While Trump cuts food
stamps, USAID bankrolls Venezuela regime
change with half a billion in tax dollars
The Trump administration has spent $654
million in “aid” to try to overthrow
Venezuela’s government, including $435
million through USAID and $128 million
directly to Juan Guaidó and his corrupt coup
gang — all while imposing crippling
austerity at home.
By Ben Norton
January 24, 2020 "Information
Clearing House" -Under President Donald Trump, the United States
has dumped over half a billion dollars into regime
change-related “aid” efforts targeting Venezuela’s
elected, UN-recognized government.
From 2017 to December 2019, the Trump
administration spent at least
$654 million on Venezuela-related aid schemes.
While Washington claims this spending assisted
humanitarian efforts, much of the US taxpayers’
money financed efforts to destabilize and ultimately
overthrow the government of
President Nicolás Maduro.
The US Agency for International Development
(USAID) is a central arm of Washington’s hybrid war
on socialist and independent states around the
world. It has a long and sordid history of funding
“civil society” groups and political opposition
parties to topple the governments of designated
enemies.
USAID has provided $435 million of this $654
million, bankrolling Venezuela’s right-wing,
US-controlled opposition. At least $128 million of
this USAID money went directly into the pockets of
the coup leaders that the Trump administration
attempted to install as the rulers of the country in
2019.
USAID recently divulged this shocking level of
support, acknowledging that it is going to fund
Venezuelan anti-government activists, NGOs, and
opposition media outlets, along with the supposed
“interim government” led by US-appointed
coup leader Juan Guaidó, as well as
Venezuela’s National Assembly, which until
January was led by Guaidó and controlled by the
right-wing opposition.
While the United States is spending hundreds of
millions of dollars trying to overthrow Venezuela’s
leftist government, the Trump administration is
aggressively cutting social programs at home.
To slash $4.2 billion in public expenditures over
five years, Trump
gutted food stamps that fed 700,000 poor
Americans, most of whom are children. Funding this
crucial program would cost just around $840 million
per year – close to the amount Trump has poured into
US regime-change efforts in Venezuela.
The Trump administration has also drastically cut
taxes for the rich and large corporations. Thanks to
these cuts, the
richest 400 billionaires in the US now pay a
lower tax rate than the poorest Americans.
As working-class Americans increasingly bear the
burden of this taxation, their tax dollars are being
spent on destroying socialist governments in the
Global South.
USAID’s role in US coup attempt against
Venezuela
USAID has long acted as a front for the CIA and
other government agencies, disguising regime-change
activities as supposed humanitarian work. Under the
administration of Donald Trump, the organization’s
role as an arm of US hybrid warfare has become more
aggressive than ever.
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In February 2019, a USAID plan was revealed to
train “aid workers” as special operations forces who
serve in teams with military and intelligence
operatives to advance US “national security”
interests.
That same month, the ostensible humanitarian
agency was activated as the lead element in a plot
to overthrow Venezuela’s elected government.
USAID collaborated with the Defense Department
and State Department in a scheme in Cucuta,
Colombia, on Venezuela’s border.
USAID worked hand in glove with Venezuelan coup
leaders, many of whom disguised themselves as
so-called aid workers. On February 23, they tried to
ram a US “aid” convoy across the Venezuelan border.
The putsch attempt was ultimately unsuccessful.
So as a last resort, violent right-wing
coup-mongers set the aid on fire, and Washington
and the international media immediately blamed the
Maduro government — in a scheme
first exposed by The Grayzone’s Max Blumenthal,
and finally acknowledged weeks later by The New York
Times.
Actual aid organizations publicly condemned
USAID’s involvement in the violent coup attempt. The
International Red Cross said the stunt “is, for
us, not humanitarian aid.” And the United Nations
slammed the “politicized” nature of USAID’s
activities.
US
Vice President Mike Pence with USAID in Colombia,
after the failed February 23 coup attempt against
Venezuela
USAID funding of Juan Guaidó’s corrupt coup
cabal
In its December statement, USAID claimed, “No
funds are provided directly to elected National
Assembly members, high-level officials of the Guaidó
Administration, Ambassadors, or the interim
President himself.”
But in the same breath, just one sentence prior,
the agency acknowledged, “USAID is providing
compensation, travel costs, and other expenses for
some technical advisors to the National Assembly and
the interim Guaidó Administration through assistance
funds.”
The Grayzone contributor Leonardo Flores noted
that USAID signed an October 8 agreement with
Guaidó’s ersatz administration that included $98
million in assistance allotted for Venezuela.
