Category: Cuba

Notes on The Threat Closer to Home: Hugo Chavez and the War Against America

Michael Rowan is the author of The Threat Closer to Home: Hugo Chavez and the War Against America and is a political consultant for U.S. and Latin American leaders. He has advised former Bolivian president Jaime Paz Zamora and Costa Rican president Oscar Arias. Mr. Rowan has also counseled winning Democratic candidates in 30 U.S. states. He is a former president of the International Association of Political Consultants.

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Hugo Chavez, the president of Venezuela, is a much more dangerous individuals than the famously elusive leader of al-Quaeda. He has made the United States his sworn enemy, and the sad truth is that few people are really listening.

“I’m still a subversive,” Chavez has admitted. “I think the entire world should be subverted.”

 

Hugo Chavez to Jan James of the Associated Press, September 23, 2007

 

 

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One cannot discount how much Castro’s aura has shaped Chavez’s thoughts and actions.

 

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There are many who harbor bad intentions towards the United States, but only a few who possess the capability to do anything about it. Chavez is one of these few because:

 

His de facto dictatorship gives him absolute control over Venezuela’s military, oil production, and treasury.

He harbors oil reserves second only to those of Saudi Arabia; Venezuela’s annual windfall profits exceed the net worth of Bill Gates.

He has a strategic military and oil alliance with a major American foe and terrorism sponsor, the Islamic Republic of Iran

He has more soldiers on active and reserve duty and more modern weapons – mostly from Russia and China – than any other nation in Latin America

Fulfilling Castro’s dream, he has funded a Communist insurgency against the United States, effectively annexing Bolivia, Nicaragua, Dominica, and Ecuador as surrogate states, and is developing cells in dozens of countries to create new fronts in this struggle.

He is allied with the narcotics-financed guerrillas against the government of Colombia, which the United States supports in its war against drug trafficking

He has numerous assocaiions with terorrists, money launderers, kidnappers, and drug traffickers.

He has more hard assets (the Citgo oil company) and soft assets (Hollywood stars, politicians, lobbyists, and media connections) than any other foreign power.

 

 

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Chavez longs for the ear when there will be no liberal international order to constrain his dream of a worldwide “socialist” revolution: no World Bank, no International Monetary Fund, no Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, no World Trade Organization, no international law, not economic necessity for modernization and globalilzation. And perhaps more important, he longs for the day when the United States no longer policies the world’s playing fields. Chavez has spent more than $100 billion trying to minimize the impact of each international institution on Latin America. He is clearly opposed to international cooperation that does not endorse the Cuba-Venezuela government philosophy.

 

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According to reports from among its 2,400 former members, the FARC resembles a mafia crime gang more than a Communist guerrilla army, but Chavez disagrees, calling the FARC, “insurgent forces that have a political project.” They “are not terrorists, they are true armies… they must be recognized.”

 

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Chavez’s goal in life are to complete Simon Bolivar’s dream to united Latin America and Castro’s dream to communize it.

 

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Since he was elected, Chavez’s public relations machinery has spent close to a billion dollars in the United States to convince Americas that he alone is telling the true story.

 

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There are a number of influential Americans who have been attracted by Chavez’s money. These influde the 1996 Republican vice-presidential candidate Jack Kemp, who has repaed large dees trying to sell Chavez’s oil to the U.S. government; Tom Boggs, one of the most powerful lobbyists in Washington D.C.; Giuliani Partners, the lobbying arms of the former New York mayor and presidential hopeful (principal lobbyists for Chavez’s CITGO oil company in Texas); former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney’s Bain Associates, which prospered by handling Chavez’s oil and bond interests; and Joseph P. Kennedy II of Massachusetts, who advertises Chavez’s oil discounts to low-income Americans, a program that reaches more than a million American families (Kennedy and Chavez cast this program as nonpolitical philanthropy).

 

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Chavez’s schoolteacher parents could not afford to raise all of their six children at home, so the two older boys, Adan and Hugo, were sent to live with their grandmother, Rosa Ines. Several distinguished Chavez-watchers, including Alvaro Vargas Llosa, have theorized that his being locked in cloastes at home and then sent away by his parents to grow up elsewhere constituted a seminal rejection that gave rise to what Vargas Llosa called Chavez’s “messianic inferiority complex” – his overarching yearning to be loved and his irrepressible need to act out.

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Chavez began living the life of a Communist double agent. “During the day I’m a career military officer who does his job,” he told his lover Herma Marksman, “but at night I work on achieving the transformations this country needs.” His nights were filled with secret meetings of Communist subversives and co-conspirators, often in disguises, planning the armed overthrow of the government.

 

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In 1979, he was transferred to Caracas to teach at his former military academic. It was the perfect perch from which to build a network of officers sympathetic to his revolutionary cause.

Chavez also expanded the circle of his ideological mentors. By far the most important of these was Douglas Bravo, an unreconstructed communist who disobeyed Moscow’s orders after détente to give up the armed struggle against the United States. Bravo was the leader of the Party of the Venezuelan Revolution (PVR) and the Armed Forces of National Liberation. Chavez actively recruited his military friends to the PVR, couching it in the rhetoric of Bolivarianism to make it more palatable to their sensibilities.

 

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From 1981 to 1984, a determined Chavez began secretly converting his students at the military academy to co-conspirators; ironically his day job was to teach Venezuelan military history with an emphasis on promoting military professionalism and noninvolvement in politics.

 

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Chavez emerged from jail in 1994 a hero to Venezuela’s poor. He had also, while imprisoned, assiduously courted the international left, who helped him build an impressive war-chest – including, it was recently revealed, $150,000 from the FARC guerrillas of Colombia.

 

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John Maisto, the US ambassador to Venezuela, at one point called Chavez a “terrorist” because of his coup attempt and denied him a visa to visit the United States. In reply, Chavez mocked Maisto by taking his Visa credit card from his wallet and waiving it about, saying, “I already have a Visa!”

 

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Corruption made a good campaign issue for Chavez, but when it came time to do something about it, he balked. Chavez initially appointed Jesus Urdaneta – one of the four saman tree oath takers – as anticorruption czar. But Urdaneta was too energetic and effective for the President, within five months he had identified forty cases of corruption within Chavez’s own administration. Chavez refused to back his czar, who was eventually pushed out of office by the very people he was investigating. Chavez did nothing to save him.

 

In 1999 Chavez started a give-away project called “Plan Bolivar 2000.” Implemented by Chavez loyalists organized in groups known as Bolivarian Circles, the project was modeled after the Communist bloc committees in Castro’s Cuba The plan was basically a social welfare program that mirrored the populist ethic…. In eighteen months, Bolivar 2000 had become so corrupt that it had to be disbanded.

 

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Independent studies estimate that the amounts taken from Venezuelan poverty and development funds by middlemen, brokers, and subcontractors – all of whom charge an “administrative” cost for passing on the funds – range as high as 80 percent to 90 percent. By contrast, the U.S. government, the World Bank, nongovernmental organizations, and international charities limit their administrative costs to 20 percent of project funds; the Nobal Peace Prize winning Doctors without Borders, for example, spends only 16 percent on administration.

 

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Between 1999 and 2009, Chavez has spent some 20,000 hours on television.

 

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Hugo Chavez is implementing a sophisticated oil war against the United Sates. To understand this you have to look back to 1999, when he asked the Venezuelan Congress for emergency executive powers and got them, whereupon he consolidated government power to his advantage. His big move was to take full control over the national oil company PDVSA. Chavez replaced PDVSA’s directors and managers with military or political loyalists, many of whom knew little to nothing about the oil business. This action rankled the company’s professional and technical employees – some 50,000 of them – who enjoyed the only true meritocracy in the country. Citgo…. Later received similar treatment.

 

Chavez in effect demodernized and de-Americanized PDVAS, which had adopted organizational efficiency cultures similar to its predecessors ExxonMobil and Shell, by claiming that they were ideologically incorrect. Chavez compared this to Haiti’s elimination of French culture under Toussain L’Ouverture in the early 1800s.

 

The president’s effort to dumb down the business was evident early on. In 1999 Chavez fired Science Applications International Corporations (Known as SAIC), an enormous U.S.-based global information technology firm that had served as PDVSA’s back office since 1995 (as it had for British Petroleum and other energy companies).

 

SAIC appealed to an international court and got a judgement against Chavez for stealing SAIC’s knowledge without compensation. Chavez ignored the judgement, refusing to pay “one penny”.

