Likely U.S. Plans for Regime Change in Venezuela, Pt. II

Ever since the National Security Act of 1947 established the Central Intelligence Agency, the CIA has engaged in activities far beyond information collection and analysis. It has been involved many times in covert efforts to achieve U.S. foreign policy goals, inlcuding regime change in nations whose leaders were not subservient to U.S. interests.

Beginning in 1953, CIA operative Kermit Roosevelt, grandson of Theodore Roosevelt and cousin of Franklin, successfully engineered a coup against Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadeq of Iran after he nationalized the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company following a dispute about revenue sharing. The CIA then helped execute another coup, ousting President Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala in 1954 because of his modest land reform program and labor reforms the well-connected United Fruit Company, which operated out of the country, opposed. Since then, this agency has had a long and tainted record of helping to destabilize and topple those governments the U.S. wishes to replace. Much of that has occurred in Latin America, most often by coup or assassination often disguised as an "accident" (like an "unfortunate" plane crash).

Investigative journalist and author Eva Golinger has uncovered CIA documents, obtained through Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests, that exposes U.S. involvement in the two-day April 2002 coup which temporarily ousted President Chavez. It involved CIA complicity and an intricate financing scheme beginning in 2001 involving the quasi-governmental agency National Endowment for Democracy (NED), funded entirely by the Congress, and the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). These agencies, in turn, provided funding to Chavez opposition groups (USAID through its Office of Transition Initiatives -OTI) which, in turn, were involved in staging the mass and violent street protests leading up to and on the day of the coup. NED and USAID also funded other destabilizing activities such as the crippling oil strike in late 2002 and 2003 and the August 2004 recall referendum that failed to unseat the President. The documents Golinger obtained clearly showed the U.S. State Department, National Security Agency and White House had full knowledge of these activities and must have approved of them.

READ MORE