­is­tra­tion has not clear­ly sig­naled whether it would favor inter­ven­tion against Maduro.

    Asked what he would do if nation­al secu­ri­ty advis­er John Bolton called him up with an offer of U.S. inter­ven­tion, Guaidó said he would reply: “Dear friend, ambas­sador John Bolton, thank you for all the help you have giv­en to the just cause here. Thank you for the option, we will eval­u­ate it, and will prob­a­bly con­sid­er it in par­lia­ment to solve this cri­sis. If it’s nec­es­sary, maybe we will approve it.”

    The remarks were among the strongest Guaidó has issued yet on the del­i­cate sub­ject of U.S. mil­i­tary assis­tance — an option that remains large­ly unpop­u­lar even among Venezue­lans opposed to Maduro.

    Guaidó said he wel­comed recent delib­er­a­tions on mil­i­tary options in Wash­ing­ton, call­ing them “great news.”

    “That’s great news to Venezuela because we are eval­u­at­ing all options. It’s good to know that impor­tant allies like the U.S. are also eval­u­at­ing the option. That gives us the pos­si­bil­i­ty that if we need coop­er­a­tion, we know we can get it.”

    He added: “I think today there are many Venezue­lan sol­diers that want to put an end to [left­ist guer­ril­las], and help human­i­tar­i­an aid get in, who would be hap­py to receive coop­er­a­tion to end usurpa­tion. And if that includes the coop­er­a­tion of hon­or­able coun­tries like the Unit­ed States, I think that would be an option.”

    Yet after Tuesday’s failed upris­ing, Guaidó may now be fight­ing a two-front bat­tle: both to oust Maduro and keep the oppo­si­tion unit­ed.

    Guaidó, a 35-year-old indus­tri­al engi­neer and for­mer stu­dent leader from Venezuela’s Caribbean coast, has ignit­ed new hope in the opposition’s ranks since he emerged as the head of the oppo­si­tion-con­trolled Nation­al Assem­bly — a body stripped of its pow­ers by Maduro in 2017 but wide­ly rec­og­nized inter­na­tion­al­ly as the country’s only demo­c­ra­t­ic insti­tu­tion.

    Guaidó’s claim to be Venezuela’s right­ful inter­im pres­i­dent has been rec­og­nized by more than 50 nations and strong­ly backed by the Trump admin­is­tra­tion. Guaidó said he had been in con­tact with U.S. offi­cials dur­ing the week.

    Yet the unrav­el­ing of a care­ful­ly laid plan to oust Maduro, includ­ing nego­ti­a­tions with his senior loy­al­ists, has gen­er­at­ed rifts with­in the oppo­si­tion. Some of its senior lead­ers have issued recrim­i­na­tions over what went wrong. The snip­ing risks rob­bing the oppo­si­tion of what became its sin­gle strongest asset in recent months: uni­ty.

    Some frus­trat­ed oppo­si­tion mem­bers are blam­ing Leopol­do Lopez, Guaidó’s men­tor, who escaped house arrest and appeared with Guaidó on Tues­day morn­ing, for upend­ing the plan.

    Lopez was one of the key archi­tects of secret nego­ti­a­tions with gov­ern­ment loy­al­ists who were sup­posed to turn against Maduro on Tues­day. But his tri­umphant pub­lic appear­ance after escap­ing a mil­i­tary base, insid­ers say, was not expect­ed. Some argue that it may have dis­rupt­ed a care­ful­ly laid plan in which some of Maduro’s senior loy­al­ists were poised to force him out.

    What actu­al­ly per­suad­ed Maduro’s inner cir­cle to close ranks instead remains a mys­tery. And Guaidó would not dis­cuss the nego­ti­a­tions nor the specifics of the opposition’s plan. But the inter­nal snip­ing pos­es a new chal­lenge for an oppo­si­tion that before Guaidó’s rise in Jan­u­ary was large­ly seen as inef­fec­tu­al and divid­ed.

    “The event shook Venezue­lan pol­i­tics,” said Car­los Romero, a Venezue­lan polit­i­cal ana­lyst. “Peo­ple are con­fused, wound­ed, unmo­ti­vat­ed.”

    “I have heard some politi­cians call it a “Leopolda­da,” he con­tin­ued, using a word that in Span­ish sug­gests a mav­er­ick act by one per­son. “And the most affect­ed one is Guaidó, who has been sell­ing him­self as a uni­tary leader. To appear with Leopol­do in a posi­tion like that one may have reduced some lead­ers’ trust in him.”

    Guaidó offered a brief and luke­warm defense of the actions of Lopez, his polit­i­cal men­tor.

    “No, I don’t think so,” he said. “I don’t have infor­ma­tion of that.”

    Guaidó sought to down­play inter­nal divi­sions in the oppo­si­tion, how­ev­er, say­ing “there’s absolute uni­ty. As always there are some dif­fer­ences in spe­cif­ic things. But I think a sin­gle cause unites us, not only as oppo­si­tion but civ­il soci­ety too.”

    Asked if Sec­re­tary of State Mike Pom­peo had dam­aged oppo­si­tion nego­ti­a­tions by men­tion­ing the names of the alleged con­spir­a­tors who were will­ing to turn against Maduro — includ­ing his defense min­is­ter Vladimir Padri­no Lopez — Guaidó said Pom­peo had not. Rather, he called Pompeo’s move a demon­stra­tion of “impor­tant sup­port.”

    The plan mov­ing for­ward, he said, remains a com­bi­na­tion of inter­na­tion­al pres­sure, attempts to woo Maduro loy­al­ists, and street action. But Guaidó is con­fronting the addi­tion­al chal­lenge of exhaus­tion and frus­tra­tion in the Venezue­lan street.

    Cor­rup­tion, mis­man­age­ment and failed poli­cies have brought Venezuela to its knees, spark­ing hunger, a mass exo­dus of migrants and the col­lapse of the pub­lic health sys­tem, as well as the elec­tric­i­ty and water grids. In addi­tion, anti-gov­ern­ment pro­test­ers have con­front­ed vio­lent repres­sion from Maduro’s secu­ri­ty forces — includ­ing four deaths dur­ing the past week.

    A march on Wednes­day — imme­di­ate­ly after the failed upris­ing — drew many thou­sands. But by Sat­ur­day, a march called by Guaidó to mil­i­tary instal­la­tions large­ly fiz­zled, draw­ing nowhere near the crowds of pre­vi­ous protests.

    “We have been doing this for 20 years,” Guaidó said, refer­ring to the rise of the left­ist fire­brand Hugo Chávez, who died in 2013 after nam­ing Maduro as his anoint­ed suc­ces­sor. “Get­ting frus­trat­ed and tired is part of it, but Venezue­lans have demon­strat­ed that they always take the fight again when they have to.”

    He tac­it­ly acknowl­edged that the plan put in place by the oppo­si­tion did not work, and said that his camp was seek­ing to do out­reach with Maduro’s mil­i­tary and senior civil­ian back­ers. But he did not sug­gest that the oppo­si­tion was close to anoth­er break­through.

    “Because the fact that we did what we did and it didn’t suc­ceed on the first time, doesn’t mean it’s not valid,” he said. “We are con­fronting a wall that is an absolute dic­ta­tor­ship. ... We have rec­og­nized our mis­takes — what we didn’t do, and [what] we did too much of.”

