DC-based PR firm CLS Strategies ran a fake news operation on social media
spreading propaganda for the Venezuelan opposition and Bolivian coup regime
U.S. govt-linked PR firm ran fake news networks for right-wing Latin American
regimes
BEN NORTONSEPTEMBER 6, 2020BOLIVIAINFORMATION WARSMEXICOVENEZUELA
A Washington, DC-based PR firm linked to the US government and Democratic
Party, CLS Strategies, ran a fake news network on Facebook and Instagram,
spreading propaganda for Bolivia’s coup regime and the right-wing opposition in
Venezuela and Mexico.
By Ben Norton
Amajor US PR firm located just a few blocks from the White House has been
caught running an industrial grade propaganda operation on social media. The
information warfare blitzkrieg relied on fake accounts and pages to spread
disinformation on behalf of right-wing, US-backed governments in Latin America,
while deploying covert propaganda to destabilize the leftist governments in
Venezuela and Mexico.
The company behind the campaign, CLS Strategies, signed a contract to represent
Bolivia’s far-right junta and provide “strategic communications counsel” in the
lead-up to that country’s ostensible election. After coming to power through a
US-backed military coup in November 2019, the Bolivian regime has delayed the
election numerous times on specious grounds.
CLS Strategies also used its network of fake accounts and pages to push
propaganda on behalf of Venezuela’s right-wing opposition and the US-backed
parallel coup regime of Juan Guaidó.
Some of the CLS-run Facebook and Instagram profiles even posed as disgruntled
Venezuelan soldiers, and called on members of the armed forces to rebel against
their socialist government. Other pages claimed to be run by disaffected former
supporters of leftist leaders like Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez and Bolivia’s Evo
Morales.
The DC-based company similarly filled social media with disinformation
demonizing Mexico’s left-wing President Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO) and
his party Morena, who have been under increasing attack by right-wing oligarch
forces.
On Facebook, the PR firm spent a staggering $3.6 million on ads to promote this
propaganda.
CLS Strategies has close links to the US government. The firm employs former
government officials like Mark Feierstein, who oversaw Latin America policy for
the Obama White House. Feierstein also served as coordinator of Latin America
activities for the US Agency for International Development (USAID), a
regime-change arm that has been used as a front for covert CIA operations and
spearheaded the Trump administration’s coup attempts in Venezuela.
Another CLS senior advisor, David Romley, worked as a Pentagon spokesman, press
attaché to the secretary of defense, and public affairs officer for the US
Marine Corps. Before moving to CLS, Romley also served as vice president for
communications at the German Marshall Fund, a prominent Cold War-era think tank
funded by the US government and NATO that has been integral in pushing the new
cold war on Russia and China.
A co-founder of CLS, Peter Schechter, was also the founding director of the
Latin America center at the major Washington think tank the Atlantic Council,
which is funded by the US and UK governments and European Union and acts as a
de facto organ of the NATO military alliance.
Grayzone contributor Alex Rubinstein exposed Schechter’s unsavory career as a
Washington insider, revealing how CLS Strategies has worked on behalf of
numerous right-wing Latin America leaders whose neoliberal policies spawned
migration crises. As Rubinstein reported, Schechter opened a progressive
“Resistance”-themed restaurant in downtown Washington, DC called Immigrant
Food, forging partnerships with immigrant rights NGOs.
Schechter’s former clients at CLS include the Colombian ex-President Álvaro
Uribe, who oversaw death squad massacres and is being investigated by his
country’s supreme court for involvement in crimes against humanity, along with
Mexico’s ex-President Enrique Peña Nieto, who is connected to drug cartels and
major corruption scandals.
A decade before it was hired by Bolivia’s coup regime, CLS Strategies signed a
contract to represent another conservative dictatorial regime, this time in
Honduras, after it took power in a US government-backed military coup in 2009.
On its website, CLS boasts of having lobbied for more than a dozen foreign
governments and having “managed campaigns and advised public officials on six
continents.”