The
Los Angeles Times obtained an internal
government memo which showed that approximately $42
million of that funding was taken from aid that had
originally been proportioned to assist desperate
Central American migrants. Instead, the money was
re-routed to “Guaidó and his faction… to pay for
their salaries, airfare, ‘good governance’ training,
propaganda, technical assistance for holding
elections and other ‘democracy-building’ projects.”
The original plan, backed by Washington, was to
use the “aid money” to bribe Venezuelan soldiers to
defect over to the Colombian side and launch an
armed uprising against Maduro. In reality, senior
members of Guaidó’s US-backed party, Voluntad
Popular, instead used the money to live it up in
Colombia.
In just a few weeks, the Venezuelan coup-mongers
flushed well over $125,000 down the drain, spending
wildly on swanky hotels, expensive dinners,
nightclubs, and designer clothes. (In Colombia,
where the minimum wage is just
$268 per month, this is an unimaginable sum of
money.)
Guaidó later publicly acknowledged the
corruption, but attempted to defect the blame onto
Maduro.
And this well documented corruption did not stop
USAID from giving Guaidó’s political wrecking crew
tens of millions more in US tax dollars to play
with.
Am I missing something or is the entire US media that zeroes in on any negative situation in Venezuela totally ignoring the gigantic corruption scandal that exposes Juan Guaido's Popular Will party as a US-backed mafia comprised of white collar criminals? https://t.co/yf2x2dEOoO
In September, USAID head Mark Green announced an
additional
$52 million in so-called “development
assistance” for coup leader Guaidó and his
fictitious parallel government, which controls no
actual assets inside Venezuela and is
not recognized by the United Nations.
USAID referred to the Venezuelan government of
elected President Maduro, which is recognized by the
UN, as the “illegitimate Maduro regime.” It
reiterated that the money would go to funding
opposition media outlets and anti-government civil
society groups, as well as Guaidó’s shadow regime
and the National Assembly.
Green announced the new funding while standing
next to the Venezuelan coup regime’s unrecognized
ambassador to the United States,
Carlos Vecchio, a former lawyer for the
corporate oil giant Exxon who has himself been
involved in a series of
corruption scandals.
This September’s pledge of $52 million to help
fund Venezuela coup leaders stands in stark contrast
to the measly
$4 million in humanitarian assistance that USAID
pledged just two weeks before to help the Bahamas
after Hurricane Dorian.
USAID Mark Green, a former Republican politician
from Wisconsin, has openly cheered on the rightist
Venezuelan opposition.
Green regularly
travels to Colombia to meet with right-wing
Venezuelan opposition activists and discusses ways
to overthrow what he calls the “illegitimate,
authoritarian regime in Venezuela.”
USAID’s direct involvement in US coup efforts
continued well past the failed putsch in February.
In November, the US embassy in Madrid paid to
promote photos on Twitter showing Ambassador Duke
Buchan with USAID on the Colombian border with
Venezuela. “It is time for Maduro to leave,” he
declared.
Buchan, a right-wing Trump ally and former
businessman, speaks miserable Spanish, but has used
his role as US representative in Spain to
aggressively lobby for regime change in Venezuela.
Emb. Buchan: “Me causa una profunda impresión ver cómo 40.000 venezolanos tienen que cruzar el puente Simón Bolívar cada día por la crisis humanitaria en Venezuela y tienen que ser atendidos en el Centro de Atención de Refugiados. Es hora de que Maduro se vaya." #EstamosUnidosVEpic.twitter.com/CZq2cFiam4
The line between USAID’s putative aid work
and Washington’s coup-mongering abroad has always
been blurry. Liberal presidents like Barack Obama
sought to preserve USAID’s image, while still using
its aid and activities as a form of soft power to
advance US foreign-policy interests. Under Trump,
however, any pretense of independence or commitment
to humanitarianism has been dispelled, and USAID has
become a blunt weapon of regime change.
USAID’s role in coup attempts against Nicaragua
and Cuba
Venezuela is by no means the only country
targeted for regime-change operations in which the
US Agency for International Development is deeply
complicit.
USAID also played a significant role backing the
right-wing
coup attempt against Nicaragua’s democratically
elected leftist government in 2018. The
Nicaraguan opposition, which carried out many
violent acts targeting supporters of the ruling
Sandinista Front, receives tens of millions of
dollars from the US government on an annual basis.