    Inter­na­tion­al calls are ris­ing for the oppo­si­tion to sit down in offi­cial talks with Maduro’s camp. But Guaidó reit­er­at­ed his oppo­si­tion to talks with­out the pre­con­di­tion of nego­ti­at­ing Maduro’s depar­ture.

    “Sit­ting down with Maduro is not an option,” he said. “That hap­pened in 2014, in 2016, in 2017. ... The end of usurpa­tion is a pre­con­di­tion to any pos­si­ble dia­logue.”

    ...

    ———-

    “Guaidó says oppo­si­tion over­es­ti­mat­ed mil­i­tary sup­port for upris­ing” by Antho­ny Faio­la; The Wash­ing­ton Post; 05/04/2019

    “Asked what he would do if nation­al secu­ri­ty advis­er John Bolton called him up with an offer of U.S. inter­ven­tion, Guaidó said he would reply: “Dear friend, ambas­sador John Bolton, thank you for all the help you have giv­en to the just cause here. Thank you for the option, we will eval­u­ate it, and will prob­a­bly con­sid­er it in par­lia­ment to solve this cri­sis. If it’s nec­es­sary, maybe we will approve it.”

    Yep, Juan Guai­do is very frank about his views on a US mil­i­tary back­ing of regime change: def­i­nite­ly maybe...if it’s deemed nec­es­sary:

    ...
    The remarks were among the strongest Guaidó has issued yet on the del­i­cate sub­ject of U.S. mil­i­tary assis­tance — an option that remains large­ly unpop­u­lar even among Venezue­lans opposed to Maduro.

    Guaidó said he wel­comed recent delib­er­a­tions on mil­i­tary options in Wash­ing­ton, call­ing them “great news.”

    “That’s great news to Venezuela because we are eval­u­at­ing all options. It’s good to know that impor­tant allies like the U.S. are also eval­u­at­ing the option. That gives us the pos­si­bil­i­ty that if we need coop­er­a­tion, we know we can get it.”

    He added: “I think today there are many Venezue­lan sol­diers that want to put an end to [left­ist guer­ril­las], and help human­i­tar­i­an aid get in, who would be hap­py to receive coop­er­a­tion to end usurpa­tion. And if that includes the coop­er­a­tion of hon­or­able coun­tries like the Unit­ed States, I think that would be an option.”
    ...

    So what are the odds that the Venezue­lan oppo­si­tion is going to deter­mine that, yes, US mil­i­tary back­ing is a neces­si­ty? Well, that appears to be large­ly hinge on whether or the oppo­si­tion can get ade­quate back­ing from the Venezue­lan mil­i­tary. And as we saw, they failed spec­tac­u­lar­ly. Beyond that, they don’t appear to have a coher­ent expla­na­tion for why they failed so spec­tac­u­lar­ly. For exam­ple, we’re learn­ing that the coup attempt from pre­ced­ed by secret nego­ti­a­tions with Maduro loy­al­ists. And Leopol­do Lopez, the hard right neolib­er­al econ­o­mist and men­tor of Juan Guai­do, was appar­ent­ly one of the key archi­tects of these secret nego­ti­a­tions. Lopez also notably was released from house arrest on the day of the coup attempt and pub­licly met with Guai­do on the streets. This appear­ance by Lopez is appar­ent­ly being blamed by some in the oppo­si­tion for the lack of sup­port for the coup with­in the Venezue­lan mil­i­tary. Which seems like a high­ly ques­tion­able excuse giv­en that Lopez has long been close­ly asso­ci­atd with Guai­do. It’s not like it was a secret that the two are allies. But those are the kinds of recrim­i­na­tions that are tak­ing place with­in the Venezue­lan oppo­si­tion at this point. The fact that the lack of sup­port in the mil­i­tary might have some­thing to do with Guia­do and Lopez rep­re­sent­ing the inter­ests of wealth right-wing oli­garchs and inter­na­tion­al back­ers and not the inter­ests of aver­age Venezue­lans is nev­er men­tioned. And when those the kind of peo­ple who are lead­ing the oppo­si­tion it’s hard to see what exact­ly is going to bring about sup­port for regime change with­in the Venezue­lan mil­i­tary:

    ...
    Yet after Tuesday’s failed upris­ing, Guaidó may now be fight­ing a two-front bat­tle: both to oust Maduro and keep the oppo­si­tion unit­ed.

    Guaidó, a 35-year-old indus­tri­al engi­neer and for­mer stu­dent leader from Venezuela’s Caribbean coast, has ignit­ed new hope in the opposition’s ranks since he emerged as the head of the oppo­si­tion-con­trolled Nation­al Assem­bly — a body stripped of its pow­ers by Maduro in 2017 but wide­ly rec­og­nized inter­na­tion­al­ly as the country’s only demo­c­ra­t­ic insti­tu­tion.

    Guaidó’s claim to be Venezuela’s right­ful inter­im pres­i­dent has been rec­og­nized by more than 50 nations and strong­ly backed by the Trump admin­is­tra­tion. Guaidó said he had been in con­tact with U.S. offi­cials dur­ing the week.

    Yet the unrav­el­ing of a care­ful­ly laid plan to oust Maduro, includ­ing nego­ti­a­tions with his senior loy­al­ists, has gen­er­at­ed rifts with­in the oppo­si­tion. Some of its senior lead­ers have issued recrim­i­na­tions over what went wrong. The snip­ing risks rob­bing the oppo­si­tion of what became its sin­gle strongest asset in recent months: uni­ty.

    Some frus­trat­ed oppo­si­tion mem­bers are blam­ing Leopol­do Lopez, Guaidó’s men­tor, who escaped house arrest and appeared with Guaidó on Tues­day morn­ing, for upend­ing the plan.

    Lopez was one of the key archi­tects of secret nego­ti­a­tions with gov­ern­ment loy­al­ists who were sup­posed to turn against Maduro on Tues­day. But his tri­umphant pub­lic appear­ance after escap­ing a mil­i­tary base, insid­ers say, was not expect­ed. Some argue that it may have dis­rupt­ed a care­ful­ly laid plan in which some of Maduro’s senior loy­al­ists were poised to force him out.

    What actu­al­ly per­suad­ed Maduro’s inner cir­cle to close ranks instead remains a mys­tery. And Guaidó would not dis­cuss the nego­ti­a­tions nor the specifics of the opposition’s plan. But the inter­nal snip­ing pos­es a new chal­lenge for an oppo­si­tion that before Guaidó’s rise in Jan­u­ary was large­ly seen as inef­fec­tu­al and divid­ed.

    “The event shook Venezue­lan pol­i­tics,” said Car­los Romero, a Venezue­lan polit­i­cal ana­lyst. “Peo­ple are con­fused, wound­ed, unmo­ti­vat­ed.”

    “I have heard some politi­cians call it a “Leopolda­da,” he con­tin­ued, using a word that in Span­ish sug­gests a mav­er­ick act by one per­son. “And the most affect­ed one is Guaidó, who has been sell­ing him­self as a uni­tary leader. To appear with Leopol­do in a posi­tion like that one may have reduced some lead­ers’ trust in him.”
    ...

