American media, public intellectuals and government officials have failed to present an accurate assessment of the threat that revolutionary leftist organizations that have declared their allegiance to foreign governments pose to the U.S. Constitution. The political unrest and media polarization which has accelerated over the past decade is not an organic response to grievances. It is the product of a twenty year-long strategy developed by anarchists, communists and secessionists in collaboration with foreign government actors. At present we are in year ten of a large-scale, clandestine effort involving tens of thousands of American to subvert and eventually annul the Constitution and replace it with one aligned with the U.N.’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
To differentiate this particular historical effort from past political projects, Socialism should no longer be used to describe this movement of movements – instead we should say that American values and political systems are under siege from the political wing of criminal CastroChavista networks.
What is American CastroChavismo?
CastroChavismo is a repertoire of rhetorical schemes, organizational tactics, and criminal activities ranging from harassment, extortion, the trafficking of narcotics, and assassination to obtain and then maintain political power. American CastroChavismo refers to the political groups on the receiving end of the efforts of the Cuban Communist Party, the United Socialist Party of Venezuela and their allies to transfer this repertoire for the purpose of beginning a “People’s Insurgency”. American CastroChavismo groups have received political training in ALBA-TCP member states or received it from members of those countries in the United States, or were recruited into collaborating with the “red de redes” (network of networks) linked to the World Social Forum developed through the efforts of former president of Venezuela president Hugo Chavez, former president of Cuba Fidel Castro, and former commander of the FARC Alfonso Cano.
Over the past two years I’ve investigated Venezuelan activities in the United States in connection to a grant financed by the Social Science Research Council. My goal was to discover where within Facebook’s Condor Dataset I would be the most likely to find coordinated inauthentic behavior and disinformation operations. My quest to answer this research question began with my examination of Foreign Agent Registration Act documents submitted to the U.S. Department of Justice by Venezuelan government contractors, official reports and proposals published by Cuba, Ecuador and the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela as well as their Ministries of Popular Power. I read statements made by officials, the journals of the FARC-EP, Resistencia, and the ELN, Insurrección, along with numerous other open source documents. What I read soon led me to start examining a large body of publications produced by social movements linked to the World Social Forum, as well as academic papers about these groups. After I organized all the facts into chronological order and developed a relational database which contains the names, dates, locations and activities of thousands of encounters between U.S. politicians, grassroots activists and, Cuban and Venezuelan government officials or their proxies a story emerge which I share below in the form of a montage.
Antifa Born in Havana and Raised in the United States
The lead-up to the U.S. invasion of Iraq set the stage for the development of American CastroChavismo. After a proposal in the Sao Paulo Forum was seconded by the European Social Forum, political bodies that facilitate coordination amongst social movements and Socialist parties, a day of coordinated protests was decided. On February 15th, 2003, in some 800 cities across the world people marched in opposition to the then imminent invasion of Iraq. The event didn’t dissuade George W. Bush, but did provide an indication of the numerical size and magnitude of American’s discontent with their government, and it did result in numerous attendees providing their contact information to a variety of groups that would soon use it as a means of organizational recruitment. On April 12, 2003, three weeks after March 19th, 2003 invasion was underway, a call was made for the formation of a new Anti-Fascist Internationale in Granma, the newspaper of the Cuban Communist Party.
Following this announcement FARA documents, movement publications and journalistic accounts show that Cuba and Venezuela began an effort at building relationships with grassroots U.S. radical political activists – much as Cuba did with armed revolutionary groups in Latin America immediately following Castro’s seizure of power – as well as Democratic Party officials in the Black Congressional Caucus and the Progressive Caucus.
In October 2003 the CastroChavista Network in Defense of Humanity was formed. In their self-published magazine is an extensive speech by Hugo Chavez which describes the necessity for informational warfare to be waged against the U.S. Reading it one also learns that the goals of this group is to promote anti-American publications through academic support networks. One of the renowned public intellectuals which signed onto this document is Howard Zinn and one of the groups that would later thank this network for their work is the FARC-EP.
