The CIA conduit: National Endowment for Democracy - EXPORTING non-DEMOCRACY

Americans have fair reason to be wary of the National Endowment for Democracy. After all, this is a private nongovernmental organization, dedicated to the promotion of democracy abroad, that receives nearly all its funding from Congress yet wants to be seen as independent of the federal government.

Recent disclosures about endowment grantees becoming entangled with shady characters in Haiti who were involved in the 2004 coup against then-President Jean-Bertrand Aristide suggest it is all too easy for such nongovernmental foundations to act at cross purposes with United States foreign policy or in conflict with American ideals. As reported recently in The New York Times, a right-wing adventurer in the International Republican Institute one of the four core grantees of the National Endowment for Democracy schemed with drug dealers and death-squad thugs to topple Aristide. Since the adventurer had backing from highly placed conservatives in the Bush administration, it is not certain his actions ran counter to administration policy. The US ambassador to Haiti at the time thought they did, and so did then-Secretary of State Colin Powell. It can happen, however, that the government has one presentable official policy for a country such as Haiti and another, covert policy that might be too incompatible with democratic mores to be acknowledged.

Whether or not the Haiti misadventures of one right-winger contradicted US foreign policy, the episode does raise justified questions about the larger mission of the National Endowment for Democracy and about the behavior of its four core grantees. Besides the International Republican Institute, these are the National Democratic Institute for International Affairs, the American Center for International Labor Solidarity, which is affiliated with the AFL-CIO, and the Center for International Private Enterprise, a pro-business organization connected to the US Chamber of Commerce.

These four foundations are meant to demonstrate a bipartisan political symmetry and to balance business interests against those of organized labor. No matter how much leeway each grantee might have to concentrate on projects abroad that it finds congenial, they are all expected to avoid choosing sides in foreign elections. They certainly are not supposed to be involved in the overthrow of elected governments, no matter how corrupt or unsavory those governments might be.

The National Endowment for Democracy has been criticized from the left largely because its grantees seemed to step over this line not only in supporting a coup against Aristide in Haiti, but in allegedly collaborating with groups that staged a short-lived coup in 2002 against President Hugo Chavez of Venezuela. At the time of the Venezuelan coup, the president of the International Republican Institute issued a revelatory statement, saying, "Last night, led by every sector of civil society, the Venezuelan people rose up to defend democracy in their country."

This was precisely the sort of partisan meddling in another country's politics that the foundations funded by the National Endowment for Democracy cannot be allowed to practice. Not only did it make the International Republican Institute look as though it were cheering defiance of democratic values rather than helping strengthen democratic institutions, but it implicitly told skeptics around the world that the Endowment's grantees were performing the same dirty work the clandestine arm of the CIA once did.

To his credit, the Endowment's president, Carl Gershman, wrote a letter to the institute leader chastizing him for interfering in "the sensitive politics of Venezuela" and making it "more difficult for the IRI to work in Venezuela and the region as a whole." True as this criticism was, it was a polite understatement.

There is a historical background to the Venezuelan coup that affects the way any US interference in the countries of Latin America is perceived "in the region as a whole." Endowment foundations were accused of partisan and selective backing of Nicaraguan opponents of the Sandinista Front leading up to the 1990 election that the Sandinistas lost. And Endowment grantees looked like vindictive partisans when they backed the opposition to former Costa Rican President Oscar Arias, the Nobel Peace Prize winner who offended conservatives in the Reagan administration by dissenting from US sponsorship of the Nicaraguan contras.

It is a shame that the democracy-building mission of the Endowment has been undermined in these and other instances, all the more so because its core foundations do valuable work in many parts of the world. The National Democratic Institute, for example, has provided training and support for democratic and refugee groups under undemocratic regimes such as those in Burma and Cambodia. In the newly established democracies of East Timor and Afghanistan, the institute works with civic and political leaders to help develop representative institutions, encourage grassroots citizen participation in politics, and aid political parties to forge a code of conduct for elections.

The National Endowment for Democracy has earned a reputation for being more effective and more accountable than government departments that do overlapping work. There is nothing wrong with the purpose and mission of the Endowment. And there is a lot right with the work it does in some of the most blighted parts of the world.

To preserve its role in helping build the civil society foundations of democracy in those places, the Endowment must root out any recipient of funds that acts to thwart the democratic movements and values the Endowment was meant to cultivate.