 

Stripped of SAIC technology and thousands of oil professionals who quit out of frustration, PDVSA steadily lost operational capacity from 1999 to 2001. Well maintenance suffered; production investment was slashed, oil productivity declined; environmental standards were ignored; and safety accidents proliferated. After the 2002 stroke that led to Chavez’s brief removal from power, PDVSA sacked some 18,000 more of it’s knowledge workers. Its production fell to 2.4 million barrels per day.

 

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After Venezuela’s 2006 presidential election, Chavez…told three American oil companies – ExxonMobil, ConocoPhillips, and Chevron – to turn over 60 percent of their heavy oil exploration [which they had spent a decade and nearly $20 billion developing] or leave Venezuela.

 

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Oil has caused a massive shift in the wealth of nations. All told, $12 trillion has been transferred from the oil consumers to the oil producers since 2002. This is a very large figure – it is comparable to the 2006 GDP of the United States – and it has contributed greatly to our unprecedented trade deficit; a weakening of the dollar; and the weakness of the U.S. financial system in surviving the housing mortgage crisis.

 

Two decades ago, private companies controlled half the world’s oil reserved, but today they only control 13 percent… While many Americans believe that big oil is behind the high prices at the gas pump, the fact is that the national oil companies controlled by Chavez of Venezuela, Ahmadinejad of Iran, and Putin of Russia are the real culprits.

 

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When Chavez’s plane first landed in Havana in 1994, Fidel Castro greeted him at the airport. What made Hugo Chavez important to Castro then was the same thing that makes him important to the United States now: oil. Castro’s plan to weaken America – which he had to shelve when the Soviet Union collapsed and Cuba lost its USSR oil and financial subsidy – was dusted off.

The Chavez Castro condominium was a two-way street. Chavez soon began delivering from 50,000 to 90,000 barrels of oil per day to Castro, a subsidy eventually worth $3 billion to $4 billion per year, which far exceeded the sugar subsidy Castro once received from the Soviet Union until Gorbachev ended it around 1980. Castro used the huge infusion of Chavez’s cash to solidify his absolute control in Cuba and to crack down on political dissidents.

 

 

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Chavez’s predatory, undemocratic, and destabilizing actions are not limited to Venezuela.

 

Chavez is striving to remake Latin America in his own image, and for his own purposes – purposes that mirror Fidel Castro’s half-aborted but never abandoned plans for hemispheric revolution hatched half a decade ago.

 

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Hugo Chavez sees himself as leading the revolutionary charge that Fidel Castro always wanted to mount but was never able to spread beyond the shores of the island prison he created in the Caribbean. Ye four decades after taking power, Castro found a surrogate, a right arm who could carry on the work that he could not.

 

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[Chavez] routinely uses oil to bribe Latin American states into lining up against the United States, either by subsidizing oil in the surrogate state or by using oil to interfere in other countries’ elections.

 

For instance, in 1999 Chavez created Petrocaribe, a company that provides oil discounts with delayed payments to thirteen Caribbean nations. It was so successful at fulfilling it’s real purpose – buying influence and loyalty – that two years later Chavez created PetroSur, which does the same for twenty Central and South American nations, at an annual cost to Venezuela’s treasury of an estimated $1 billion.

 

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From 2005 to 2007 alone, Chavez gave away a total of $39 billion in oil and cash; $9.9 billion to Argentina, $7.5 billion to Cuba, $4.9 billion to Ecuador, and $4.9 billion from Nicaragua were the largest sums Chavez gave…

 

At a time when U.S. influence is waning – in part owing to Washington’s preoccupation with Iraq and the Middle East – Chavez has filled the void. The United States provides less than $1 billion in foreign economic aid to the entire region, a figure that rises to only $1.6 billion in foreign economic aid to the entire region… Chavez, meanwhile, spends nearly $9 billion in the region every single year. And his money is always welcome because it comes with no strings. The World Bank and IMF, by contrast, require concomitant reforms – for instance, efforts to fight corruption, drug trafficking, and money laundering – in return for grants and loans.

Consequently, over the course of a handful of years, virtually all the Latin American countries have wound up dependent on Venezuela’s oil or money or both. These include not just resource-poor nations; in Latin America only Mexico and Peru are fully independent of Chavez’s money.

One consequence: at the Organization of American States (OAS), which serves as a mini-United Nations for Latin America, Venezuela has assumed the position of the “veto” vote that once belonged to the United States.

 

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Since Chavez has been president of Venezuela, the OAS has not passed on substantive resolution supported by the United States when Chavez was on the opposite side.

In all, since coming to power in 1999, Chavez has spent or committed an estimated $110 billion – some say twice the amount needed to eliminate poverty in Venezuela forever – in more than thirty countries to advance his anti-American agenda. Since 2005, Chavez’s total foreign aid budget for Latin America has been more than $50 billion – much more than the amount of U.S. foreign aid for the region over the same period.

Many of these expenditures have been hidden from the Venezuelan public in secret off-budget slush funds.The result is that Chavez now, by any measure, the most powerful figure in Latin America.

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During Morale’s first year in office, 2006, Chavez contributed a whopping $1 billion in aid to Bolivia (equivalent to 12 percent of the country’s GDP). He also provided access to one of Venezuela’s presidential jets, sent a forty-soldier personal guard to accompany Morales at all times, subsidized the pay of Bolivia’s military, and paid to send thousands of Cuban doctors to Bolivia’s barrio health clinics.

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After his political success in Bolivia, Chavez has aggressively supported every anti-American presidential candidate in the region. U.S. policymakers console themselves by claiming that Chavez’s favorites have mostly been defeated by pro-American centrists. The truth is more complex. Chavez came close to winning every one of those contests, and lost only when he overplayed his hand. More troubling, U.S. influence and prestige in Latin America is at perhaps its lowest ebb ever; today, being considered America’s ally is the political kiss of death.

 

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Since turning unabashedly criminal, the FARC has imported arms, exported drugs, recruited minors, kidnapped thousands for ransom, executed hostages, hijacked planes, planted land mines, operated an extortion and protection racket in peasant communities, committed atrocities against innocent civilians, and massacred farmers as traitors…

 

A long-held ambition of the FARC’s leadership is to have the group officially recognized as a belligerent force, a legitimate army in rebellion. Such a designation – conferred by individual nations and under international law – would give the FARC rights normally accorded only to sovereign powers.

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Uribe, a calm and soft-spoken attorney, set out methodologically to finish what Pastrana had begun.

 

To Chavez, any friend of the United States is his enemy, and any enemy of a friend of the United States is his friend – even a terrorist organization working to destabilize one of his country’s most important neighbors.

 

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The relationship [between Chavez and the FARC] began more than a decade and a half ago, in the wake of Chavez’s failed coup. In 1992, the FARC gave a jailed Chavez $150,000, money that launched him to the presidency.

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Perhaps the most sinister aspect to Chavez’s relationship with the FARC is the help he has provided to maximize its cocaine sales to the United States and Europe. British journalist John Carlin, who writes for The Guardian, a newspaper generally supportive of Chavez, secured interviews with several of the 2,400 FARC guerrillas who deserted the group in 2007. One of his subject told him that “the guerillas have a non-aggression pact with the Venezuelan military. The Venezuelan government lets FARC operate freely because they share the same left-wing, Bolivarian ideals, and because FARC bribes their people. Without cocaine revenues, the FARC would disappear, its former members assert. “If it were not for cocaine, the fuel that feeds the Colombian war, FARC would long ago have disbanded.”

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Iran and Venezuela are working together to drive up the price of oil in hopes of crippling the American economy and enhancing their hegemonies in the Middle East and Latin America. They are using their windfall petro-revenues to finance a simmering war – sometimes cold, sometimes hot, sometimes covert, sometimes overt – against the United States.

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As Chavez told Venezuelans repeatedly, Saddam’s fate was also what he feared for himself.

 

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Hugo Chavez’s first reaction after the attack on the camp of narcoterrorist Raul Reyes was to accuse Colombia of behaving like Israel. “We’re not going to allow an Israel in the region,” he said.

 

Actually the parallel is not far off. Like Colombia, Israel is a state that wishes to live in peace with its neighbors, but they insist on destroying it. Israel’s fondest wish would be for the Palestinians to be capable of building a peaceful and prosperous nation with which Israel could establish normal relations.

 

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American officials have also submitted some 130 written requests for basic biographical or immigration-related information, such as entry and exit dates into and out of Venezuela, for suspected terrorists. Not one of the requests has generated a substantive response.

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Michael Rowan talked about the book he co-wrote, The Threat Closer to Home: Hugo Chavez and the War Against America, on C-SPAN. Former U.S. Ambassador to Venezuela Otto Reich joined him to comment on the book. Ray Walser moderated. Discussion topics included the global geopolitical impact of Venezuela’s decreasing economic and personal freedoms and what the U.S. can do. Then both men responded to questions from members of the audience.