According to the PR firm’s own public listings, as well as Foreign Agents
Registration Act (FARA) filings reviewed by The Grayzone, CLS Strategies has
worked for right-wing political forces from Argentina, Azerbaijan, Bolivia,
Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, Egypt, Honduras, Kenya, Mexico, Nicaragua, Nigeria,
Peru, Portugal, Serbia, Spain, and Venezuela, as well as the World Bank and
large corporations.
CLS Strategies international clients Latin America
Another CLS Strategies partner, Juan Cortiñas, boasted on the firm’s website
that he has represented top right-wing leaders and major corporations in Latin
America, including the Venezuelan opposition.
Since the fake news ring was exposed, however, CLS Strategies has edited its
website to scrub some of these compromising materials, removing the bios of
associates like Feierstein and Cortiñas.
This controversy underscores how US PR firms, elite Washington insiders, and
foreign opposition groups work in tandem to promote right-wing regimes in Latin
America while astroturfing opposition to democratically elected left-wing
governments.
Given the extensive links CLS has to the Democratic Party, this scheme also
highlights the bipartisan consensus around regime change and support for
corrupt neoliberal leaders linked to death squads and drug trafficking.
Further, the scandal shows how foreign policy apparatchiks in Washington do
exactly what they accuse Russia of doing: meddle in foreign elections to try to
install their preferred candidates in power.
Facebook deletes CLS Strategies fake news ring
The Grayzone has reported on social media corporations’ US government-backed
censorship of independent media outlets and voices critical of US foreign
policy. Virtually all of Facebook’s purges of alleged fake accounts have
targeted foreign governments and firms in other countries. The CLS Strategies
fake news ring is apparently the first time Facebook has ever taken down a
US-based operation.
Facebook published a press release on September 1 acknowledging that it had
removed a network of 55 fake accounts and 42 pages, along with 36 Instagram
profiles, “for violating our policy against foreign interference, which is
coordinated inauthentic behavior on behalf of a foreign entity.”
An accompanying report (PDF) released by Facebook acknowledged that these fake
accounts portrayed themselves “as independent news entities, civic
organizations and political fan Pages,” while some “posed as locals in
countries they targeted” and “impersonated political parties.”
The social media giant said the network “posted content in support of the
political opposition in Venezuela and the interim government in Bolivia, and
criticism of Morena, a political party in Mexico.” It identified the network as
being connected to the PR firm CLS Strategies.
Facebook shared the information about this fake news ring with Stanford
University’s Internet Observatory, which analyzed the materials and published a
report on September 4 (PDF), showing how CLS Strategies created 17 Facebook
pages to promote the Venezuelan opposition, along with 11 for the Bolivian coup
regime.
A total of 509,000 unique accounts followed one or more of these propaganda
pages on Facebook. Some pages were huge, with as many as 163,000 followers,
while others had very few subscribers.
The Bolivia pages spread Spanish-language propaganda promoting coup leader
Jeanine Áñez, a right-wing extremist from a fringe party that got just 4
percent of the vote in the November election but who was recognized by the
United States as the country’s supposed interim president.
The Stanford report noted that the “Venezuela-focused assets supported and
promoted Venezuelan opposition leaders but changed in tone in 2020, reflecting
factional divides in the opposition and a turn away from opposition president
Juan Guaidó.”
Most of these propaganda pages were run out of the United States, although some
operatives in Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador, and Peru were involved.
US infowarriors pose as Venezuelan soldiers and call for rebellion
The majority of the Facebook pages in this CLS Strategies-led fake news ring
published boilerplate conservative propaganda, with names like “Undone with
Socialism” and “Die Oppression – Free Venezuela.”
But some of the accounts were more sophisticated disinformation operations,
targeting disaffected leftists and even falsely posing as Venezuelan soldiers.
Stanford CLS Strategies fake news Facebook Venezuela Bolivia
One CLS-run page, titled “Chavista FAN,” posed as a member of the Venezuelan
military who had supported late socialist President Hugo Chávez but lost faith
in current President Nicolás Maduro.