    So it’s look­ing like the Venezue­lan oppo­si­tion is like­ly to remain rel­a­tive­ly unpop­u­lar with­in Venezuela and with the mil­i­tary, and that means we should prob­a­bly expect that oppo­si­tion to deter­mine US mil­i­tary back a neces­si­ty soon­er or lat­er. But will the Trump admin­is­tra­tion actu­al­ly back the use of US mil­i­tary forces for the pur­pos­es of over­throw­ing the Maduro regime, which is what the oppo­si­tion clear­ly needs? That remains to be seen. But as the fol­low­ing arti­cle that was remark­ably pub­lished on April 30th, the same day of the failed coup attempt, informs us, there’s anoth­er option for out­side mil­i­tary forces. An alarm­ing­ly famil­iar option at this point: Erik Prince wants to send in a mer­ce­nary mil­i­tary force to over­throw Maduro and he’s been lob­by­ing the Trump admin­is­tra­tion for months:

    Reuters

    Exclu­sive — Black­wa­ter founder’s lat­est sales pitch: mer­ce­nar­ies for Venezuela

    Aram Ros­ton, Matt Spetal­nick
    April 30, 2019 / 12:04 AM

    WASHINGTON (Reuters) — Erik Prince — the founder of the con­tro­ver­sial pri­vate secu­ri­ty firm Black­wa­ter and a promi­nent sup­port­er of U.S. Pres­i­dent Don­ald Trump — has been push­ing a plan to deploy a pri­vate army to help top­ple Venezuela’s social­ist pres­i­dent, Nico­las Maduro, four sources with knowl­edge of the effort told Reuters.

    Over the last sev­er­al months, the sources said, Prince has sought invest­ment and polit­i­cal sup­port for such an oper­a­tion from influ­en­tial Trump sup­port­ers and wealthy Venezue­lan exiles. In pri­vate meet­ings in the Unit­ed States and Europe, Prince sketched out a plan to field up to 5,000 sol­diers-for-hire on behalf of Venezue­lan oppo­si­tion leader Juan Guai­do, accord­ing to two sources with direct knowl­edge of Prince’s pitch.

    One source said Prince has con­duct­ed meet­ings about the issue as recent­ly as mid-April.

    White House Nation­al Secu­ri­ty Coun­cil spokesman Gar­rett Mar­quis declined to com­ment when asked whether Prince had pro­posed his plan to the gov­ern­ment and whether it would be con­sid­ered. A per­son famil­iar with the administration’s think­ing said the White House would not sup­port such a plan.

    Venezuela oppo­si­tion offi­cials have not dis­cussed secu­ri­ty oper­a­tions with Prince, said Guai­do spokesman Edward Rodriguez, who did not answer addi­tion­al ques­tions from Reuters. The Maduro gov­ern­ment did not respond to a request for com­ment.

    Some U.S. and Venezue­lan secu­ri­ty experts, told of the plan by Reuters, called it polit­i­cal­ly far-fetched and poten­tial­ly dan­ger­ous because it could set off a civ­il war. A Venezue­lan exile close to the oppo­si­tion agreed but said pri­vate con­trac­tors might prove use­ful, in the event Maduro’s gov­ern­ment col­laps­es, by pro­vid­ing secu­ri­ty for a new admin­is­tra­tion in the after­math.

    A spokesman for Prince, Marc Cohen, said this month that Prince “has no plans to oper­ate or imple­ment an oper­a­tion in Venezuela” and declined to answer fur­ther ques­tions.

    Lital Leshem — the direc­tor of investor rela­tions at Prince’s pri­vate equi­ty firm, Fron­tier Resource Group — ear­li­er con­firmed Prince’s inter­est in Venezuela secu­ri­ty oper­a­tions.

    “He does have a solu­tion for Venezuela, just as he has a solu­tion for many oth­er places,” she said, declin­ing to elab­o­rate on his pro­pos­al.

    The two sources with direct knowl­edge of Prince’s pitch said it calls for start­ing with intel­li­gence oper­a­tions and lat­er deploy­ing 4,000 to 5,000 sol­diers-for-hire from Colom­bia and oth­er Latin Amer­i­can nations to con­duct com­bat and sta­bi­liza­tion oper­a­tions.

    ‘DYNAMIC EVENT’

    For Prince, the unlike­ly gam­bit rep­re­sents the lat­est effort in a long cam­paign to pri­va­tize war­fare. The wealthy son of an auto-parts tycoon has field­ed pri­vate secu­ri­ty con­trac­tors in con­flict zones from Cen­tral Asia to Africa to the Mid­dle East.

    One of Prince’s key argu­ments, one source said, is that Venezuela needs what Prince calls a “dynam­ic event” to break the stale­mate that has exist­ed since Jan­u­ary, when Guai­do — the head of Venezuela’s Nation­al Assem­bly — declared Maduro’s 2018 re-elec­tion ille­git­i­mate and invoked the con­sti­tu­tion to assume the inter­im pres­i­den­cy.

    ...

    CLOSE TIES TO TRUMP

    Prince was a pio­neer in pri­vate mil­i­tary con­tract­ing dur­ing the Iraq war, when the U.S. gov­ern­ment hired Black­wa­ter pri­mar­i­ly to pro­vide secu­ri­ty for State Depart­ment oper­a­tions there.

    In 2007, Black­wa­ter employ­ees shot and killed 17 Iraqi civil­ians at Nisour Square in Bagh­dad, spark­ing inter­na­tion­al out­rage. One of the Black­wa­ter employ­ees involved was con­vict­ed of mur­der in Decem­ber and three oth­ers have been con­vict­ed of manslaugh­ter.

    Prince renamed the Black­wa­ter secu­ri­ty com­pa­ny and sold it in 2010, but he recent­ly opened a com­pa­ny called Black­wa­ter USA, which sells ammu­ni­tion, silencers and knives. Over the past two years, he has led an unsuc­cess­ful cam­paign to con­vince the Trump admin­is­tra­tion to replace U.S. sol­diers in Afghanistan with secu­ri­ty con­trac­tors.

    Since 2014, Prince has run the Hong Kong-based Fron­tier Ser­vices Group, which has close ties to the state-owned Chi­nese invest­ment com­pa­ny CITIC and helps Chi­nese firms oper­at­ing in Africa with secu­ri­ty, avi­a­tion and logis­tics ser­vices.

    Prince donat­ed $100,000 to a polit­i­cal action com­mit­tee that sup­port­ed Trump’s elec­tion. His sis­ter, Bet­sy DeVos, is the administration’s edu­ca­tion sec­re­tary.

    Prince’s role in Trump’s cam­paign was high­light­ed in the report by Spe­cial Pros­e­cu­tor Robert Mueller, released this month, on alleged ties between the Trump cam­paign and Russ­ian efforts to influ­ence the 2016 pres­i­den­tial elec­tion.

    The report out­lined how Prince financed an effort to authen­ti­cate pur­port­ed Hillary Clin­ton emails and how in 2016 he met in the Sey­chelles islands, off east Africa, with a wealthy Russ­ian finan­cial offi­cial on behalf of Trump’s pres­i­den­tial tran­si­tion team.

    Prince spokesman Cohen declined to com­ment on the Mueller report.

    TARGETING FROZEN ASSETS

    The two sources with direct knowl­edge of Prince’s Venezuela plan said he is seek­ing $40 mil­lion from pri­vate investors. He also aims to get fund­ing from the bil­lions of dol­lars in Venezue­lan assets that have been seized by gov­ern­ments around the world impos­ing sanc­tions on the OPEC nation, a major oil exporter.