Notes from CastroChavism: Organized Crime in the Americas

CastroChavism: Organized Crime in the Americas by José Carlos Sánchez Berzaín, Bolivia’s former Minister of Defense and the author of XXI Century Dictatorship in Bolivia.

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[Venezuela and Bolivia] are dictatorships that reach[ed] power through elections and through successive coups that liquate democracy.

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The two Americas make up an axis of confrontation in which perpetual and arbitrary control of power, on the one handed, branded dictatorship with ideology as a pretext; versus democracy, with respect for human rights, alternation in power, accountability and free elections, declaratively protected by the inter-American system, enshrined – among others – in the inter-American democratic charter.

From 1959 to 1999, the Cuban dictatorship is “Castroism.” From 1999 onwards it is “Castrochavismo,” led by Hugo Chavez until his death.

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It began as progressive leftist populism, and was successively called ALBA Movement (Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America); the Bolivarian Movement; and after a few years Socialism of the 21st Century.

Castro receives a new source of financing for his conspiratorial and criminal actions with Chavez’s surrender not only of Venezuela’s money and oil but, as we have learned today, of the entire country. This allowed the dictator to reactivate genuine Castroism under the mantle of the Bolivarian Movement, or ALBA, and disguise it as democracy. With Venezuela’s money he started conspiracies, which led to the fall and overthrow of democratic leaders. The first one occurs in Argentina, with the fall of President De La Rua. The second happens in Ecuador and it is Jamil Mahuad who pays the proce. The Third one is the overthrow of President Gonzalo Sanches de Lozada in Bolivia. The fourth is in Ecuador, with the fall of President Lucio Gutierrez. They also overthrew the OAS Secretary General, Miguel Angel Rodriguez, who had just been elected. A false case of corruption was planted in Costa Rica, where Rodriguez ends up being illegally detained, making room for Insulsa to arrive.

The nascent CastroChavista organization expands with Lula da Silva taking power in Brazil with the Workers Party, whose government he used to strengthen the extraordinary flow of economic resources with transnational corruption .A sample of such crimes include the infamous case of “Lava Jato – Odebrecht”

The destruction of democracy becomes noticeable in the exiles, who had been purely Cuban and are now regional – waves of Venezuelans Bolivians, Nicaraguans, Ecuadorians, Argentines, and Central Americans.

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An electoral dictatorship is a political regime that by force or violence concentrates all power in a person or in a group or organization that repressed human rights and fundamental freedoms and uses illegitimate elections, neither free no fair, with fraud and corruption, to perpetuate itself indefinitely in power.”

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Cuba, Venezuela, Bolivia and Nicaragua… are criminal entities that must be separated from politics and must be treated as transnational organized crime from within the framework of the Palermo Convention and other norms, without the immunities or privileges inherent to the heads of State or government.

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Castrochavista dictatorships are in crisis, but are not defeated. They are called out as regimes that violate human rights, that have no rule of law, where there is no division or independence of public powers, and that are narco States and creators of poverty. To remain in power, they apply the uniform strategy of “resisting at all costs, destabilizing democracies, politicizing their situation and negotiating.”

The first element of this strategy, of “retention of all power at all costs,” can be seen in Nicaragua, Venezuela and Cuba – where they imprison and torture political prisoners. The President of the Human Rights assembly in Bolivia has just reported that there are 131 deaths without investigation from killings that the government has committed, and there are more than 100 political prisoners.

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The second element of their strategy is to “destabilize democracies,” for which they conspire against those who accuse them and against the governments that defend democracy. The destabilization range from false news and character assassination of leaders whom they designate as right wing, to criminal acts of terrorism, kidnappings and narco guerrillas.

The third element of their strategy is to “politicize their situation and their criminal acts.” When the dictatorships in Cuba, Venezuela, Bolivia, Nicaragua improperly imprison a citizen, when they torture them, when they evn kill them – they call it defense of the revolution.

These four dictatorships are narco states and, to justify themselves, they argue that “drug trafficking is an instrument of struggle for the liberation of the peoples”

Evo Morales in 2016 at the United Nations said that “the fight against drug trafficking is an instrument of imperialism to oppress the peoples”.

Jesus Santrich fled from Colombia to Venezuela, proclaiming that he had been persecuted by the right. The bosses of the ELN narco-guerrillas of Colombia are under protection in Cuba.

The third element of Castrochavismo, which consists in politicizing their crimes, serves to ensure that when they kill any person they say that they are defending the revolution. When they torture they say they defend the popular process of liberation of peoples and so on.

The fourth element of Castrochavista strategy is to “negotiate”. They negotiate in order to gain time, demoralize the adversary, collect bills from their allies or extort money from third states to gain their support or at least neutralize them.

From these four elements, they survive.

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Political events are based on respect for the “rule of law,” which is simply that “no one is above the law,” on the temporality of public service, on accountability and public responsibility, where you can take on an adversary. But organized crime has no adversaries, it has enemies and the difference between an adversary and an enemy is that the former is defeated or convinced, whereas the latter is eliminated, and this explains the number of crimes that Castrochavismo commits in the Americas.

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The peoples of Cuba, Venezuela, Nicaragua and Bolivia are fighting against the dictatorships that oppress them, but it is not a local or national oppressor, they take on a transnational enemy, united by the objective of retaining power indefiniately as the best mechanism for impunity.

Castrochavismo as a transnational organized crime structure is a very powerful usurper with a lot of money, a lot of criminal armed forces, control of many media and many mercenaries of various specialties at its service, which has put the peoples they oppress in a true and extreme “defenseless condition.”

As long as there are dictatorships there will be no peace or security in the Americas.

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It is vital to differentiate and separate that which is “politics” meaning an activity of public service, from that which is “organized crime” and “delinquency.” Politics with its ideologies, pragmatisms, imperfections, errors, crises, even tainted by corruption is one thing, but another very different things is politics and power under the control of associated criminals who turn their politics into their main instrument for the commission of crimes, the setting up of criminal organizations, the seizure and indefinite control of power with criminal objectives and for the sake of their own impunity.

Politics is legal, meaning that it is conducted in pheres considered to be “just, allowed, according to justice and reason” because it is of order and public service….

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Castro, Maduro, Ortega and Morales are not politicians, they are not corrupted government – they are organized delinquency that holds political power and plans to indefinitely keep holding it. They can no longer keep being treated as politicians, and least of all as State Dignitaries.

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CastroChavist is the label for Fidel Castro and Hugo Chavez’s undertaking that, using the subversive capabilities of the Cuban dictatorial regime and Venezuelan oil, has resurrected – commencing in 1999, the expansion of Castroist, antidemocratic communism with a heavy antiimperialist discourse.

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What is happening in Venezuela today is the result of almost two decades of progressive and sustained abuses to freedom and democracy, violation of human rights, persecutions, electoral fraud, corruption, violation of the sovereignty of the country, theft of government and private resources, killing of the freedom of the press, elimination of the rule of law, disappearance of the separation and independence of the branches of government, control of the opposition, imprisonment and forced exile of political opponents, narcotics trafficking and all that may be necessary to make Venezuela a Castroist-model dictatorial “narco-state with a humanitarian crisis.”

The international democratic community has understood that for the sake of their own interests and security, it must preclude Venezuela from turning into the second consolidated dictatorship of the Americas, and prevent the dictatorships of Bolivia and Nicaragua from following that path. Liberating Venezuela is a strategic necessity.

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In Bolivia, the top and perpetual leader of the coca leaf harvesters, Evo Morales, is the head of the Purinational State of Bolivia wherein “by decree of law” he has increated the lawful cultivation of coca by 83% from 12,000 hectares to 22,000 hectares and has increased the cultivation of unlawful coca from the existing 3,000 hectares in 2003 – the year they toppled President Sanchez de Lozada – to the current 50,000 hectares.

Evo Morales’ drug czar Colonel Rene Sanabria was arrested by the DEA for cocaine trafficking and has been sentenced by US judges to 15 years in jail.

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In democracy, corruption is not the rule but the flaw, it is the violation of normalcy, “the misuse of government power to get illegitimate advantages, generally in a secret or private way”, it is “the consistent practice of utilizing the functions and means of the government for the benefit – whether this benefit be financial or otherwise – of those who are involved with it.” In a democracy, there are investigations, prosecution, and punishment with accountability, there is separation and independence of the branches of government, the Rule of Law exists, and there is freedom of the press. On the other hand, however, in dictatorships, corruption is the means, the cause, and the end objective of getting to, and indefinitely remaining in power.