This was echoed by another Facebook page, “Liberatory Soldiers,” which falsely
claimed to consist of members of the armed forces seeking to oust Maduro.
The “Chavista FAN” page included a profile photo of an anonymous soldier
proudly identifying as a supporter of Venezuela’s leftist Chavista movement.
FAN is a play of words using the English word fan, which is common in Spanish,
while also referencing Venezuela’s military, the Fuerza Armada Nacional
Bolivariana, or FANB (but by removing the B, which references the left-wing
nationalist Bolivarian movement popularized by Chávez).
In one particularly insidious post disclosed by Facebook, the CLS
Strategies-run account clearly claims to be operated by members of the
Venezuelan armed forces. While making no mention of the suffocating US
sanctions and embargo that have devastated Venezuela’s health sector and
economy and prevented the government from buying medical equipment and
medicine, the Chavista FAN page wrote, “After years of looting, the health
sector is in shambles. Are we in the FANB (Venezuelan military) going to
continue protecting the lie at the expense of the public?”
The use of “vamos” in the post (“are we going to”) expressly includes the
publisher in the collective we, as a putative member of the Venezuelan armed
forces.
CLS Strategies Venezuela FAN Chavista propaganda
A post from a CLS Strategies-run Facebook account falsely posing as a member of
Venezuela’s military
Chavista FAN was targeted at patriotic leftist Venezuelans, but simultaneously
spread disinformation on behalf of US-recognized coup leader Juan Guaidó.
Another post released in the report showed that the page pressured Venezuelan
soldiers to rise up against their government, by reassuring them that Guaidó
had offered “amnesty.” The post also implored soldiers to stop blocking the
entrance of supposed “humanitarian aid” that Washington was using as a weapon
in its coup attempt.
CLS Strategies Venezuela propaganda Chavista Guaido
Venezuelan opposition propaganda on a CLS Strategies-run Facebook page
A similar Facebook page overseen by the DC-based PR firm was devoted
specifically to supporting Venezuela’s US government-funded far-right
opposition leader María Corina Machado, a close ally of neoconservative Senator
Marco Rubio who has openly, repeatedly called for the US military to invade her
country.
DC PR firm spreads right-wing propaganda by posing as disgruntled leftists
CLS Strategies’ Bolivia propaganda was similar to its disinformation campaign
against Venezuela. The firm created Facebook pages promoting the coup leader
Jeanine Áñez with titles like “Everyone with Áñez.”
The PR firm also set up a page called “Camacho Lovers Santa Cruz,” devoted to
the far-right goon squad leader, Luis Fernando Camacho, a businessman from
Bolivia’s wealthiest city who started his political career in a neo-fascist
Christian paramilitary group founded by former Nazi collaborators.
Another page targeted Bolivian women specifically. With the name “Free Bolivian
Women,” this Facebook profile posted propaganda attempting to link elected
former President Evo Morales and his allies to organized crime, a common yet
baseless talking point of the right-wing opposition.
CLS Strategies Bolivia Facebook propaganda
CLS Strategies propaganda targeting Bolivian women on Facebook
Some of the CLS Strategies propaganda relied on more devious techniques. A
Facebook page the company oversaw was called “MAS for Bolivia,” and sought to
drive a wedge in between Bolivians who had previously voted for the Movement
Toward Socialism (MAS) party and the former President Evo Morales, who was
overthrown in the 2019 coup.
On Instagram, the CLS disinformation campaign was similarly duplicitous. In
addition to running parallel accounts with some of the same names as the
Facebook pages, CLS created profiles posing as disenchanted supporters of
Venezuela President Nicolás Maduro.
One Instagram account was titled “Maduro Style,” and included as its bio,
“Maduro, motherland, and death.” Another Instagram profile was named “A True
Madurista,” or a true supporter of Maduro. (“Madurista” is however not a term
used by actual leftists in Venezuela; it is mostly an insult used by the
opposition to attack President Maduro and his supporters.)