On September 5th, 2005 the Common Grounds Collective was founded. The People’s Hurricane Relief Fund was one of the groups that received money from Citgo and became a means by which Venezuelan ambassadors and Communist activists could organize meetings. On a pirate radio station, anarchist activist and later Antifa organizer Scott Crow would “describe Common Ground as “a paramilitary organization.” One of the organization’s founders, Brandon Darby, would later claim that while on a trip to Venezuela government officials sought to introduce him to the FARC. In June of 2005 700 U.S. activists – including members of the Young Communist League, Socialist Workers Party, and Project South – fly to Caracas, Venezuela to attend training at the World Youth Festival – a network which the U.S. government previously categorized as a Communist Front Organization.
The August 2005 FARA Reporting log for the Venezuela Information Office (VIO) shows that the VIO called numerous U.S. activist groups to encourage them to participate in a Social Forum in Boston and emphasized that Venezuelan government officials would be in attendance. Those contacted – all of whom would attend the March 6th to the 9th 2006 conference – included the Democratic Socialists of America, the Communist Party of the United States and the regional director of ACORN (the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now. In the October 27th, 2005 edition of the newspaper for the Workers World Party – a revolutionary Marxist organization – they announced a Cuban/Venezuelan/American Labor Conference to be held in Tijuana, Mexico from December 9th to the 11th that they are helping organize. On December 20th, 2005 CITGO – under the direction of Hugo Chavez – launched an oil heating program. A large part of it would go to indigenous tribes – that some say swung the 2020 Presidential election in Arizona to Joe Biden – and community activist groups. By the time the program was suspended in 2014, it had given almost 500 million dollars worth of oil.
During the World Social Forum held January 24th – 29th in Caracas, it’s decided that a United States Social Forum will be held in 2007. A Border Forum held October 13th – 15th, in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico helps to prepare for it. Throughout 2006 – and for many years after – Venezuelan ambassadors Bernardo Alvarez Herrera, Martin Sanchez, Omar Sierra as well as labor attache’s such as Marcos Garcia and others attended socialist conferences, political assemblies of secessionist groups, forums with Communist unions and took meetings with aldermen and representatives from the Black Congressional Congress to advertise the success of the “Venezuela model” of politics, to develop sister cities programs. One of the politicians who strikes a deal with the PSUV-led CITGO is Senator Bernie Sanders.
June 27th to July 1st of 2007 the first national United States Social Forum was held in Atlanta and it brought together over 20,000 activists. This is, arguably, the most important event for the American Communist movement in over a century. While a delegation of Cubans are not given visas to to attend, numerous Castroist groups ensures their geopolitical interests are voiced and Venezuelan ambassadors socialize and sit it on the strategy meetings. Young Democratic Socialists of American member and future founder of Jacobin Bhaskar Sunkara are on a panel with a government official. Outside the U.S. – in Nairobi, Kenya – the World Social Forum there will soon lead to an impact on U.S. politics. Julian Assange will attend and find himself so impressed by the Kenyan Communist Party – which is allied to Hugo Chavez – that he stays there two years in an effort to contribute to ensure that Another World is Possible. When threatened with jail another Chavez ally, Ecuadorian president Rafael Correa, will help him avoid arrest.
May 30-June 1 of 2008 at the Sonja Haynes Stone Black Culture and History Center in Chapel Hill, North Carolina over 70 people from 17 states and 20 cities got together to launch the Black Left Unity Network – an organization that is avowedly Chavista, has participated in the Social Forum, and will go on to advocate on the Black Lives Matter Platform.