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The Venezuelan dictatorship is the Gordian knot the keeps the Venezuelan people from recovering their freedom and democracy, one that at the same time sustains dictatorships in the America, specifically in Cuba, Bolivia, and Nicaragua as a system of Transnational Organized Crime – they are a real danger not only for this region, but the whole world.

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The hub of narcotics trafficking that Venezuela has been turned into, with the Colombian FARC’s cocaine and with Evo Morales’ coca growers’ unions from Bolivia, has penetrated the entire region and impacts the whole world with serious consequences in security and the wellbeing of people.

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A well-orchastrated international system of public relations, lobbyists who work for the Cuba-Venezuela-Bolivia-Nicaragua group, the subjecting of PetroCaribe countries with bribes of Venezuelan oil, it’s penetration into international organizations, its control over the national news media and its creation and influence over international media, its collusion with important magnates and businessmen, and its repetitive anti-U.S. discourse along with its opening to Russia, China, North Korea, and Iran, have all been factors – that have allowed the existence of the Ortega’s Crime Dictatorship in Nicaragua.

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Cuba with the Castro’s, Venezuela with Chavez and Maduro, Bolivia with Evo Morales, Nicaragua with Daniel Ortega, and Ecuador with Rafael Correa, replaced freedom of the press with a system of control of the information with prior censorship, self-censorship, financial and judicial repression. They appropriated themselves – through transfers under duress, seizures, intervention, and violence – of private news media in order to place them at their service, they have supported and created state media, founded and funded regional media, they manage the official propaganda as a mechanism for extorsion, they use taxes as a means of pressure and retribution, they extort companies regarding the assignment of propaganda, they start and sustain “assassination of reputation” campaigns against journalists and owners of news media.

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Crimes committed by the 21st Century Socialist Regimes range from persecution with the aim of physical torture and killing, judicial trials with false accusations heard by “despicable judges”, the application of the regime’s pseudo-laws violating human rights or of “despicable laws”, restricting freedom of speech or freedom to work, to be employed, or discharge a profession, assassinating the individuals reputation to convert the wrongly accused as an undesirable, subjecting the person into a condition of being defenseless, depriving him/her of a job and much more.

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…they’ve replaced politics with criminal practices in order to totally and indefinitely control political power.

Extortion is a key feature of the Castrochavista methods that is further proof of the Transnational Organized Crime nature of these dictatorships.

Extortion is “the pressure exerted on someone – through threats – to compel them to act in a certain way and obtain a monetary or other type of benefit.” The legal definition of extortion includes “the intimidation or serious threat that restricts a person to do, tolerate the doing or not doing of something for the purpose of deriving a benefit or undue advantage for one’s self or someone else.”

The Castrochavista constitutions have established “the law’s retroactivity” and have suppressed or limited parliamentary immunities in order to keep extorting members of the opposition.

Judges, prosecutors and even attorneys are extorted. Several cases corroborate this, cases, such as Venezuela’s Judge Maria Lourdes Afiuni’s jailing, violations, and tortures; the fired prosecutors and judges who were afterwards prosecuted in the case of Magistrate Gualberto Cusi in Bolivia, as well as the jailing of defense attorneys; the persecution and exile of Magistrates from Venezuela’s Supreme Justice Tribunal “ the legitimate one in exile,” or that of Attorney General Ortega, the assassination of Prosecutor Alberto Nisman in Kirchner’s Argentina, and dozens more.

The imprisonment, torture, humiliations, assassinations, and exile started as extrortions and are dictatorial warning operations in order to ensure the submission of the system it manipulates “setting precedents” of its decision to use extortion to obtain benefits for the dictator and his Organized Crime group who is called government. Benefits range from financial gain, cover up, and impunity, to the indefinite tenure in government.

(78)

Cornered by crises, the dictatorships of Cuba, Venezuela, Nicaragua and Bolivia, have gone into an attack more and the meeting of the Sao Paulo Forum in Havana was the scenario to launch their new phase of destabilization.

Dictatorships attack with forced migration, the generation of internal violence, and destabilization.

(79)

All of the region’s democratic countries are under the pressure of forced migration caused by Venezuela’s dictatorship that has converted on of its shameful problems into a problem for the whole region. Democracies must now deal with problems in: their security, unemployment, provision of health care, their handling of massive numbers of people in transit, identification issues, budgets, and human rights, all because the Castrochavista criminal regime of Nicolas Maduro has transformed its crimes and its effects into a political weapon. Very similar to the so-called “Mariel’s exodus” promoted by Dictator Fidel Castro against the United States, but many folds greater and for an indefinite period.

(81)

The Sao Paulo Forum is 1990 was the dictatorial reaction to the crash of Soviet Communism and was gathered, for the first time, with the objective of addressing the international scenario following the fall of the Berlin Wall and to confront the “neo-liberal” policies. It is the tool with which the Castroist dictatorship formulated the “multiplication of the confrontation axis” strategy, going beyond class struggles to the fight against any elements that may be useful to destabilize democratic governments.

The 21st Century in the Americas is the history of the Castro-Chavista buildup…

The worn-out cliché of “liberation of the peoples” as an “anti-imperialist” argument and slogan for massive demonstrations, has remained to become “the people’s oppression” that is corroborated by the quantity of massacres, assassinations, torture, political prisoners, exiles, and the daily life the people must endure.

(83)

It has become necessary for Americas’ leaders and politicians to clearly differentiate themselves from the criminals who hold power in Cuba, Venezuela, Nicaragua and Bolivia. Not doing so implies the assumed risk of being accomplices and concealers.

(89)

The price for Pablo Iglesias and PODEMOS backing to the investiture of the PSOE would be the sustainment of the dictatorships for which Iglesias works and their funding, are now amply evident in Spain’s new foreign policy aiming to sustain the CastroChavista dictatorships of Cuba, Venezuela, Nicaragua and Bolivia.

(92)

Is the use of force the only options for the dictatorships to leave?

Cuba, Venezuela, Nicaragua and Bolivia are under regimes that after applying all possible simulations and misrepresentations in order to be a revolution, a democracy, populist, leftist, and socialist governments but are nothing by Organized Crime’s organizations that hold power by force.

Alleging self-determination of the nation state while oppressing the citizens and violating their human rights is but another flaw of the CastroChavista dictatorships.

(95)

The parameters to qualify a regime as a dictatorship, an Organized Crime dictatorship, and a criminal government, are set out but existing universal and regional standards, such as: the United Nations Charter, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the Charter of Bogota, the Convenant of San Jose, the European Union Treaty, the Palermo Conventions, the Interamerican Democratic Charter, and many more.

(102)

The dictatorial nature of a regime is proven by its violation of all essential components of democracy through the supplanting of the democratic order, manipulation of constituent referendums, consults and elections, down to the imposition of a fraudulent legal framework, a “legal” scheme, that nowadays is the legal system in existence in Venezuela, Nicaragua, Bolivia and Correa’s Ecuador.

(105)

Why Abstention?

To run as a candidate in a dictatorship is to dress up a tyrant as a democrat.

(106)

For elections to be free and fair, there must be “conditions of democracy” in existence, this is the minimum presence of the essential components of democracy that will enable all citizens to be wither voters or be elected, will guarantee an equity of options to the candidates, transparency in the process, impartiality in the electoral authorities, offer guarantees of resources with impartial judges, with freedom of association, freedom of expression, freedom of the press, and guarantees against electoral fraud, timeliness and more.

(109)

In 1961, Cuba’s dictatorship birthed; Nicaragua’s National Liberation Army (ELN) afterwards converted into the Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN), then later converted into the 13th of November Revolutionary Movement (MR13N), and the Revolutionary Armed Forced (FAR) in Guatemala. In 1962, it birthed Venezuela’s National Liberation Armed Forces (FALN), the Colombian Self-Defense Forces turned into the Southern Block Forces afterwards turned into the Colombian Armed Revolutionary Forces (FARC). In Peru, it birthed the National Liberation Army (ELN) and the Leftist Revolutionary Movement (MIR), in Bolivia the National Liberation Army (ELN), in Uruguay the Tupamaros, as an urban guerrilla, in Argentina the Montoneros, and in the 70’s the People’s Revolutionary Army (ERP), in Brazil the Revolutionary Movement 8 (MR*), and many more. The Castroist movement did no spare any country from staining it with the blood of guerrillas.

(120)

The OAS has two charters; the Charter of Bogota which birthed the organization and the Interamerican Democratic Charter, with which democracy was institutionalized.