An even more dishonest Instagram account overseen by the US PR firm was called
“VTV Journalists.” This page posed as former insiders from Venezuela’s state
broadcaster VTV, falsely claiming to be an “account of journalists fired from
VTV in a humiliating way, but with good contacts inside.”
CLS Strategies Instagram fake accounts Venezuela propaganda
These pages show how Washington-based CLS infowarriors posed as Venezuelan
critical Chavistas and disgruntled Bolivian leftists to attract progressives
who had supported Chávez, Maduro, and Morales, but to mislead them and warp
their views by exposing them to opposition disinformation.
Conservatives already supported these right-wing opposition forces in Venezuela
and Bolivia, so the PR firm was clearly seeking to mislead and propagandize
left-wing sympathizers.
CLS Strategies signs PR contract with Bolivia’s coup regime
After overthrowing Bolivia’s democratically elected President Evo Morales in a
US-backed military coup on November 10, 2019, the new junta immediately sought
out public relations flacks in Washington help whitewash its image.
Almost exactly a month later, on December 11, 2019, CLS Strategies registered
under the US Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) as a lobbyist for the
Bolivian coup regime.
The firm signed a 90-day contract, at a neat $90,000, agreeing to “provide
strategic communications counsel,” which included “creating and distributing
communications materials, interfacing with the media, and providing
communications services as directed by the Plurinational State of Bolivia.”
This contract did not include CLS Strategies’ work on behalf of the Venezuelan
opposition. It is not clear where the firm got the $3.6 million it spent on
Facebook ads.
CLS Strategies Bolivia coup regime FARA
The FARA registration confirming CLS Strategies registered to represent the
Bolivian coup regime in December 2019
As part of its contract with the Bolivian coup regime, CLS Strategies also
helped coordinate meetings between top US government officials and the Bolivian
junta’s far-right minister of government, Arturo Murillo, according to another
FARA document.
Murillo is an extremist who pledged to “hunt” left-wing leaders from Evo
Morales’ MAS party like “animals,” and even went so far as to falsely claim
that indigenous protesters massacred by the coup regime had actually shot
themselves and then blamed it on the junta.
When he visited Washington in December 2019, CLS Strategies organized in-person
meetings between Murillo and Senators Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz, and Rick Scott,
along with staffers from the National Security Council, State Department,
USAID, Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, and House Foreign Affairs
Committee.
CLS also successfully scheduled meetings between the extremist Bolivian
minister and Luis Almagro, the hardline right-wing leader of the Organization
of American States (OAS), which played a key role in the coup, as well as with
the head of the OAS’ Inter-American Commission on Human Rights.
The PR firm then helped plan an event with Murillo at the corporate lobby group
the Council of the Americas / Americas Society.
CLS Strategies also coordinated interviews with Murillo for CNN en Español and
the major Spanish news agency EFE.
On behalf of the coup regime, CLS likewise contacted the offices of Senator Tim
Kaine and House Representatives Eliot Engel, Albio Sires, Mario Diaz-Balart,
and Francis Rooney, along with the the prominent DC think tank the
Inter-American Dialogue, which hosted an event with Bolivian fascist coup
leader Luis Fernando Camacho.
CLS Strategies Bolivia coup meetings Washington DC
Meetings with top US government officials in Washington, DC that CLS Strategies
organized on behalf of the Bolivian coup regime
The agreement that CLS Strategies signed with the Bolivian was personally
signed by partner Brian Berry, who boasts of having worked for an array of
large corporate clients.
At the same time, CLS Strategies Managing Director William Moore also
registered with FARA to represent the Bolivian coup regime.
FARA requires registrants to disclose if they have made any political
contributions in the past 60 days. Moore revealed that he had donated to Joe
Biden’s presidential campaign exactly one week before. (This was months before
the start of the Democratic presidential primaries.)