    It’s unclear, how­ev­er, how the Venezue­lan oppo­si­tion could legal­ly access those assets. Prince told peo­ple in pitch meet­ings, the sources said, that he believes that Guai­do has the author­i­ty to form his own mil­i­tary force because he has been rec­og­nized inter­na­tion­al­ly as Venezuela’s right­ful leader.

    Prince envi­sions a force made up of “Peru­vians, Ecuadore­ans, Colom­bians, Span­ish speak­ers,” one of the sources said, adding that Prince argued that such sol­diers would be more polit­i­cal­ly palat­able than Amer­i­can con­trac­tors.

    ———-

    “Exclu­sive — Black­wa­ter founder’s lat­est sales pitch: mer­ce­nar­ies for Venezuela” by Aram Ros­ton, Matt Spetal­nick; Reuters; 04/30/2019

    “Over the last sev­er­al months, the sources said, Prince has sought invest­ment and polit­i­cal sup­port for such an oper­a­tion from influ­en­tial Trump sup­port­ers and wealthy Venezue­lan exiles. In pri­vate meet­ings in the Unit­ed States and Europe, Prince sketched out a plan to field up to 5,000 sol­diers-for-hire on behalf of Venezue­lan oppo­si­tion leader Juan Guai­do, accord­ing to two sources with direct knowl­edge of Prince’s pitch.”

    Will 5,000 mer­ce­nar­ies pro­vide the Venezue­lan oppo­si­tion the mil­i­tary might it needs to over­throw Maduro? In terms of raw num­bers for actu­al­ly fight­ing and defeat­ing the Venezue­lan mil­i­tary it does­n’t seem like that would be remote­ly enough. But note Prince’s plan is for start­ing the regime change plan with intel­li­gence oper­a­tions and cre­ation some sort of “dynam­ic event”. In oth­er words, asym­met­ric war­fare:

    ...
    The two sources with direct knowl­edge of Prince’s pitch said it calls for start­ing with intel­li­gence oper­a­tions and lat­er deploy­ing 4,000 to 5,000 sol­diers-for-hire from Colom­bia and oth­er Latin Amer­i­can nations to con­duct com­bat and sta­bi­liza­tion oper­a­tions.

    ‘DYNAMIC EVENT’

    For Prince, the unlike­ly gam­bit rep­re­sents the lat­est effort in a long cam­paign to pri­va­tize war­fare. The wealthy son of an auto-parts tycoon has field­ed pri­vate secu­ri­ty con­trac­tors in con­flict zones from Cen­tral Asia to Africa to the Mid­dle East.

    One of Prince’s key argu­ments, one source said, is that Venezuela needs what Prince calls a “dynam­ic event” to break the stale­mate that has exist­ed since Jan­u­ary, when Guai­do — the head of Venezuela’s Nation­al Assem­bly — declared Maduro’s 2018 re-elec­tion ille­git­i­mate and invoked the con­sti­tu­tion to assume the inter­im pres­i­den­cy.
    ...

    And as we should expect at this point, it sounds like the Venezue­lan oppo­si­tion is quite open to Prince’s pro­pos­al:

    ...
    Venezuela oppo­si­tion offi­cials have not dis­cussed secu­ri­ty oper­a­tions with Prince, said Guai­do spokesman Edward Rodriguez, who did not answer addi­tion­al ques­tions from Reuters. The Maduro gov­ern­ment did not respond to a request for com­ment.

    Some U.S. and Venezue­lan secu­ri­ty experts, told of the plan by Reuters, called it polit­i­cal­ly far-fetched and poten­tial­ly dan­ger­ous because it could set off a civ­il war. A Venezue­lan exile close to the oppo­si­tion agreed but said pri­vate con­trac­tors might prove use­ful, in the event Maduro’s gov­ern­ment col­laps­es, by pro­vid­ing secu­ri­ty for a new admin­is­tra­tion in the after­math.
    ...

    And while the source close to the Trump admin­is­tra­tion is claim­ing that the Trump admin­is­tra­tion would­n’t sup­port such a plan, note that Prince was appar­ent­ly hold­ing these meet­ings as recent­ly as mid-April, just two weeks before the failed coup attempt. Recall that this arti­cle was pub­lished the day of the failed coup, so that source was report­ing the admin­is­tra­tion’s think­ing before the coup failed. Did that think­ing change?

    ...
    One source said Prince has con­duct­ed meet­ings about the issue as recent­ly as mid-April.

    White House Nation­al Secu­ri­ty Coun­cil spokesman Gar­rett Mar­quis declined to com­ment when asked whether Prince had pro­posed his plan to the gov­ern­ment and whether it would be con­sid­ered. A per­son famil­iar with the administration’s think­ing said the White House would not sup­port such a plan.
    ...

    Also note how Prince’s plans are for the Venezue­lan oppo­si­tion to pay for this mer­ce­nary force using $40 mil­lion from pri­vate investors and the Venezue­lan assets seized by for­eign gov­ern­ments and pri­vate investors. So finan­cial cost may not be an issue, assum­ing gov­ern­ments allow the oppo­si­tion to access those funds:

    ...
    TARGETING FROZEN ASSETS

    The two sources with direct knowl­edge of Prince’s Venezuela plan said he is seek­ing $40 mil­lion from pri­vate investors. He also aims to get fund­ing from the bil­lions of dol­lars in Venezue­lan assets that have been seized by gov­ern­ments around the world impos­ing sanc­tions on the OPEC nation, a major oil exporter.

    It’s unclear, how­ev­er, how the Venezue­lan oppo­si­tion could legal­ly access those assets. Prince told peo­ple in pitch meet­ings, the sources said, that he believes that Guai­do has the author­i­ty to form his own mil­i­tary force because he has been rec­og­nized inter­na­tion­al­ly as Venezuela’s right­ful leader.

    Prince envi­sions a force made up of “Peru­vians, Ecuadore­ans, Colom­bians, Span­ish speak­ers,” one of the sources said, adding that Prince argued that such sol­diers would be more polit­i­cal­ly palat­able than Amer­i­can con­trac­tors.
    ...

    It’s also worth recall­ing that while Prince does indeed have exten­sive ties to the Trump admin­is­tra­tion and was one of the key fig­ures in the Mueller inves­ti­ga­tion into the 2016 cam­paign, that inves­ti­ga­tion did­n’t just reveal Prince’s ties to the Trump team. Prince was also act­ing as a rep­re­sen­ta­tive of the Sau­di and UAE gov­ern­ments in a bid to sup­port Trump’s cam­paign. So it’s impor­tant to keep in mind that Prince has very close ties to two major oil exporters who hap­pen to be key com­peti­tors with Venezuela in the glob­al oil mar­kets:

    ...
    CLOSE TIES TO TRUMP

    ...

    Prince donat­ed $100,000 to a polit­i­cal action com­mit­tee that sup­port­ed Trump’s elec­tion. His sis­ter, Bet­sy DeVos, is the administration’s edu­ca­tion sec­re­tary.

    Prince’s role in Trump’s cam­paign was high­light­ed in the report by Spe­cial Pros­e­cu­tor Robert Mueller, released this month, on alleged ties between the Trump cam­paign and Russ­ian efforts to influ­ence the 2016 pres­i­den­tial elec­tion.