Article 1 of the IDC mandates that “America’s people haec the right to democracy and their government has the obligation to promote and defend it.”

(123)

The Palermo Convention for Human Trafficking should be applied to the Cuban physicians.

(134)

What dictator Nicolas Maduro and his regime insist in presenting as “elections” is a chain of serious crimes to misrepresent the popular sovereignty, sustain the narco-state, and guarantee himself impunity. The “organized crime group” that hold power has committed, and is willing to commit, whatever crime may be necessary to continue receiving the criminal benefits that have taken Venezuela to the current state of its ongoing crisis.

(188)

Fear is an essential component of dictatorships, this is why they kill the “Rule of Law” and supplant it with the “Rule of the State” with despicable laws to enable them to persecute, imprison, dishonor and wrest the property of, citizens.

The foreign enemy is useful in order to blame the United States for all disastrous results from the organized crime that holds political power, such as what the Castros’ have done for so many years and now Maduro, Morales, and their thugs do.

Cuba, Venezuela, Nicaragua, and Bolivia claim the “right” conspires, pays politicians, and wants them toppled, attributing to themselves the position of being “leftist”, socialist, and communist when in reality they are criminal “fascists” whose sole ideology and objective is the total and indefinite control of power along with their illicit enrichment.

(193)

Odebrecht is one of the Brazilian companies implicated in the Forum of Sao Paulo’s criminal network implemented by Lula de Silva with the dictators Fidel Castro and Hugo Chavez with the payments of millions of dollars in bribes.

(202)

Hugo Chavez allied himself with Fidel Castro in 1999 when Cuba agonized during it’s “special period” as a parasite state that, since the breakdown of the Soveit Union, did not have a way to survive. With Venezuela’s oil, Chavez salvaged the only dictatorship there was at that time in the Americas and kick started the recreation of Castroist expansionism under the labels of the Bolivarian Movement, ALBA, and 21st Century Socialism and that is today known as “CastroChavismo”.

 

 

 

American CastroChavismo : Why Venezuela Matters

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.

Bolivarians Speak: Documents from the PCC, PSUV, FARC-EP & Allies Irregular War Against the United States

Bolivarians Speak: Documents from the PCC, PSUV, FARC-EP & Allies Irregular War Against the United States

Now available on Amazon.

The leaders of United Socialist Party of Venezuela, Hugo Chávez and Nicolas Maduro, and their partners in the Cuban Communist Party, the FARC-EP, the ELN and the Sao Paulo Forum have a geopolitical vision for a multi-polar New World Order. This vision is one that transforms all of the current governments and constitutional traditions of Latin America and the Caribbean, by hook and by crook, into Castroist-type Authoritarian dictatorships to be united into a single governing body. Those that struggle to make this Pan-Latin American League of Nations come into being call themselves Bolivarians.

The following selection of translations illustrates how these Communist Parties and transnational criminal networks sought to make this happen though the subversion of politics, democratic norms and institutions in the United States of America via the promotion of illegal immigration, informational warfare, and ideologically-driven economic conflict.

Review of Red Cocaine: The Drugging of America

“The war on drugs has not failed: it has never existed. There has been no war on drugs in the United States.”

– Joseph D Douglass, Jr.

*

The extent of money spent by the United States Federal Government on drug enforcement and interdiction nationally and internationally would make the above quote from Joseph D Douglass, Jr.’s book Red Cocaine: The Drugging of America seem intuitively false. And yet in this highly documented tome the  author shows how it is that numerous government agencies have prioritized working relations with Communist governments such as China, Russia and Cuba over open conflict with them over facilitation of drug trafficking as a form of irregular warfare. Given the gravity of the claims made within the text I found myself constantly looking up references, and sure enough a geopolitical world-view that I was not at all familiar with started to emerge.

I don’t normally provide background on the authors I read, but given the topic it seems important to do so here…

Dr. Joseph Douglass is a national security analyst and author with expertise in defence policy, threat assessment, deception, intelligence and political warfare, nuclear strategy, terrorism, advanced chemical and biological warfare agents and applications, and international narcotics trafficking. Since the mid-1980s, his primary focus has been research into various dimensions of cultural warfare and notably into the illegal drugs plague, with emphasis on its origins, support structures, and marketing.

Narcotics Trafficking as Irregular Warfare

The case that is laid out in Red Cocaine is that China and the Soviet Union were involved at the state level in the faciltation of trafficking narcotics to the United States. Citing a variety of data points, including several high-ranking Communist Party members, Douglass shows how destroying American youth through drugs and corruption was covert Communist policy. Potential traffickers were identified for training and marketing of drugs and then various government agents – from those monitoring inports/exports to those involved with policing – were encouraged to support their comrades by turning a blind eye or, if they were sufficiently compromised, by themselves actively facilitating such activities.

The case study stemming from the Vietnamese war and Chinese heroin being distributed to the American military was particularly insightful in demonstrating the manner in which the claim that large scale drug-production is just done by individuals is particularly compelling. The war became a sort of social science experiment – with the military being the subjects. Far-below market-value drugs were offered in order to test how this would affect military readiness and morale.

Cuba and Bulgaria are singled out specifically as entrepots for these activities, the former for cocaine and the latter for opium. Fidel Castro’s role in helping  the Andean region industrialize cocaine-producers operations is shown to be  extensive.

The book also examines issues of strategy. For instance the reason why it is that so many radical leftist groups within Colombia and Venezuela were formed with the encouragement of Fidel. Their development – to whit – created multiple service suppliers should there ever be political periods akin to those of the FARC-EP peace accords. While one snakes head, the FARC, avows not to continue such activity another, the ELN, can take their place.

Narcotics and Corruption as a Vector for Societal Disruption

This By Any Means Necessary approach to political change allowed for foreign intelligence operatives to track and manage Americans that could be used, wittingly or not, to disrupt the country’s economy and political system. Furthermore, it became a means by which to raise funds in order to support these and other military intelligence operations. While the Chinese, Soviets and the Cubans sought to avoid their role in such activities from becoming overtly known, the Americans had an incentive not to look too deeply lest the relationships between the country’s denegrate further.

Black and Hispanic people are specifically targeted by Fidel Castro to be the manner by which drugs are disseminated in the United States. By focusing the building of connections with drug distributors of such demographics, it helped allow the Drug War to be cast as racist and thus facilitate the increase of  political polarization. Given that some members of the black community laud Fidel Castro and demonize Ronald Regean, this is an example of a rich Orwellian Irony.

There’s a lot of other detailed accounts that are worth going into in detail, but I’ll close instead by saying if drugs, communism, or geopolitics interests you – definitely give this book a read.

Snow Storm in the Jungle

Quotes from Red Cocaine

     

Brief Excerpt about Drug Revenue’s Impact

‘In 1996, annual revenues derived from global criminalist activities were estimated by the World Bank’s experts at $1.2 trillion, of which $500 billion were thought to represent profits. These were and remain highly conservative estimates. The narcotics trade alone is in the $500 billion or more range. A more realistic estimate today would probably be of the order of $2 trillion per year – with $1 trillion, more or less, by way of straight profit; and some experts would raise these estimates further, towards $3.0 trillion annually in turnover. That is to say, governments, banks and the global criminalists are arranging the transfer of at least $1.0 trillion every year of national and private wealth into the bank accounts of the global criminal fraternity – a massive transfer of wealth for which there has been no historical parallel. This scandalous state of affairs has been continuing for several decades on an ever expanding scale, and the power conferred as a consequence threatens to destroy governments, democracy and the international banking system itself. Drug money also weakens and corrodes competition by favouring some economic agents at the expense of others’.

‘Two trillion+ dollars a year (a conservative figure, as noted) over the past two decades, excluding interest, would imply that more than $40 trillion will have been added to the wealth of the global criminal classes, including the managers and representatives of Lenin’s continuing world socialist revolution. Most of this money has been invested in property, bonds and stocks, and each year a further trillion or more dollars is added to the pool. Given that these data are believed by some experts to understate the position, the probable value of accrued drug money lodged in the international financial system now exceeds this $40 trillion estimate by a considerable margin. The associated corruption among financial institutions, investment advisory services (including stock brokerage houses and mutual funds), prestigious law firms, and among the political classes, has by now long since reached epidemic proportions. And this transformation has been accompanied by minimal publicity, with the exception of extensively publicised, but intermittent, ‘drug busts’…’.