CLS Strategies William Moore Latin America
CLS Strategies Managing Director William Moore, who helped run the fake news
campaign on social media
William Moore was identified in the Stanford Internet Observatory report as one
of the CLS employees who operated the fake news campaign on Facebook.
CLS Strategies removed Moore’s bio from its website, apparently in response to
the revelation of its involvement in the Facebook fake news scandal. Moore also
took down his LinkedIn profile.
But a cached version of Moore’s CLS page is available, indicating that it was
only recently scrubbed. There, Moore boasts that “he applies his professional
experience in Latin America to serve private and public sector clients across
the region and in the practice areas of public affairs, crisis communications,
and political strategy.”
Moore’s bio adds, “Prior to joining CLS, William cut his teeth at a strategic
communications and public affairs agency in Bogota, through which he worked
with a government ministry.” He also represented numerous multinational
corporations, helping them as they “expanded operations in Colombia.”
CLS Strategies Bolivia coup regime lobbying William Moore
The FARA registration filed by CLS Strategies Managing Director William Moore
to represent the Bolivian coup regime in December 2019
When CLS Strategies Managing Director William Moore and partner Brian Berry
registered to lobby on behalf of the Bolivian coup regime, they were joined by
another colleague: Juan Cortiñas Garcia.
As with Moore’s profile, Cortiñas’ bio was removed from the CLS Strategies
website, as the firm has apparently tried to scrub its involvement in the
scandal. Coriñas also took down his LinkedIn profile, which he had linked to in
his CLS bio.
But in its report on the CLS fake news ring, Stanford University linked to an
archived version of Juan Cortiñas’ professional profile. In this bio, he boasts
of having “worked with some of the leading political leaders in Latin America
such as former Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos, Argentine Congressman
Sergio Massa and the Venezuelan opposition, helping with political
communications, campaign strategy and developing digital-based campaigns.”
Cortiñas added that he has “counseled some of the largest companies in Latin
America,” and boasted of “helping a Fortune 500 company overcome a reputational
crisis that spread across the front pages of newspapers in Mexico.”
CLS Strategies Bolivia coup lobbying Juan Cortinas
The FARA registration filed by CLS Strategies partner Juan Cortiñas to
represent the Bolivian coup regime in December 2019
FARA registration files reviewed by The Grayzone show that Juan Cortiñas has
registered to work on behalf of numerous foreign governments, including Aruba,
Bolivia, the right-wing administration of President Enrique Peña Nieto in
Mexico, and the coup regime in Honduras.
CLS Strategies signs PR contract with Honduras’ coup regime
Ten years before the United States backed a right-wing military coup in
Bolivia, Washington did the same in the Central American nation of Honduras.
On June 28, 2009, the Honduran military overthrew the country’s democratically
elected left-leaning president, Manuel Zelaya, and physically removed him from
the country.
Zelaya told The Grayzone in Honduras, in an interview on the 10th anniversary
of the coup, that the US government had threatened him because of his close
political and economic relations with socialist President Hugo Chávez in
Venezuela.
In the wake of the putsch, the new unelected right-wing regime in Honduras
searched for publicists in DC. It found a loyal ally in a firm called Chlopak,
Leonard, Schechter and Associates, which would go on to rebrand as CLS
Strategies in 2014.
In September 2009, Chlopak, Leonard, Schechter and Associates filed FARA
paperwork acknowledging that it had signed a four-month contract for the
Honduran coup regime, at the cost of $292,000, not including tens of thousands
more in additional expenses.
CLS Strategies Chlopak Leonard Schechter Honduras 2009 coup
The FARA registration Chlopak, Leonard, Schechter and Associates (now CLS
Strategies) signed with the Honduran coup regime in September 2009
At the time, the senior vice president of Chlopak, Leonard, Schechter and
Associates was Juan Cortiñas Garcia, who would go on to represent the Bolivian
coup regime a decade later.
Cortiñas said in his FARA registration that his job was to “provide public
relations counsel and services to the government of Honduras in their efforts
to communicate with policy markers or opinion leaders, their staff, the news
media and other related third parties.”