In 2009 former Vice President of the Republic of New Afrika, a black secessionist movement, Chokwe Lumumba, ran to be on the City Council of Jackson, Mississippi. He forms a People’s Movement Assembly in Jackson, Mississippi prior to his run and uses the connections made from his work as President of the Coordinating Committee for the Venezuelan government sponsored People’s Hurricane Relief and Oversight to obtain fuel and lightbulbs via the Citizens Energy program. He wins, and later becomes the Mayor despite concerns that much of his campaign was paid for by outside money.
From June 22-26, 2010 in Detroit, Michigan another United States Social Forum was held. Venezuelan ambassadors are in attendance, as are two of the founders of Black Lives Matter – Alicia Garza and Patrisse Cullors. During the event marches are held in order to free Simón Trinidad, a high-ranking member of the FARC-EP, and at the end of the event a National Social Movement Agenda is set across 13 fronts of struggle with a twenty year-long strategy for achieving it.
In July, 2010 the CastroChavista “Union Meeting for Our America” network hosted a number of U.S. based unions. Several chapters of the American Federation of Teachers, United Auto Workers and the SEIU as well the representatives for UNITE Here, Union del Barrio and the Union of California Faculty sign the Caracas Declaration.
In 2011 New York, Occupy Wall Street was launched primarily from the efforts of activists linked to the Right to the City Movement – which emerged from the Social Forum network – and Communist Parties. In Venezuela, at the International Meeting for Revolutionary Transformations a new network called the Afro-descendant Regional Articulation of Latin America and the Caribbean (ARAAC) is formed. Several years later, on November 7th, 2018 in Boston, the U.S. chapter cofounder of this CastroChavista organization Yvette Lepolata thank Democratic Socialists of America Congresswoman Ayanna Pressley for work done on their behalf will later host multiple events with it’s Venezuelan founder and ambassador to the U.S. Jesus “Chucho” Garcia.
On May 19th, 2012 over 300 anti-imperialist and progressive community activists from across the US gathered at the Centro Autonomo in Chicago to launch the International League of People’s Struggle, an umbrella group of activists linked to foreign Communist parties. Jesús Rodríguez-Espinoza, a Venezuelan Ambassador, addressed this founding assembly whose chair and spokesperson is Jose Maria Sison, a Communist in the Philippines.
August 22nd, 2015 at North Carolina Central University Venezuela ambassador Jesus “Chucho” Garcia gives an interview wherein he claims that UNESCO’s Afro-Descendant Decade was developed a result of agitation by Venezuelan and Cuban Communists, and that their goal is to use this effort to promote the same nexus of movements which brought Hugo Chavez and Nicolas Maduro into power: Afro-Indigenous Socialism. In We Are the Ones We Have Been Waiting for: Pan-African Consciousness Raising and Organizing in the United States and Venezuela the doctoral thesis of NCCU alumni Layla Brown-Vincent, describes “Chucho” giving similar speeches going back to the mid 2000s and meeting with groups such as Black Workers for Justice, the All African People’s Revolutionary Party, Cooperation Jackson and other revolutionary Black nationalist groups.
The 2nd annual Sao Paulo Forum held June, 17th 2017 at the St. Stephen & the Incarnation Episcopal Church in Washington D.C., the Democratic Socialists of America, the Communist Party, Black Lives Matter, SEIU, and other groups long associated with the Forum meet with the representatives of the Venezuelan, Nicaraguan and Bolivian governments. Four months later, September 16th and 17th Venezuelan Ambassador Carlos Ron, several Venezuelan media contractors, and other Social Forum Leaders along with around five hundred people attended the inaugural People’s Congress of Resistance.
In 2017 the CastroChavista World Social Forum on Migrations hosted U.S. based groups such as Alianza Americas and Casa de Maryland – the latter of which had previously received $1.5 million dollars from Hugo Chavez. Despite the availability of extensive open source information like that listed which above shows the connection between Social Forum events, Cuba and Venezuela – President Donald Trump and Vice President Mike Pence are summarily dismissed in the mainstream press as conspiracy mongers when they declare that Nicolas Maduro and domestic Leftist groups are supporting the Migrant Caravan.