‘It is critical for the survival of Western civilisation, and in order to slow down its rapid descent into pervasive, corrosive globalised criminality and corruption, which is the grim outlook for the 21st century, that Western countries begin, even at this late hour, to understand the true nature of the illegal drug crisis – which means correctly analysing its sources, especially its political origins, its enabling mechanisms, and its related criminal dimensions. Unless the nature and provenance of the challenge is finally understood, the appropriate strategy and tactics to address it will never be formulated. The drugs scourge continues to escalate because the measures so far developed to counter it do not take account of the geopolitical dimension – that is to say, of the malevolent, revolutionary intent which drives it’.

‘As a consequence, the measures taken, in the United States, Britain and elsewhere, to address the scourge, have remained essentially irrelevant and ineffective…. The plague continues to spread because the West is the victim of a deliberate, sustained and relentless offensive planned and directed by enemy intelligence which Western policymakers appear not to begin, or care, to understand. Some Western leaders even share the ideological objectives of the perpetrators of the drugs offensive. To make matters much worse, the values of many policymakers have been fatally eroded; and if one has no real values, one is not emboldened to defend anything at all, let alone with conviction and vigour. Policymakers too often stand for nothing and fall for everything – for every false assessment, for every piece of fashionable disinformation and for every diversionary tactic which is intended to add to the confusion and which clouds the truth: namely, that the West has been targeted as an act of war, and is the victim of a sustained offensive’.

‘Obviously, the longer this perversity and blindness continue, the more powerful and insuperable will the forces which help to perpetuate this blanket offensive, become. Soon, they will wield almost total power in some Western countries. The European Union’s collectivist structures, with their pork-barrel traditions and inclinations, are conspicuously vulnerable to drug-related corruption…’.

Review of “Venezuela in Light of Anti-American Parties and Affiliations in Latin America”

Abstract: This article offers an overview of the structure of those political parties and international organizations most relevant to the current goings-on in northern South America and the Caribbean. It highlights a network of revolutionary-left parties and concludes with a working hypothesis regarding the network’s conspiratorial prospects.

Keywords: 21st Century Socialism, Sao Paolo Forum, Transnational Criminal Organizations, Political Science

Party Affiliation in Latin America and Connection to Political Movements

Venezuela in Light of Anti-American Parties and Affiliations in Latin America was written by Lt. Col. Geoff Demarest, JD, PhD and published in Military Review Online in June of 2019.

The author argues that one needs to become familiar with the ideological signaling and collaborative habits of an armful of militant-left organizations in order to understand the Bolivarian Movement that has lead to the economic crisis and deterioration of democracy in Venezuela.

As a multi-national movement predicated on the idea that pan-Latin American revolution should be accimplished “by any means necessary,” Bolivarianism is defined by it’s soaring rhetoric and criminal behavior.

First Tier:

  1. The Cuban Communist Party (PCC)
  2. The United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV)
  3. The Brazilian Workers Party (PT)

Second Tier:

  1. The Sandinista National Liberation Front (Frente Sandinista de Liberación Nacional or FSLN) in Nicaragua.
  2. Movement to Socialism (Movimiento al Socialismo or MAS) in Bolivia.
  3. Dominican Liberation Party (Partido de Liberación Dominicana or PLD) in the Dominican Republic.

These organizations wield enhanced influence within the above described composite in that they control their respective country-level governments.

Associated Groups:

  1. FARC-EP
  2. ELN

Umbrella Organizations

  1. The Forum of São Paulo (Foro de São Paulo or FSP)
  2. The Permanent Conference of Political Parties of Latin America and the Caribbean (Conferencia Permanente de Partidos Políticos de América Latina y el Caribe or COPPPAL).

The Sao Paolo Forum’s Origins

Lula da Silva’s Worker’s Party was the organizing force behind the first Sao Paolo conference. Foreshadowing the corruption that was to later shown via Operation Car Wash, the first conference later lead to corruption charges being brought against the organizers for misappropriation of public sector funds.

A number of the FSP associated parties run the offices of the chief executive of their respective countries. This includes Ecuador’s PAIS Alliance (Patria Altiva y Soberana Alianza), El Salvador’s Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (Frente Farabundo Martí para la Liberación Nacional or FMLN), Uruguay’s Broad Front (Frente Amplio or FA), and Mexico’s National Regeneration Movement (Movimiento Regeneración Nacional or MORENA).

This does not mean that only one party per country is given credentials to attend.

While none of these following Colombian political parties have much electoral support, all are members of the Foro de Sao Paulo.

(1) Patriotic March (Marcha Patriótica)
(2) Progressive Movement (Movimiento Progresista)
(3) Green Alliance Party (Partido Alianza Verde)
(4) Colombian Communist Party (Partido
(5) Alternative Democratic Pole (Polo Democrático Alternativo)
(6) Here for Socialism (Presentes por el Socialismo)
(7) Patriotic Union (Unión Patriótica)
(8) Citizen Power Movement (Movimiento Poder Ciudadano)

Given that some of the above mentioned groups are designated terrorist organizations and that there is an increasing suspiscion as to the motivations and goals of the actors involved Sao Paolo Forum – other organizations act as front groups for their interests. The Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America, or ALBA) “advances PCC and PSUV positions on a complete range of international issues.”

The author closes his article with the statement that until these extraregional entites and their coercive associates are weakened, that democratization in Venezuela will be more difficult – an assessment made evident by the fact that the Cuban military now occupies a significant role in the functioning of the government of the PSUV.

While Venezuela in Light of Anti-American Parties and Affiliations in Latin America only takes Venezuela as it’s subject, it’s also worth mentioning in this review that the Forum’s influence is not limited to Latin America. Thus this ends the literature review. Below continues with an extension of the author’s thesis – which relates to my own movement of movements thesis.

The PSUV and the FARC-EP

One of the recurring tropes used by the PSUV and their political accomplices is that everyone that seeks to maintain a global political order based on laws is a Nazi.

As of other journalists and investigators have pointed out – the FARC and ELN have recieved arms, vehicles and special treatment from Nicholas Maduro. Nicholas Maduro even welcomed FARC leaders while at the Sao Paolo Forum to “set up base” in Venezuela.

Given the effectiveness that these organizations have had in helping leftist parties win office in Latin America – one would expect them to try to export the process. And indeed they have!

U.S. Social Forum: The North American Iteration of the  Sao Paolo Forum

The United States Social Forum, like the New Horizons Conference in Iran, presents an opportunity for the assessment and recruitment of political activists by foreign intelligence services.

The United States Social Forum emerged from American political activists collaboratings with numerous radical political action groups. 15,000 people and numerous organizations attended the first convergence in 2007 in Atlanta, Georgia and there have been several other regional and national Forums since then.

This, however, is not the extent of influence that can be charted. Indeed, a number of American political activists connected to the United States Social Forum have travelled to the Sao Paulo Forum.

Americans at the Sao Paulo Forum

American organizations associated with the Sao Paolo Forum include political parties – such as the Communist Party USA and the Green Party, as well as movements such as Code Pink, Black Lives Matters, CISPES.

As is evident from the above flyer, there are several  U.S. organizations whose political activities, rhetoric and goals align with that of the Anti-American Parties which normally attend the Forum.

Indeed Black Lives Matter founders Alicia Garza and Patrisse Cullors were present at the first United States Social Forum while Opal Tometti has recieved an award from her activism from Nicolas Maduro.

The United Socialist Party of America

Conceptual Map of the United Socialist Party of America. Important to note is that this excludes other NGOs and movements that fit into their activities.

Given all this I believe it’s worth reconceiving how Socialist Parties within the United States are viewed.

In Venezuela the PSUV brought sundry Socialist political activists together due to the charisma and policies of Hugo Chavez.

It seems reasonable to state that a similar political alignment, which I call the United Socialist Party of America, has also formed. But rather than love of a leaders, it’s around hatred manufactured against President Donald Trump.

Carlos Ron, the Counselor of Political Affairs at the Embassy of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela is the larger, bald man two seats away from the 1st Annual People’s Congress of Resistance Convention.

This development isn’t some organic happenstance, but something that has been manufactured in large part by a variety of Venezuelan political officials – like Carlos Ron, pictured above. Carlos along with Jesus “Chucho” Garcia, Jorge Arreaza and other diplomats have frequently attended socialist events in the United States – be it at Party of Socialism and Liberation meetings or at events held at the People’s Forum in New York – an obvious nod to the Social Forum. What the extent of their influence has been – be it funding, access to goods and services, etc. – is something for another article.

The Movement of Movements Thesis, Invisibility Mapping and the Connection Between Venezuela and Antifa

This article will introduce the American Public to some of the finer points of Left-Wing Social theory and will introduce the American Public to a political party that’s worked inside America without any fanfare for over a decade, the United Socialist Party of America, or PSUA for short.