    The report out­lined how Prince financed an effort to authen­ti­cate pur­port­ed Hillary Clin­ton emails and how in 2016 he met in the Sey­chelles islands, off east Africa, with a wealthy Russ­ian finan­cial offi­cial on behalf of Trump’s pres­i­den­tial tran­si­tion team.

    Prince spokesman Cohen declined to com­ment on the Mueller report.
    ...

    Might the Sau­di and UAE gov­ern­ments have an inter­est in see­ing Venezuela col­lapse into a pro­tract­ed civ­il war? It’s a ques­tion we have to ask now that the mas­ter or mer­ce­nar­ies has set his sights on the coun­try. Don’t for­get that Prince lit­er­al­ly relo­cat­ed to the UAE in 2010. Also don’t for­get that a pro­tract­ed civ­il war just means more con­tracts for Erik Prince.

    So as we can see, there are a lot more peo­ple than just John Bolton try­ing to push the US into a war in Venezuela.

    Posted by Pterrafractyl | May 11, 2019, 4:28 pm
  9. One of the more remark­able aspects of the spec­tac­u­lar fail­ure of the Venezue­lan coup attempt from sev­er­al weeks ago was the fact that US fig­ures like John Bolton were open­ly nam­ing the appar­ent co-con­spir­a­tors in the Venezue­lan gov­ern­ment. In what appeared to be a kind of ‘name and shame’ tac­tic to coax them into back­ing the regime change push, fig­ures like Venezue­lan Defense Min­is­ter Vladimir Padri­no, Supreme Court chief judge Maikel Moreno and pres­i­den­tial guard com­man­der Ivan Rafael Her­nan­dez Dala were open­ly called upon by Bolton to get behind the regime change effort. Bolton also claimed these fig­ures had pre­vi­ous­ly voiced their sup­port for remov­ing the Maduro gov­ern­ment.

    So why were poten­tial co-con­spir­a­tor open­ly called out by the US in this high­ly risky man­ner? Well, as we’re going to see, it’s a reflec­tion of how high risk this coup attempt ulti­mate­ly was in the end. Because it turns out that, yes, these fig­ures were indeed in con­ver­sa­tions with the Venezue­lan oppo­si­tion and the US in the weeks before the coup attempt and were indeed sup­port­ive of remov­ing Maduro from pow­er. But they were not on board with the entire plan.

    At least that was the case with Supreme Court chief judge Maikel Moreno, who was seen as a cru­cial fig­ure for the coup attempt to work because it was Moreno who could give the mil­i­tary legal legit­i­ma­cy to move against Maduro, mak­ing the coup tech­ni­cal­ly not a coup. As we’ll see, Moreno was in exten­sive talks with the oppo­si­tion and claimed to be behind remov­ing Maduro, but he had a dif­fer­ent idea for who should replace Maduro: him­self. Moreno felt that pow­er should tem­porar­i­ly be trans­ferred to the courts, instead of the Nation­al Assem­bly, and that would make Moreno the tem­po­rary head of the gov­ern­ment.

    So while Moreno agreed Maduro had to go, he nev­er actu­al­ly go on board with the oppo­si­tion’s plan and did not agree that Guai­do should replace Maduro. This was the case as of April 28th, just two days before the coup attempt. The plan was for a May 1st upris­ing, but then Maduro’s spy chief, Maj. Gen. Manuel Ricar­do Cristo­pher Figuera, one of the oth­er gov­ern­ment insid­ers who was part of the scheme, got word that the Maduro gov­ern­ment was plan­ning on replac­ing him and also plan­ning on some sort of unspec­i­fied crack­down on Guai­do and the oth­er oppo­si­tion lead­ers. Figuera also learned that the Leopol­do Lopez (the neolib­er­al econ­o­mist who was Juan Guaido’s men­tor) was about to be trans­ferred from house arrest back to jail. These pres­sures force the oppo­si­tion to move up the planned coup date one day to April 30th.

    And that’s how hap­haz­ard the coup attempt was: three days before the planned coup, they learn that Moreno, a key fig­ure need­ed for it to work, isn’t on board with the plan. Then they learn that the Maduro gov­ern­ment was plan­ning on an immi­nent crack­down. So they decid­ed to just roll the dice and go with the coup plan a day ear­ly and hoped they could pres­sure Moreno into going along with it. That’s the back­sto­ry of why you had John Bolton pub­licly nam­ing and sham­ing poten­tial coup co-con­spir­a­tors:

    Reuters

    Bolton press­es key aides to Venezue­la’s Maduro to aban­don him

    April 30, 2019 / 2:17 PM

    WASHINGTON (Reuters) — U.S. nation­al secu­ri­ty advis­er John Bolton on Tues­day sin­gled out three senior aides to Venezue­lan Pres­i­dent Nico­las Maduro who he said must make good on com­mit­ments they pur­port­ed­ly made to the oppo­si­tion for a peace­ful tran­si­tion away from Maduro’s rule.

    Speak­ing at the White House dur­ing a day of anti-gov­ern­ment protests in Venezuela, Bolton named Venezue­lan Defense Min­is­ter Vladimir Padri­no, Supreme Court chief judge Maikel Moreno and pres­i­den­tial guard com­man­der Ivan Rafael Her­nan­dez Dala as hav­ing told the oppo­si­tion that Maduro need­ed to give up pow­er to oppo­si­tion leader Juan Guai­do.

    Bolton offered no evi­dence that three of Maduro’s top loy­al­ists had expressed a will­ing­ness to turn against the social­ist pres­i­dent, except to say the oppo­si­tion had kept the Trump admin­is­tra­tion well informed about their dis­cus­sions.

    “It’s still very impor­tant for three fig­ures in the Maduro regime who have been talk­ing to the oppo­si­tion over these last three months to make good on their com­mit­ment to achieve the peace­ful tran­si­tion of pow­er from the Maduro clique to inter­im pres­i­dent Juan Guai­do,” Bolton told reporters.

    “All agreed that Maduro had to go,” Bolton said. “They need to be able to act this after­noon and this evening to be able to bring oth­er mil­i­tary forces to the side of the inter­im pres­i­dent.”

    ...

    ———

    “Bolton press­es key aides to Venezue­la’s Maduro to aban­don him”; Reuters; 04/30/2019

    ““It’s still very impor­tant for three fig­ures in the Maduro regime who have been talk­ing to the oppo­si­tion over these last three months to make good on their com­mit­ment to achieve the peace­ful tran­si­tion of pow­er from the Maduro clique to inter­im pres­i­dent Juan Guai­do,” Bolton told reporters.”

    Behold! It’s John Bolton’s ver­sion of diplo­ma­cy: out­ing his fel­low coup co-con­spir­a­tors who got cold feet. It was one of the sur­re­al aspects to a coup attempt where pret­ty much every­thing went wrong.

    Now here’s a arti­cle from last week with the back­sto­ry on why Bolton was nam­ing and sham­ing fig­ure like Maikel Moreno: Bolton need­ed to do name and shame because his fel­low coup plot­ters went ahead with coup plans with­out the back­ing of all the key plot­ters (which seems like a real­ly bad plan):

    The Wash­ing­ton Post

    Inside the secret plot to turn senior Venezue­lan offi­cials against Maduro

    By Antho­ny Faio­la
    May 13, 2019

    Late one night in April, a week before Venezuela’s oppo­si­tion launched its abortive upris­ing, four men sat on the ter­race of the hill­side com­pound in Cara­cas belong­ing to the chief jus­tice of the country’s Supreme Court. The dim lights of the cap­i­tal twin­kling below them, they sipped Fiji bot­tled water as they plot­ted the ouster of Pres­i­dent Nicolás Maduro.