Though CastroChavista political networks in the United States continue to impact politics into the present, and to an extent far greater than what the above montage of activities demonstrate, I’m stopping here because this last entry and everything leading up to it allows for three important conclusions to be deduced.
The first deduction to be derived from the above account is that political ads, posts by bots on social media and fake news are not as significant assessing the impact of foreign influence in domestic U.S. politics as the creation, funding and management of fifth columns. Such an evaluation is all the more so true considering that the infiltration and organizing within social media companies of radicals aligned to the forum as well as former Venezuelan ambassadors with links to revolutionary movements like, Martin Sanchez, who has a position of power over what Facebook users are presented with in their feed, means that indicators such as “number of posts shared or viewed” aren’t necessarily valid.
The second is that the mainstream journalism’s unwillingness to rigorously investigate the activities of American social movements, niche political parties and radical unions have made Americans ignorant to the significant network effects of their convergence, alliance and collaboration with the governments of Cuba, Venezuela and others in the new Anti-Fascist, i.e. Communist, Internationale.
Lastly, recognizing that American CastroChavismo is a continental project means that it must be understood in relation to its siblings in South America, Central America and the Caribbean. Because of this it’s important to understand at the same time that political activists who would later become the leaders of loosely affiliated network organizations such as Antifa and Black Lives Matter were meeting with Venezuelan ambassadors, the FARC-EP was beginning to shape the trans-national political activist organization which would later become the Bolivarian Continental Movement. The relationship between this funded-by-kidnapping-and-narco-trafficking, armed Marxist insurgency’s efforts at exploiting social movements in their favor and Venezuela is made clear in a November 24, 2004 letter by Raúl Reyes, the FARC’s second-in-command, to another member of the FARC General Secretariat. In this document discovered following the capture of Reyes’ computer in Ecuador, it’s now known that Fort Tiuna, the main government military and intelligence center in Venezuela, is where the Bolivarian Continental Movement is headquartered. Unless citizens want to see the rhetorical schemes, organizational tactics, criminal activities, and armed insurgencies that have led so many to flee their homelands, we must be vigilant against all of the toxic and foreign effects of American CastroChavismo.
The Limits of Activity Based Intelligence Development
Only so much information can be gathered from open source materials on American CastroChavismo. Contracts and pacts made in private can only be included if those involved divulge details. While the facts listed above and those not included tell a compelling story of American subversion, the fact patterns which emerge from this process presents a worrisome constellation that speaks to the hidden core of the contemporary condition of American politics.
Some questions able to be formulated are simple and speculative, but still sensible guides that ought to justify law enforcement inquiries. For example:
Is it rational to assume that Nicolas Maduro – who has the means, motive, and opportunity to subvert the U.S. constitutional order; who leads a party whose goals include the subversion of the United States; that has been indicted with other members of his administration on criminal charges; and that has at his disposal a network of actors sympathetic to his cause – is engaged in additional illegal activities through these associations?
Some of the questions are more complex and relate to legal matters.
Given six members of the National Lawyers Guild were invited to participate in a meeting with Venezuelan Embassy Staff on the 15th May, 2006; the organization’s participation in the various Social Forums; their July 4-16, 2015 travel to Venezuela for the purposes of expressing Solidarity, and their prior designation as a Communist Party front group – is it appropriate to consider their support of those engaged in rioting following the death of George Floyd as being activities engaged in on behalf of a foreign government? Isn’t this illegal, and worth an investigation by law enforcement?
In light of the fact that the SEIU has been involved in Cuban and Venezuelan solidarity activities and the Social Forum process since its founding; has had their leadership receive awards from Nicolas Maduro; is – according to Jaime Contreras – an organization with a membership composition that is 60% immigrant; and that Nicolas Maduro pays those that protest in Venezuela on his behalf would it not be likely that there is some sort of ongoing financial remuneration occurring via proxies – a typical CastroChavista tactic – to encourage SEIU members (and other groups like it) to direct wages to political efforts? Isn’t this illegal, and worth an investigation by law enforcement?