The Movements of Movements thesis attests to its likely existence; while Invisibility Mapping helps proves it. Using Antifa, a group that the United States Congress has sought to unmask, as a case study in invisibility mapping I will illustrate the connection between them, the PSUA and Venezuela.

Building the Base, with a Regional Focus

The Multitude, the Movement of Movements, the Grassroots; the People; Mi Gente – archival research and data science proves these are not just random solidarity alliances converging. There are many traces over many places & troves of data showing a guiding order to American Socialism – Venezuela.

In future publications, which you can learn about by following me here, I will show how the PSUA developed in large part due to the material and symbolic assistance of Venezuela via Hugo Chavez and Nicolas Maduro; the media company of which they are the President on Record – TeleSUR; TeleSURs state partners in Nicaragua, Cuba, Iran, and Russia; TeleSURs political party partners across the world; Venezuela’s official political and cultural attaches in the United States and elsewhere; media colectivos and encuentros organized via Bolivarian Circulo members abroad and Bolivarian Collectivos in Venezuela; Academic colectivos organized through the Cuba-based Red de Intellectuals; identity-based activism groups targeted by Bolivarian-supported Communist Entryists; the development of novel software and digital services; and more.

Five Fingers, One Fist: The Movement of Movement Thesis

To develop political action networks in the United States that would spread political unrest to use for its benefit, a variety of actors working on behalf Venezuelan Intelligence Services infiltrated a variety of U.S. and international organizations and institutions. Their goal? Set the conditions for Revolution.

Hugo Chavez never hid his intentions to help export revolution across the American continent. Proof of this is evident in the new name adopted by Venezuela, the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela; his interest in founding a new Socialist International; the behavior of TeleSUR – the face of Venezuela’s Intelligence Apparatus; as well as myriad Bolivarian Government documents.

Using Italian Communist Antonio Gramsci’s writing as a guide and the oil-income from the PSVSA (the state oil company of Venezuela) – which has now moved their offices to Russia – Hugo and later his successor Nicolas Maduro Moros flattered political and cultural actors while also paying for participation in their world-altering quest to gain control of Latin America. While unable to ever economically develop their own country in the manner  promised by PSUV (the United Socialist Party of Venezuela – Nicolas Maduro’s party); the net effect of this concerted political influence effort in North America was the creation of a counter-hegemonic political force that operated within North America, but at the behest of Venezuela. The name for this movement of movements is called the PSUA, or United Socialist Party of America.

Invisibility Mapping: An Algorithmic-based Rationale for Evidence

Does Red Scare 3.0 mean Venezuela 6.0? Only time will tell…

Having learned from the Soviet Union’s attempt to influence American politics, the directors of Project PSUA – the name that I’ve given to Venezuela Intelligence’s influence campaign in America – decided not to limit their support to one or two parties, but instead gave material or symbolic support to many parties, movements and individuals. Akin to Chairman Mao’s Hundred Flowers Campaign, they drew together a motley-crew of grassroots activists to help form and direct the new movement for socialism in America.

Proving this is difficult, especially so as many of the people involved refuse to talk about it, but it’s not impossible. There are a variety of ways of doing this, which the University of Washington has done and that I have demonstrated elsewhere. One method, however, the is likely to be novel to many people is called Invisibility Mapping.

Invisibility Mapping is the term of an algorithmic concept that I picked up from one of my favorite TV series, Star Trek: Discovery. When facing an invisible enemy, the crew decides to activate the ships spore drive hundreds of times around its enemy in order to gather small bits of information so that it may calculate a means of circumventing these “security culture” defenses. By getting small bits of information from a large sample size – new data emerges. Let’s see how this works in action.

Invisibility Mapping, Antifa and Venezuela

Refuse Fascism is one of many front groups for the Revolutionary Communist Party. They are aligned with Venezuela through ideological affinities as well as via institutional connections such as the Alliance for Global Justice Alliance – the new iteration of the Nicaragua Network, as well as Hands Off Venezuela. While they are open about their desire to help bring about violent socialist revolution in the United States, they are quiet about the nature of their relationship to other groups such as Redneck Revolt; John Brown Gun Club and the Hampton Insitute and The Party for Socialism and Liberation, the Communist Party and the Workers World Party. All defend and justify the acts of Antifa, and yet none of the claim open membership.

I state this not to claim that Bob Avakian is mastermind and bank for all their activity. He’s not. Nicolas Maduro is. He is, to quote Killer Mike, “the man behind the man behind the man behind the throne.”

Invisibility Mapping: The Antifa Case Study

Venezuela’s Imperialist Designs for Latin America; Nicolas Maduro speaking at the first International Antifascist Meetings Ever, held in Caracas in 2013; the Software which PSUC activists aligned with the PCV use to ensure political compliance by the Venezuelan populace.

How to test this hypothesis? Well I decided to write Rose City Antifa in order to try to verify it.

I sent them an email stating who I am and what my interest was, but they were did not respond. Understandable. Answering my surveys it would quickly validate the movement of movements thesis – something that those involved don’t want.

Nevertheless, the communique and projected survey outlined below shows how it is that one is able to map the invisible.

I share it here now so that the concept is better understood by my readers.

The Below is a copy of an email that I sent the leader of Rose City Antifa.

RCA,

You’re welcome to state that this line of questioning is silly and dismissing this investigation as a conspiracy-minded, though to be honest I can’t locate the humor.
Also, I feel compelled to point out that not only is it counter-intuitive that people/groups with similar political affinities would AVOID working together, history is ripe with historical examples of international leftist organizations working together (a portion of my master’s thesis from NYU on American political economic development charted the fates of American leftist parties based on their international alliances/domestic orientation) and the data related to the matter at hand I’ve organized thus far from publicly available sources is crystal clear in it’s implications.
That said, I hope you won’t mind providing me with clarification on a point as it relates to your decision-making process to decline my request.
I understand that Antifa tries to operate according to a consensus model:
Did you convey my request to other members of the organization for discussion and a collective decision, or are you claiming to speak on their behalf without having consulted them? And if not, why?
I understand security is a concern of yours but I’m interested in pursuing the truth, not political points.
I would not be including questions about specific demos or activities as this is not some ruse to entrap anyone – hence my personal introduction from the beginning – and participants would be free to skip whatever questions they didn’t want to answer. I’m just interested in being able to visualize the relationships between movements and parties so if, as you say, there is no relation then data would show that.
If anything, I think that were your and your comrades to agree to my request the results would show that the people involved in Antifa have a variety of humanitarian concerns beyond just de-platforming Nazis.
I hope this gives you room to reconsider my request.
Regards,
Ariel Sheen

 

On Feb 18, 2019, at 2:09 AM, Rose City Antifa <fight_them_back@riseup.net> wrote:

Hi,
No that is not feasible. This is a very silly line of questioning. I am
not going to waste of both of our time to go through and counter these
weird points and flimsy “evidence”. The right-wing loves a conspiracy
theory and this tendency is largely impervious to reason.
///
RCA

On 2019-02-15 18:25, Ariel Sheen wrote:

RCA,

Thanks for your prompt and informative response!

Based on it, I think that I did a poor job of communicating what I was
looking to learn by contacting you. My bad.

First, let me clarify that I haven’t encountered any evidence that
would lead me to believe that you or your particular Antifa group is
receiving money or instructions from Venezuela and that I believe you
when you describe your fundraising and volunteer efforts.

The same can’t be said, however, for Latin American Antifacists; nor
for PODEMOS in Spain; nor anarchist groups in Pais Vasco; nor for
Philly Antifa; nor for a number of other American groups.

I’m glad I could make you laugh about being part of an
“international communist conspiracy” but considering the above;
the previous information I shared; that Maduro now claims that the
Trump administration is the KKK and the Lima group are Nazis; and how
in Mark Bray’s book Antifa he claims:

“The only long-term solution to the fascist menace is to undermine
its pillars of strength in society grounded not only in white
supremacy but also in ableism, heteronormativity, patriarchy,
nationalism, transphobia, class rule, and many others. This long-term
goal points to the tensions that exist in defining anti-fascism,
because at a certain point destroying fascism is really about
promoting a revolutionary socialist alternative (in my opinion one
that is antiauthoritarian and nonhierarchical) to a world of crisis,
poverty, famine, and war that breeds fascist reaction.”

I think it’s rational to make the connection between the Bolivarian
Revolution’s goals for a new world order and an American group that
wants a revolutionary socialist alternative which aligns with those
goals. Right?

