The US-funded CANVAS organization that trained Juan Guaido and his
allies produced a 2010 memo on exploiting electricity outages and urged the
opposition “to take advantage of the situation…towards their needs”
By Max Blumenthal
A September 2010 memo by a US-funded soft power organization that
helped train Venezuelan coup leader Juan Guaido and his allies identifies the
potential collapse of the country’s electrical sector as “a watershed event”
that “would likely have the impact of galvanizing public unrest in a way that
no opposition group could ever hope to generate.”
The memo has
special relevance today as Guaido moves to exploit nationwide blackouts caused
by a major failure at the Simon Bolivar Hydroelectric Plant at Guri dam – a
crisis that Venezuela’s government blames on US sabotage.
It was
authored by Srdja Popovic of the Center for Applied Non-Violent Action
and Strategies (CANVAS), a Belgrade-based “democracy promotion” organization
funded by the US government that has trained thousands of US-aligned youth
activists in countries where the West seeks regime change.
This group
reportedly hosted Guaido and the key leaders of his Popular Will party for a
series of training sessions, fashioning them into a “Generation 2007”
determined to foment resistance to then-President Hugo Chavez and sabotage his
plans to implement “21st century socialism” in Venezuela.
In the 2010
memo, CANVAS’s Popovic declared, “A key to Chavez’s current weakness is the
decline in the electricity sector.” Popovic explicitly identified the Simon
Bolivar Hydroelectric Plant as a friction point, emphasizing that “water levels
at the Guri dam are dropping, and Chavez has been unable to reduce consumption sufficiently
to compensate for the deteriorating industry.”
Speculating
on a “grave possibility that some 70 percent of the country’s electricity grid
could go dark as soon as April 2010,” the CANVAS leader stated that “an
opposition group would be best served to take advantage of the situation and
spin it against Chavez and towards their needs.”
Flash forward
to March 2019, and the scenario outlined by Popovic is playing out almost
exactly as he had imagined.
On March 7,
just days after Guaido’s return from Colombia, where he participated in the
failed and demonstrably violent February 23 attempt to ram a shipment of US aid across the
Venezuelan border, the Simon Bolivar Hydroelectric Plant experienced a major
and still unexplained collapse.
Days later,
electricity remains sporadic across the country. Meanwhile, Guaido has done
everything he can “to take advantage of the situation and spin it” against
President Nicolas Maduro – just as his allies were urged to do over eight years
before by CANVAS.
Rubio vows “a period of suffering” for Venezuela
hours before the blackout
The
Venezuelan government has placed the blame squarely on Washington, accusing it
of sabotage through a cyber-attack on its electrical infrastructure. Key
players in the US-directed coup attempt have done little to dispel the
accusation.
In a tweet on March
8, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo framed the electricity outage as a pivotal
stage in US plans for regime change.
At noon on
March 7, during a hearing on Venezuela at the Senate Foreign Relations
Subcommittee, Sen. Marco Rubio explicitly called for the US to stir
“widespread unrest,” declaring that it “needs to happen” in order to achieve
regime change.
“Venezuela is
going to enter a period of suffering no nation in our hemisphere has confronted
in modern history,” Rubio proclaimed.
Around 5 PM, the Simon Bolivar Hydroelectric Plant experienced a total and still
unexplained collapse. Residents
of Caracas and throughout Venezuela were immediately plunged into darkness.
At 5:18 PM, a
clearly excited Rubio took to Twitter to announce the blackout and claim that
“backup generators have failed.” It was unclear how Rubio had obtained such
specific information so soon after the outage occurred. According to Jorge Rodriguez, the communications minister of Venezuela, local
authorities did not know if backup generators had failed at the time of Rubio’s
tweet.
Back in
Caracas, Guaido immediately set out to exploit the situation, just as his
CANVAS trainers had advised over eight years before. Taking to Twitter just
over an hour after Rubio, Guaido declared, “the light will return when the usurpation [of
Maduro] ends.” Like Pompeo, the self-declared president framed the blackouts as
part of a regime change strategy, not an accident or error.
Two days
later, Guaido was at the center of opposition rally he convened in affluent
eastern Caracas, bellowing into a
megaphone: “Article 187 when
the time comes. We need to be in the streets, mobilized. It depends on us, not
on anybody else.”
Article 187
establishes the right of the National Assembly “to authorize the use of
Venezuelan military missions abroad or foreign in the country.”
Upon his
mention of the constitutional article, Guaido’s supporters responded, “Intervention! Intervention!”
Exploiting crisis to “get back into a position of power”
As Dan Cohen
and I reported here at the Grayzone, Guaido’s rise to prominence – and the coup plot
that he has been appointed to oversee – is the product of a decade-long project
overseen by the Belgrade-based CANVAS outfit.
CANVAS is a
spinoff of Otpor, a Serbian protest group founded by Srdja Popovic in 1998 at the University of Belgrade. Otpor,
which means “resistance” in Serbian, was the student group that worked
alongside US soft power organizations to mobilize the protests that eventually
toppled the late Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic.
CANVAS has
been funded largely through the National Endowment for
Democracy, a CIA cut-out that
functions as the US government’s main arm of promoting regime change.
According to leaked internal emails from Stratfor, an intelligence firm known as
the “shadow CIA,” CANVAS “may have also received CIA funding and
training during the 1999/2000 anti-Milosevic struggle.”
A leaked email from a Stratfor staffer noted that after they
ousted Milosevic, “the kids who ran OTPOR grew up, got suits and designed
CANVAS… or in other words a ‘export-a-revolution’ group that sowed the seeds
for a NUMBER of color revolutions. They are still hooked into U.S. funding and
basically go around the world trying to topple dictators and autocratic
governments (ones that U.S. does not like ;).”
Stratfor
subsequently revealed that CANVAS “turned its attention to Venezuela” in 2005,
after training opposition movements that led pro-NATO regime change operations
across Eastern Europe.
In September
2010, as Venezuela headed for a parliamentary election, CANVAS produced a
series of memos outlining the plans they had hatched with “non-formal actors”
like Guaido and his cadre of student activists to bring down Chavez. “This is
the first opportunity for the opposition to get back into a position of power,”
Popovic wrote at the time.
In his memo
on electricity outages, Popovic highlighted the importance of the Venezuelan
military in achieving regime change. “Alliances with the military could be
critical because in such a situation of massive public unrest and rejection of
the presidency,” the CANVAS founder wrote, “malcontent sectors of the military
will likely decide to intervene, but only if they believe they have sufficient
support.”
While the
scenario Popovic envisioned failed to materialize in 2010, it perfectly
describes the situation gripping Venezuela today as an opposition leader
cultivated by CANVAS seeks to spin the crisis against Maduro while calling on
the military to break ranks.
Since the
Grayzone exposed the deep ties between CANVAS and Guaido’s Popular Will party,
Popovic has attempted to publicly
distance himself from
his record of training Venezuela’s opposition.
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