These aren’t questions that I am equipped to answer.
And yet they and others like it need to be posed to the myriad individuals and groups not listed above and resolved publicly no matter how socially or professionally uncomfortable they are. The gravity of the consequences of uncontested American CastroChavismo is too consequential.
It’s not hyperbolic for a risk assessment of American CastroChavismo to claim that the subversion of the United States Constitution and the forfeiture of national sovereignty they agitate for means that authoritarian Socialism is on the horizon.
The Size and Significance of American CastroChavismo
Since Cuba’s announcement of the formation of an Antifascist International and Venezuela’s cultivation of clandestine communist groups and social movements in the U.S numerous cities have adopted significant policies in contravention to the United States Constitution. Sanctuary Cities have proliferated, in San Francisco ex-Venezuelan government translator turned District Attorney Chesa Boudin has effectively legalized many crimes and Democratic Party mayors and governors that for the moment benefit from these groups political capabilities have also shirked their duties and integrity in anticipation of political gain. Many of the groups and events linked to the CastroChavista Social Forum have gotten extensive media coverage – Black Lives Matter, Antifa, the Standing Rock Protest Swarms, the Democratic Socialists of America – and yet the twenty-year long strategy we are now a decade into has remained hidden.
At the date of publication of this article Universidad Pontificia Bolivariana’s research for the Social Science Research Council has enabled us to identify several political parties and over two hundred social movements and NGOs aligned with the CastroChavismo. Because we do not include the Islamist groups that CastroChavistas frequently collaborate with, a reflection of the Venezuelan alliance with Iran, Hezzbollah and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, nor Chinese groups – this number should be understood to be on the low end.
We’ve identified thirty-eight English language media organizations that qualify as disseminators of CastroChavista propaganda. Because we do not include all of the companies that have hired journalists and commentators whose media contributions can be categorized as CastroChavista, this number should also be understood to be on the low end.
The rhetorical tropes and ideologically imbued narratives of these groups legitimize and valorize anti-Constitutional subversion and the normalization of criminal and unethical activities. Normalizing harassment, extortion, sabotage, hacking, politically motivated non-enforcement of crimes and similar activities are the precursors for an armed domestic insurgency. This is the very definition of irregular warfare.
Boaventura de Sousa Santos, a Distinguished Legal Scholar at the University of Wisconsin-Madison describes the variety of struggles that converge at the Social Forum events as follows in his article “A Left Of The Future: The World Social Forum And Beyond”: “The social struggles that find expression in the World Social Forum… are extremely diverse and appear spread out in a continuum between the poles of institutionalism and insurgency. Even the concept of non-violence is open to widely disparate interpretations.”
American CastroChavismo, in other words, is neither separated by a geographical border nor an ideological one: it is an effort at normalizing guerilla politics and corruption so that power can be taken from the citizen and wielded by the dictator that deems themself enlightened. Venezuela Matters because of their efforts to develop guerilla politics within our borders, which as of yet has not the same success as it has had elsewhere.
***
Ariel Sheen is an Investigator and Project Manager for a Social Science Research Council grant examining Venezuela’s political and media operations in the United States in partnership with Harvard University and Facebook via Social Science One. He is a doctoral student in the Technology and Innovation Management program at Universidad Pontificia Bolivariana in Medellín, a Colombian national scholarship recipient and was awarded a Don Lavoie Fellowship at George Mason University. He received his Master’s degree in Experimental Humanities & Social Engagement from New York University and is the translator of Bolivarians Speak: Documents from the PCC, PSUV, FARC-EP & Allies Irregular War Against the United States and Guerrilla Girls Like FARC Poetry: Selected Poems of Jesús Santrich. He has also worked as a communications and digital media strategist, data scientist, and business intelligence consultant.