    Maduro’s spy chief, Maj. Gen. Manuel Ricar­do Cristo­pher Figuera, and Cesar Omaña, a 39-year-old Venezue­lan busi­ness­man based in Mia­mi, were try­ing to seal a deal hashed out over weeks with Maikel Moreno, the chief jus­tice, accord­ing to one of the par­tic­i­pants in the meet­ing. Figuera and Omaña were part of the plan to force Maduro out, but they need­ed Moreno’s help.

    Moreno, sit­ting before an ash­tray laden with the stubs of Cuban cig­ars, appeared to be hav­ing doubts. The 53-year-old jurist voiced con­cerns about Juan Guaidó, the U.S.-backed oppo­si­tion leader who would become the nation’s inter­im pres­i­dent if the plot suc­ceed­ed.

    Then, accord­ing to the par­tic­i­pant, Moreno offered anoth­er can­di­date to “tem­porar­i­ly” lead the bro­ken coun­try — him­self.

    “In the end, he was try­ing to safe­guard his own pow­er play,” one senior oppo­si­tion fig­ure said.

    ...

    The three peo­ple, who spoke on the con­di­tion of anonymi­ty to dis­cuss inter­nal tac­tics, said Moreno’s hes­i­tant pledge to coop­er­ate — and then his rever­sal — played a cru­cial role in the plan’s col­lapse.

    The fail­ure of the upris­ing has cast new uncer­tain­ty on the opposition’s months-long effort to oust Maduro. Guaidó made a sur­prise appear­ance with a hand­ful of troops at a mil­i­tary base in Cara­cas at dawn on April 30 to announce that he had the sup­port of key mil­i­tary units and to call on oth­ers to join in the “final phase” of the cam­paign against the strong­man. But the broad­er mil­i­tary sup­port nev­er mate­ri­al­ized, and Maduro’s forces moved against oppo­si­tion pro­test­ers, killing at least four and wound­ing scores.

    While U.S. offi­cials still want Maduro out and say they remain engaged, they now say it prob­a­bly will take longer than they ini­tial­ly believed. Pres­i­dent Trump, mean­while, has expressed frus­tra­tion at his administration’s aggres­sive strat­e­gy, com­plain­ing that he was mis­led about how easy it would be to replace Maduro with Guaidó, accord­ing to admin­is­tra­tion offi­cials and White House advis­ers.

    Moreno’s back­ing alone, oppo­si­tion offi­cials con­cede, might not have forced Maduro out on April 30. But the plot­ters were count­ing on Moreno to pro­vide a vital lever to sway the mil­i­tary to their cause: a legal rul­ing that would have effec­tive­ly acknowl­edged Guaidó as inter­im pres­i­dent and led to new elec­tions. The fact that it nev­er emerged, they believe, scared off key mil­i­tary and oth­er loy­al­ists.

    They por­tray the chief jus­tice, a for­mer intel­li­gence offi­cer turned lawyer, as an angler with his own ambi­tions of pow­er. The senior U.S. offi­cial con­firmed that the ver­sion of events described here con­curred with descrip­tions offered to the Amer­i­cans by the Venezue­lan oppo­si­tion, which had been updat­ing them on the progress of the talks. Sec­re­tary of State Mike Pom­peo has pub­licly named Moreno as one of the top loy­al­ists in talks to turn on Maduro.

    Moreno, through a spokesman, did not respond to a request for com­ment. He has pub­licly con­demned the plot against Maduro, and in the days since, the court he leads has issued charges, includ­ing trea­son, against oppo­si­tion fig­ures involved in the attempt­ed ouster.

    “I express my strong rejec­tion of the ille­gal inten­tion of a very small group of mil­i­tary and civil­ians who have sought to take polit­i­cal pow­er with force, going against the con­sti­tu­tion and the laws,” Moreno said in a call to state tele­vi­sion 90 min­utes after the upris­ing began.

    Maduro hasn’t open­ly moved against Moreno or any oth­er senior loy­al­ists that U.S. and oppo­si­tion offi­cials claim were plot­ting against him. Ana­lysts see two pos­si­ble rea­sons: Either the loy­al­ists were feign­ing inter­est in oust­ing Maduro to learn more about the plot or expose it, or Maduro is too weak to act against oth­er senior offi­cials.

    Oppo­si­tion offi­cials, while dis­ap­point­ed that the plan did not work, remain con­vinced that it has shown a crit­i­cal lack of loy­al­ty, and believe senior offi­cials and jus­tices might still be will­ing to turn.

    Figuera, Omaña and Moreno met around 11 p.m. on April 23 at Moreno’s man­sion in the Alto Hatil­lo neigh­bor­hood of Cara­cas, out­fit­ted with an impres­sive wine cel­lar, the par­tic­i­pant recalled.

    Figuera and Omaña — a chem­i­cals trad­er and med­ical doc­tor who was work­ing to defuse the cri­sis by liais­ing with con­tacts in loy­al­ist cir­cles, the U.S. gov­ern­ment and the oppo­si­tion — promised Moreno that senior gov­ern­ment offi­cials and top mil­i­tary brass were poised to stand up and denounce Maduro. But they need­ed a legal lever to help pro­vide legit­i­ma­cy, and one that only Moreno could pro­vide.

    For weeks, they had gone back and forth on the lan­guage of a rul­ing to be issued by the Supreme Court, and which was expect­ed on the night of April 29. Under the rul­ing, accord­ing to a draft reviewed by The Wash­ing­ton Post, the Supreme Court would with­draw legal recog­ni­tion of Maduro’s Con­stituent Assem­bly, one of the key sources of his pow­er, and the sta­tus of polit­i­cal pris­on­ers would be “revised.”

    Most impor­tant, the Supreme Court would rein­state the Nation­al Assem­bly, head­ed by Guaidó but stripped of its pow­ers by the court in 2017 under Moreno’s lead­er­ship. It also would call for the back­ing of the armed forces, and free and fair elec­tions.

    “The mag­ni­tude of the social dam­age caused to Venezue­lan soci­ety giv­en the vio­la­tion of [demo­c­ra­t­ic guar­an­tees] and con­sti­tu­tion­al prin­ci­ples, is incom­men­su­rable,” the nev­er-issued draft declared.

    The Nation­al Assem­bly, wide­ly rec­og­nized inter­na­tion­al­ly as Venezuela’s only demo­c­ra­t­ic insti­tu­tion, had already declared Maduro an “usurp­er” and named Guaidó the nation’s inter­im pres­i­dent. The Supreme Court rul­ing would have effec­tive­ly backed that dec­la­ra­tion, pro­vid­ing the armed forces with the con­sti­tu­tion­al cov­er they need­ed to turn against Mau­dro.

    In return for the legal rul­ing, the Supreme Court jus­tices, includ­ing Moreno, would get to keep their posts.

    As described by oppo­si­tion offi­cials, the oper­a­tion wasn’t meant to be a text­book “coup,” but a tight­ly sequenced chain of offi­cial state­ments meant to force Maduro to step down with­out a sin­gle bul­let being fired.