To repeat – I have no basis to make any claim that you or your group
is anything other than an organic expression of activism emerging from
your interpretation of the present – which is why I’m reaching out
to you and not Philly Antifa.

That said, let me clarify what I’d really like to know:

I’d be interested to know, as a percent of total, which of your
“members” are also members of?
The Revolutionary Communist Party
The Party for Socialism and Liberation
Workers World Party
Democratic Socialists of America
Freedom Road Socialist Organization
And other Leftist Factions, like Revolutionary Abolutionism Movement

I’d be interested to know, as a percent of total, which of your
“members” have gone to:
United States Social Forums
Regional Social Forums
World Social Forums
People’s Movement Assemblies
Left Forum
Academic Marxist Conferences
Etc.

I’d be interested to know, as a percent of total, which of your
“members” are or were involved with:
Bolivarian Circles
Hands Off Venezuela
Refuse Fascism
The Poor People’s Campaign
Occupy Wall Street (or regional iteration)
Project South

South to South
The Praxis Project
Alliance for Global Justice
Union Del Barrio
Grassroots Global Justice
Jobs with Justice
Derechos para Todos
The People’s Freedom Caravan
Crimethinc
Critical Resistance (There is a Portland Chapter)
All of Us or None
Rural Organizing
Jobs with Justice
Nicaragua Network
Code Pink
Black Lives Matters
Revolutionary Student Coordinating Committee
And a few more along those lines I could throw it into a Google
Survery, which allows for anonymous responses,  provided you agreed to
share such a line of questioning.

Is this something that seems more feasible?

The PSUA & Antifa: Venezuela’s Rear-Guard

As you can tell by the survey, which is based on research into Venezuela’s interaction with American political movements, parties, political actors and sympathizers – they’ve been able to help create and direct a vast network of American activists.

The evidence that they do this is in their literature – however those that participate refuse to share about their behavior as to do so would be to admit this networks’ existance as well as the existance of a political party – the PSUA – that they would rather keep secret.

 

Review of “Race to Revolution: The United States and Cuba During Slavery and Jim Crow”

Gerald Horne’s book Race to Revolution: The United States and Cuba During Slavery and Jim Crow is an incredible account primarily on the relationships between the two countries mentioned in the title along with Cuba’s former colonial master, Spain. Horne’s account is not, however, a mere institutional history but one that illustrates that key role which enslaved and emancipated African Americans had in structuring attitudes and actions of the colonial Cuban government, the slaveholding Republic to its North and the center of Empire across the ocean to the East.

A large concern of the United States was that of a “black military republic” in Cuba that was sponsored by Britain. Secretary of State Daniel Webster was deeply concerned that London would “offer independence to the creoles, on condition that they unite with the colored government” in this Negro Republic “under British protection… and that “A Venezuelan general residing in Jamaica was to “take the command of an invading army,” which was to be “seconded” by an insurrection of the slaves and free men of color,” and thus with “600,000 black in Cuba and 800,000 in her West India Islands London will then strike a death blow at the existence of slavery in the United States (73).

The Long History of Interaction Amongst Cubans and American Negroes

Due to its prime ports and location, networks of trade and information were created between a large number of the States in Havana. Louisian, Mississipi and Texas were the primary buyers, however while slave markets closed in the United States due to abolition, they flourished in Cuba. Shipping now primarily to Texas, which was still a territory, Cuba experienced a boom in trade.

While all this was going on, in the halls of the Congress the Southern legislature hooted and hollered for annexation. Reading the speeches, yellow news article clippings, letters, diaries all depict a primal lust to aim, shoot and pull Cuba under the yoke of American capital and American style property management and enforcement. After all, American investment had dramatically increased as many of the Americans reinvested capital that was previously in the south to Cuba.

Cubans Considered by White Racists to be Lesser Humans

The Cubans, and for that matter also the Spaniards, were considered by the Americans to be less than white. In the racialist literature of the day, subscribed to by any politician of importance, the occupation of the Spanish by the Moors made them “not fully white”. Quoting Horne:

“U.S. nationals tended to think that Spaniard were “not quite white,” given the lengthy occupation of the Iberian peninsula by Arabs and Africans and, inter alia, this disqualified them from holding the prize that was Cuba.”(25).

The Spaniards subsequent intermarriage with the Negresses brought from the Ivory Coast increased the rationale for their being inferior.

A large number of expeditions – filibusters – went in in order to claim property and spoils. Former soldiers accustomed to the horrors of the Civil War re-enacted their old jobs. Like Hell on Wheels, but if when Bohannon first rolls up he just re-enslaves the black crew with the help of the white present – who he says now gets paid double. Richard Gott, perhaps no surprise, writes a wonderfully journalistic description of something akin to this in his history of Cuba. U.S. privateers were able to do this primarily as it occurred during a period of intensive rebellion in Cuba. Slaves, Freeman, and Mulattos united against the Spanish colonial administration. Over 160,000 people were killed in the ten years uprising. The atrocious and widespread slaughter literally split the country in two as domestic rebels acted as an insurgent and constituent force alongside the shores America. As can be imagined, what shape the constituent force to take was of prime significance to American politicians, which represented the interests that investors had made into Cuban railroads, sugar mills, land and labor.

Unlike what was said in the halls of power, the writings of Cuban newspapers were often written in part to target American Negroes and contained a message that didn’t sanctify property rights but one of community control. The content of these messages was often presented in a manner that would encourage readers towards a pan-African identity. By carrying tales of lynching and profiles of people such as Frederick Douglass as well as more daring stories such as that of “The Mutinous Sixth” – a deployment of African American Soldiers that were preparing to invade Cuba in Georgia that suffered casualties by American racists for refusing to submit to Jim Crow segregation. In 1886, the year slavery was effectively banned, the first cigar factory was built in Tampa, accompanied by the arrival of about a million workers from Cuba and other lands touched by Spain.” (159). Yet while slavery maybe have been made illegal in the United States, this did not prevent those that had profited from it from finding places where they were able to return to their high ROI practices. This put the US in the perilous position of, basically, fighting to impose a racial order on an island that was considered “colored”.

White Nationalists Afraid of a United Soviets of America

Horne’s book doesn’t go into the much detail as to the Soviet influence on either Castro’s or the Communists in Cuba – itself split along Trotskyist, longstanding anarchist, and nationalist lines. However he does point out how vastly inflated as a cause for fear this was by the members of the United States’ Havana Bureau. Whether this was because it gave informants cause to receive bribes from the U.S. government’s “liason and administration offices,” people that among others Cuban patriots would later call “vendepatriots,” is uncertain. What is clear from the record is that “Cubanidad” and distaste for Jim Crow style white supremacy was an organizing ideology against White Supremacy. Citizens of Cuba and the U.S. paid each other homage to the struggles going on there in a coordinated series of marches, demonstrations and exchanges between committed cadres of organizers.

Domestic sympathies towards the Cuban Communist party by America Negroes drove home the fear that Soviets would spread across the southern tip of the country and radical property struggles would again take place. This fear flamed by the KKK and others wasn’t entirely without cause, as the people involved in this cultural and intellectual exchange would soon have an outsized role within the civil rights movement in the United States.

Cubanidad as an Ideological Enemy to White Nationalism

Horne tells the story of Havana’s holding lucrative “black vs. white” boxing matches, a practice then forbidden in the United States. Havana allowed Paul Robeson to sing to “mixed race”, “mixed couple” crowds that were drunk on Bacardi family products. These, however, are shown to be showcase moments by the new economic and political leadership.

The reaction to the Jim Crowism that the US brought to the region was swift. It was so repugnant to the people that a domestic response force soon composed itself to eject such a social order. Most of the J26 movement – which I write about more on here – were also composed of Black Cuban nationalists. After black political organizations were banned, “the Communists came to play an increasingly conspicuous role on both sides of the strais, with those on the island going to far as broaching “the idea of an autonomous state in Oriente” (239). Domestic unrest lead to U.S. and Cuban elites embracing military rule via Batista, however his darkness made some in America suspect and uneasy. While first embraced by American blacks, subsequent secret police actions against poor, “colored”, Cubans that had mobilized against American investment and the enforcement of Jim Crow rules when Black American businessmen were visiting for conventions made him soon lose his lustre. Private party delegations between the countries increased to study each other’s answer to the “racial question” and increasingly the Cuban people – both the poor the suffered the most as well as the elite which more often dealt with resentment over American influence – came to view the US as prohibiting the social structures most appropriate to a post-colonial export economy. When Castro finally did come to power, one of the reasons he was so welcome by African-American was precisely because his policies were against such racialized oppression.