U.S. spends millions to finance foes of Chávez

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U.S. spends millions to finance foes of Chávez#1

Posted: 11/9/06 at 3:38pm

U.S. spends millions to finance foes of Chávez

By Simon Romero
The New York Times

Since President Hugo Chávez returned to power after a brief coup in 2002, the United States has channeled millions of dollars to Venezuelan organizations, many of them critical of his government. The money has become a key issue in the presidential election here, sparking complaints that Washington is interfering in the nation's political system.

"Washington thinks it can buy regime change in Venezuela," said Carlos Escarra, a constitutional lawyer and a leading legislator in the National Assembly who has been pushing for tighter regulation over the U.S. financing of Venezuelan groups. "This is an affront to our sovereignty as a nation that is not docile to Washington's interests."

Escarra echoed comments from other high-ranking officials and from Chávez, who has a double-digit lead in most polls over his main opponent, Manuel Rosales, the governor of the state of Zulia. Chávez rarely refers in public to Rosales by name, instead framing his campaign as a choice between his government and the Bush administration.

U.S. diplomats here have remained largely quiet about the election, which is scheduled for Dec. 3. But government officials here point out any example of U.S. efforts to counter Chávez's influence as evidence of what they see as a looming confrontation with Washington.

Vice President José Vicente Rangel organized an event to publicize the release of "Bush vs. Chávez: Washington's War Against Venezuela," a book by Eva Golinger, an American lawyer who is now famous in Venezuela for detailing the American financing of groups here.

The U.S. Agency for International Development has distributed $25 million to various organizations in the last five years, officials involved in the projects said. The money has been channeled to the groups through private and public entities from the United States that have opened offices in Caracas.

These include Development Alternatives, a company in Bethesda, Maryland, that works closely with the State Department in dispersing funds around the world, and the International Republican Institute and the National Democratic Institute for International Affairs, two groups in Washington that have carried out training for emerging political leaders in Venezuela.

Documents obtained from the U.S. government under the Freedom of Information Act point to numerous grants made by the United States in the past two years to groups whose activities are viewed as critical of Chávez's government. The international development agency withheld the names of many of the grant recipients, saying that the disclosure of their identities could put them at risk of political retaliation.

All of the grants were channeled through Development Alternatives, which worked on behalf of the Office of Transition Initiatives, a branch of the international development agency that started operating in Venezuela after the April 2002 coup, which had the Bush administration's approval.

The office, which was created in the 1990s to push for democratic change in the former Soviet Union, normally finances activities in strife-torn countries like Liberia, Nepal and Sri Lanka. Its only operations in Latin America are in Venezuela and Bolivia, two countries that have developed an alliance based in part on distrust of the United States. Chávez has repeatedly lashed out at the U.S. government's activities.

Officials from the Agency for International Development did not withhold all of the identities of its grant recipients in Venezuela, as if to point out that some of the aid went to groups receiving charity in the form of baseball equipment and roofing materials. A $15,728 grant for a nutrition program went to the municipal government of Baruta, an area of Caracas whose mayor, Henrique Capriles Radonski, is an outspoken critic of Chávez.

The aid agency's grants have raised concern among some political analysts who see parallels to the efforts by Washington to destabilize the socialist government of Salvador Allende in Chile in the early 1970s or the attempts to influence the political system of Nicaragua in the 1980s.

"I wouldn't feel comfortable with the Chinese government doing something like this in the U.S.," said Jeremy Bigwood, an analyst at the Center for Economic Policy and Research, in Washington.

Jens Erik Gould contributed reporting.