    The Supreme Court rul­ing “was essen­tial, because it gave the mil­i­tary as an insti­tu­tion a rea­son to step for­ward in an hon­or­able way,” said a per­son present at the meet­ing. “It made it so their actions were legal, and would not be con­sid­ered a coup.”

    On that evening of April 23, Moreno, while sym­pa­thet­ic to the opposition’s goal, sound­ed anx­ious and dubi­ous, the par­tic­i­pant said. He had been in com­mu­ni­ca­tion with a U.S. con­tact and senior oppo­si­tion fig­ures liv­ing in exile. Yet that evening, he com­plained that if the plan failed, he might be com­pelled to leave the coun­try for the Unit­ed States and “end up car­ry­ing my wife’s bags at Wal­mart.”

    Then he raised the issue of who would lead the coun­try if Maduro was pushed aside.

    “Why Guaidó? Why him?” Moreno asked, accord­ing to the par­tic­i­pant.

    Moreno sug­gest­ed he delay the resti­tu­tion of the Nation­al Assembly’s pow­ers, and there­fore the place­ment of Guaidó as inter­im pres­i­dent. He pre­sent­ed the Supreme Court — a 32-mem­ber body large­ly seen as pro-Maduro, but with at least two dis­sent­ing voic­es — as the log­i­cal inter­im pow­er. Such a move would have made Moreno, as the court’s chief jus­tice, the nation’s tem­po­rary ruler ahead of any new elec­tions.

    The par­tic­i­pants balked. They envi­sioned a tran­si­tion like the one in South Africa, albeit based on social ide­ol­o­gy instead of race. But the tran­si­tion need­ed a bro­ker with inter­na­tion­al stature, con­sti­tu­tion­al legit­i­ma­cy and pop­u­lar sup­port. That per­son, they told Moreno, was Guaidó.

    By the end of the night, Moreno appeared to have come around, the par­tic­i­pant said. But in two meet­ings lat­er that week — the most recent on April 28 with Figuera — he began to have doubts. He insist­ed the oppo­si­tion show it had sup­port from the mil­i­tary before the Supreme Court issued its rul­ing. He also demand­ed from Figuera a pledge of forces to pro­tect him­self and his fam­i­ly after the rul­ing was issued.

    None of it would come to pass.

    Oppo­si­tion offi­cials say the move was orig­i­nal­ly sched­uled for May 1 but had to be moved up a day when Figuera sent a text at 1 a.m. April 30 say­ing he had learned he was about to be replaced as head of SEBIN, Maduro’s feared intel­li­gence police.

    Figuera also said Leopol­do López — under house arrest as the nation’s most famous polit­i­cal pris­on­er, and a key play­er in the effort to oust Maduro — was about to be trans­ferred back to a prison cell.

    Oppo­si­tion offi­cials were also told that the gov­ern­ment was prepar­ing to take unspec­i­fied action against Guaidó and oth­er senior oppo­si­tion lead­ers.

    “The mes­sage was: We had to act,” one oppo­si­tion leader said.

    The con­spir­a­tors made des­per­ate attempts to reach Moreno that day, but their calls went unan­swered. Grad­u­al­ly, many of the mil­i­tary men ini­tial­ly back­ing Guaidó at the La Car­lota mil­i­tary base began to drift away. Oth­ers who had pledged their sup­port nev­er showed up.

    Said one oppo­si­tion offi­cial: If Moreno had act­ed, “the cracks [in Maduro’s inner cir­cle] would have been deep­er, and prob­a­bly defin­i­tive.”

    ———-

    “Inside the secret plot to turn senior Venezue­lan offi­cials against Maduro” by Antho­ny Faio­la; The Wash­ing­ton Post; 05/13/2019

    “Maduro’s spy chief, Maj. Gen. Manuel Ricar­do Cristo­pher Figuera, and Cesar Omaña, a 39-year-old Venezue­lan busi­ness­man based in Mia­mi, were try­ing to seal a deal hashed out over weeks with Maikel Moreno, the chief jus­tice, accord­ing to one of the par­tic­i­pants in the meet­ing. Figuera and Omaña were part of the plan to force Maduro out, but they need­ed Moreno’s help.

    Chief Jus­tice Moreno was the linch­pin of the plan. It was Moreno who would give the planned mil­i­tary’s move against Maduro legal legit­i­ma­cy:

    ...
    Figuera, Omaña and Moreno met around 11 p.m. on April 23 at Moreno’s man­sion in the Alto Hatil­lo neigh­bor­hood of Cara­cas, out­fit­ted with an impres­sive wine cel­lar, the par­tic­i­pant recalled.

    Figuera and Omaña — a chem­i­cals trad­er and med­ical doc­tor who was work­ing to defuse the cri­sis by liais­ing with con­tacts in loy­al­ist cir­cles, the U.S. gov­ern­ment and the oppo­si­tion — promised Moreno that senior gov­ern­ment offi­cials and top mil­i­tary brass were poised to stand up and denounce Maduro. But they need­ed a legal lever to help pro­vide legit­i­ma­cy, and one that only Moreno could pro­vide.

    For weeks, they had gone back and forth on the lan­guage of a rul­ing to be issued by the Supreme Court, and which was expect­ed on the night of April 29. Under the rul­ing, accord­ing to a draft reviewed by The Wash­ing­ton Post, the Supreme Court would with­draw legal recog­ni­tion of Maduro’s Con­stituent Assem­bly, one of the key sources of his pow­er, and the sta­tus of polit­i­cal pris­on­ers would be “revised.”

    Most impor­tant, the Supreme Court would rein­state the Nation­al Assem­bly, head­ed by Guaidó but stripped of its pow­ers by the court in 2017 under Moreno’s lead­er­ship. It also would call for the back­ing of the armed forces, and free and fair elec­tions.

    ...

    The Nation­al Assem­bly, wide­ly rec­og­nized inter­na­tion­al­ly as Venezuela’s only demo­c­ra­t­ic insti­tu­tion, had already declared Maduro an “usurp­er” and named Guaidó the nation’s inter­im pres­i­dent. The Supreme Court rul­ing would have effec­tive­ly backed that dec­la­ra­tion, pro­vid­ing the armed forces with the con­sti­tu­tion­al cov­er they need­ed to turn against Mau­dro.

    In return for the legal rul­ing, the Supreme Court jus­tices, includ­ing Moreno, would get to keep their posts.

    As described by oppo­si­tion offi­cials, the oper­a­tion wasn’t meant to be a text­book “coup,” but a tight­ly sequenced chain of offi­cial state­ments meant to force Maduro to step down with­out a sin­gle bul­let being fired.

    The Supreme Court rul­ing “was essen­tial, because it gave the mil­i­tary as an insti­tu­tion a rea­son to step for­ward in an hon­or­able way,” said a per­son present at the meet­ing. “It made it so their actions were legal, and would not be con­sid­ered a coup.”
    ...