Today I asked USAID’s Mark Green about the lethal violence of the opposition his agency backs in Nicaragua and the proximity of one the favorite US grantees, Felix Maradiaga, to armed elements. As expected, he totally ducked the question. #NicaraguaQuierePazpic.twitter.com/Oc2UEYcLpB
In 2018, USAID spent
$24.5 million in Nicaragua. Its top recipients
were the Democratic Leadership Development Program,
Municipal Governance Program, and Lifting Nicaraguan
Voices Program — that is to say, programs to help
train, cultivate, and fund right-wing opposition
leaders.
Of this $24.5 million in so-called “aid,” USAID
spent $15 million (61%) on “governance” — that is to
say, supporting opposition groups — while another
$5.1 million (21%) went to covering administrative
costs.
A mere $2.7 million (11%) was spent on education,
with a meager $1.2 million spent on health (5%). In
other words, just around 16% of the USAID budget in
Nicaragua in 2018 was actually spent on aid, smaller
than its own administrative costs.
USAID in Nicaragua essentially just acts as a
job-creation program for coup-mongers
Cuba has been another primary target of USAID.
For decades, it has financed efforts to destabilize
and overthrow the tiny island’s independent
socialist government. The so-called aid agency even
created its own
fake Twitter platform called ZunZuneo, which it
used to spread propaganda and disinformation to
demonize the Cuban government and call for protests.
Bolivia has been a target as well. After the
Trump administration oversaw a far-right military
coup, in which fascist-led violent mobs toppled the
democratically elected government of socialist
President Evo Morales, USAID announced that it would
be traveling to Bolivia to
influence the May 3 election.
Falsely accusing Venezuela of the
hemisphere’s worst migrant crisis
In addition to directly participating in
regime-change efforts and bankrolling right-wing
opposition groups, USAID has helped to popularize
demonstrably false talking points demonizing
Venezuela, which have been breathlessly echoed by
corporate media stenographers.
In its press statements announcing tens of
millions of tax dollars in support for Venezuela’s
right-wing coup regime, USAID has accused Venezuela
of creating “the largest external displacement in
the history of the Western Hemisphere.”
Mainstream media outlets have frequently repeated
this claim, citing the US regime-change organization
without investigating its veracity.
It is impossible to obtain a precise estimate of
the number of Venezuelans displaced in the US-fueled
crisis. Venezuelan government officials have told
The Grayzone that most figures echoed by the US
government and corporate media outlets are greatly
exaggerated, but that millions of Venezuelans have
been displaced because of the conflict — likely
somewhere around 3 million. The crisis has been
undoubtedly fueled by Washington’s blockade of the
Venezuelan economy and relentless attempts to
overthrow its government.
However, the largest external displacement in the
modern history of the Western Hemisphere has taken
place not in Venezuela, but rather in its neighbor
Colombia, where a brutally repressive right-wing
government, backed to the hilt by Washington, has
waged a decades-long internal war against leftist
insurgent groups. Millions of Colombians have been
displaced because of this US-backed war, which is
still ongoing.
Colombia’s war was aggravated and prolonged by
the US government’s notorious Plan Colombia, which
scholar
Greg Grandin has blamed for “catastrophic
violence on the country, resulting in a mountain of
corpses and millions of displaced civilians.”
Ironically, millions of these displaced
Colombians were welcomed in Venezuela. (This
reporter interviewed a Venezuelan national of
Colombian descent who was born next door but has
lived most of her life in the impoverished Caracas
barrio of Petare, and who
staunchly supports Venezuela’s leftist movement.)
While fueling Colombia’s migration crisis,
Washington has sought to sabotage its internal peace
process, backing the hard-line, far-right President
Iván Duque in his fanatical opposition to the peace
accord negotiated by his predecessor, Juan Manuel
Santos.
At every level, the US government has tried to
destabilize and overthrow Venezuela’s democratically
elected leftist government, blaming the horrid
consequences of its aggressive policies on Caracas
itself.
USAID has served the spearhead of its hybrid war
on Venezuela. As the Trump administration pours
money into the regime-change machine, citizens at
home are suffering from another kind of sanctions,
facing painful immiseration and growing economic
hardship as it slashes their already meager social
welfare programs.
Ben Norton is a journalist, writer, and
filmmaker. He is the assistant editor of The
Grayzone, and the producer of the
Moderate
Rebels podcast, which he co-hosts with editor
Max Blumenthal. His website is
BenNorton.com and
he tweets at @BenjaminNorton.
This article was originally published by "The
Gray Zone" -
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