    But on April 23, a week before the planned coup, Moreno was voic­ing doubts about plan. Specif­i­cal­ly, doubts about putting Juan Guai­do in pow­er and the Nation­al Assem­bly direct­ly in pow­er. Moreno want­ed the courts to tem­porar­i­ly rule ahead of new elec­tions. It appeared that his con­cerns were pla­cat­ed but then, on April 28th, Moreno once again expressed doubts and insist­ed that the sup­port from the mil­i­tary had to be demon­strat­ed before the Supreme Court could issue its rul­ing. This was a rather big com­pli­ca­tion because it was the Supreme Court that was sup­posed to open the way for the mil­i­tary to back new gov­ern­ment. So Moreno threw a big wrench in the plans just a few days before it was set to go:

    ...
    On that evening of April 23, Moreno, while sym­pa­thet­ic to the opposition’s goal, sound­ed anx­ious and dubi­ous, the par­tic­i­pant said. He had been in com­mu­ni­ca­tion with a U.S. con­tact and senior oppo­si­tion fig­ures liv­ing in exile. Yet that evening, he com­plained that if the plan failed, he might be com­pelled to leave the coun­try for the Unit­ed States and “end up car­ry­ing my wife’s bags at Wal­mart.”

    Then he raised the issue of who would lead the coun­try if Maduro was pushed aside.

    “Why Guaidó? Why him?” Moreno asked, accord­ing to the par­tic­i­pant.

    Moreno sug­gest­ed he delay the resti­tu­tion of the Nation­al Assembly’s pow­ers, and there­fore the place­ment of Guaidó as inter­im pres­i­dent. He pre­sent­ed the Supreme Court — a 32-mem­ber body large­ly seen as pro-Maduro, but with at least two dis­sent­ing voic­es — as the log­i­cal inter­im pow­er. Such a move would have made Moreno, as the court’s chief jus­tice, the nation’s tem­po­rary ruler ahead of any new elec­tions.

    The par­tic­i­pants balked. They envi­sioned a tran­si­tion like the one in South Africa, albeit based on social ide­ol­o­gy instead of race. But the tran­si­tion need­ed a bro­ker with inter­na­tion­al stature, con­sti­tu­tion­al legit­i­ma­cy and pop­u­lar sup­port. That per­son, they told Moreno, was Guaidó.

    By the end of the night, Moreno appeared to have come around, the par­tic­i­pant said. But in two meet­ings lat­er that week — the most recent on April 28 with Figuera — he began to have doubts. He insist­ed the oppo­si­tion show it had sup­port from the mil­i­tary before the Supreme Court issued its rul­ing. He also demand­ed from Figuera a pledge of forces to pro­tect him­self and his fam­i­ly after the rul­ing was issued.

    None of it would come to pass.
    ...

    Then, at 1 am on April 30th, Gen­er­al Figuera informed the oppo­si­tion that he learned he was about to be replaced and there was going to be a move against the oppo­si­tion fig­ures. So they decid­ed to move the coup plans to that day, with­out know­ing whether or not chief jus­tice Moreno would be on board:

    ...
    Oppo­si­tion offi­cials say the move was orig­i­nal­ly sched­uled for May 1 but had to be moved up a day when Figuera sent a text at 1 a.m. April 30 say­ing he had learned he was about to be replaced as head of SEBIN, Maduro’s feared intel­li­gence police.

    Figuera also said Leopol­do López — under house arrest as the nation’s most famous polit­i­cal pris­on­er, and a key play­er in the effort to oust Maduro — was about to be trans­ferred back to a prison cell.

    Oppo­si­tion offi­cials were also told that the gov­ern­ment was prepar­ing to take unspec­i­fied action against Guaidó and oth­er senior oppo­si­tion lead­ers.

    “The mes­sage was: We had to act,” one oppo­si­tion leader said.

    The con­spir­a­tors made des­per­ate attempts to reach Moreno that day, but their calls went unan­swered. Grad­u­al­ly, many of the mil­i­tary men ini­tial­ly back­ing Guaidó at the La Car­lota mil­i­tary base began to drift away. Oth­ers who had pledged their sup­port nev­er showed up.

    Said one oppo­si­tion offi­cial: If Moreno had act­ed, “the cracks [in Maduro’s inner cir­cle] would have been deep­er, and prob­a­bly defin­i­tive.”
    ...

    As we should expect, oppo­si­tion fig­ures are spin­ning their deba­cle as a sign that Maduro lacks loy­al­ty:

    ...
    Oppo­si­tion offi­cials, while dis­ap­point­ed that the plan did not work, remain con­vinced that it has shown a crit­i­cal lack of loy­al­ty, and believe senior offi­cials and jus­tices might still be will­ing to turn.
    ...

    So was that just real­ly bad luck for the oppo­si­tion that a dis­loy­al Maduro offi­cial backed out at the last minute for per­son­al ambi­tions? Well, the fact that the Maduro gov­ern­ment has­n’t actu­al­ly move against fig­ures like Moreno after the failed coup attempt rais­es one par­tic­u­lar­ly embar­rass­ing pos­si­bil­i­ty: that the Maduro loy­al­ists like Moreno who were just feign­ing inter­est the entire time in order to expose the plot. Don’t for­get that Bolton was pub­licly nam­ing and sham­ing more fig­ures than just Moreno that day. There were mul­ti­ple high-lev­el fig­ures who appar­ent­ly pledged to back a coup but backed off at the last minute. Was that all because of Moreno’s deci­sion not to give it the Supreme Court’s stamp of approval or were they play­ing the oppo­si­tion the whole time?

    ...
    Moreno, through a spokesman, did not respond to a request for com­ment. He has pub­licly con­demned the plot against Maduro, and in the days since, the court he leads has issued charges, includ­ing trea­son, against oppo­si­tion fig­ures involved in the attempt­ed ouster.

    “I express my strong rejec­tion of the ille­gal inten­tion of a very small group of mil­i­tary and civil­ians who have sought to take polit­i­cal pow­er with force, going against the con­sti­tu­tion and the laws,” Moreno said in a call to state tele­vi­sion 90 min­utes after the upris­ing began.

    Maduro hasn’t open­ly moved against Moreno or any oth­er senior loy­al­ists that U.S. and oppo­si­tion offi­cials claim were plot­ting against him. Ana­lysts see two pos­si­ble rea­sons: Either the loy­al­ists were feign­ing inter­est in oust­ing Maduro to learn more about the plot or expose it, or Maduro is too weak to act against oth­er senior offi­cials.
    ...

    But whether or not Moreno was mis­lead­ing the oppo­si­tion the whole time, there’s one fig­ure who clear­ly feels mis­led: Pres­i­dent Trump, who is report­ed­ly quite upset over being mis­led by Bolton about how easy it would be to over­throw Maduro:

    ...
    While U.S. offi­cials still want Maduro out and say they remain engaged, they now say it prob­a­bly will take longer than they ini­tial­ly believed. Pres­i­dent Trump, mean­while, has expressed frus­tra­tion at his administration’s aggres­sive strat­e­gy, com­plain­ing that he was mis­led about how easy it would be to replace Maduro with Guaidó, accord­ing to admin­is­tra­tion offi­cials and White House advis­ers.
    ...

    So that’s all some­thing to keep in mind regard­ing both future Trump admin­is­tra­tion regime change schemes, whether it’s anoth­er attempt in Venezuela or ongo­ing threats of war with Iran: the Trump admin­is­tra­tion and its co-con­spir­a­tors were will­ing to engage in an high risk regime-change gam­bit that did­n’t even have all of the key co-con­spir­a­tors on board. That’s quite an itchy trig­ger fin­ger.

    Posted by Pterrafractyl | May 20, 2019, 3:17 pm

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