In the years following the coup, Honduras became the murder capital of the
planet, with some of the highest levels of inequality of any country. The
violence and widespread corruption fueled a massive refugee crisis on the
southern US border.
The subsequent dictatorial leader of Honduras, Juan Orlando Hernández, or
“JOH,” is intimately linked to the drug trade; his brother Tony Hernández was
convicted of trafficking nearly 200,000 kilograms (440,000 pounds) of cocaine
and machine guns.
A US district court even stated that infamous Mexican drug lord El Chapo Guzmán
gave JOH a $1 million bribe to help him rig Honduras’ 2013 elections.
CLS Strategies signs PR contract with corrupt Colombian President Uribe
The Honduran coup regime is by no means the only connection between CLS
Strategies and corrupt, drug-linked Latin American leaders. The shadowy PR firm
has also worked with a notorious demagogue who may have the dubious honor of
being the most corrupt and violent president in modern Colombian history.
On its website, CLS boasts of having represented both the government of
Colombia and the presidential campaign of far-right former leader Álvaro Uribe.
Uribe is infamous for working closely with drug cartels and death squads.
In August, Colombia’s Supreme Court put Uribe under house arrest, accusing him
of bribery and officially investigating his involvement in paramilitary
massacres of human rights activists, which it emphasized are crimes against
humanity.
CLS Strategies Colombia Uribe
CLS Strategies worked for Colombia and far-right President Álvaro Uribe, who is
linked to drug cartels and death squads
The US government has long known that Uribe is deeply involved with Colombian
drug cartels and far-right paramilitary groups. Declassified cables from the
1990s show that the US State Department was well aware of his criminal ties,
but Washington still strongly supported his rise to power.
A ranch owned by Uribe and his family members was used as the base of a death
squad. But this has not stopped the Trump administration from pressuring the
Colombian justice system to release Uribe and end its investigation into his
crimes.
CLS Strategies signs PR contract with corrupt Mexican President Peña Nieto
In addition to representing the drug-linked Honduran coup regime and death
squad aficionado Álvaro Uribe, Chlopak, Leonard, Schechter and Associates also
worked for the transition team of Mexico’s notoriously corrupt President
Enrique Peña Nieto.
Peña Nieto allegedly won the presidential election on July 1, 2012. Just five
days later, on July 6, he signed a contract with Chlopak, Leonard, Schechter
and Associates.
The PR firm agreed, for a monthly fee of $50,000, to “provide communications
counsel and assistance to the transition team including dissemination of
news/announcements from the transition team.”
Once again, CLS consultant Juan Cortiñas Garcia registered with FARA to
represent Peña Nieto, pledging to work on “Public relations, communications and
media relations related to election/presidential transition” and “Potential
distribution of materials or information to U.S. media, policymakers or third
parties.”
CLS Strategies’ involvement with Peña Nieto during this transition period is
especially controversial, because he was credibly accused of rigging the 2012
election. It appears the firm was hired to try to deal with these very serious,
substantiated accusations.
Then-presidential candidate Andrés Manuel López Obrador, who came in second
place (and now serves as the president of Mexico), immediately cast doubt on
the 2012 election results. López Obrador gathered evidence showing how Peña
Nieto’s neoliberal party PRI bribed voters, buying huge sums of votes.
In 2016, these accusations were confirmed by a prominent Colombian hacker named
Andrés Sepúlveda. Sepúlveda, who is currently serving a 10-year prison sentence
for spying on Colombian officials, told Bloomberg that he was given a budget of
$600,000 to assemble a team of hackers to rig the 2012 Mexican presidential
election. Bloomberg reported that he and his fellow hackers “stole campaign
strategies, manipulated social media to create false waves of enthusiasm and
derision, and installed spyware in opposition offices, all to help Peña Nieto,
a right-of-center candidate, eke out a victory.”
Chlopak Leonard Schechter CLS Strategies Mexico Enrique Pena Nieto
The FARA registration Chlopak, Leonard, Schechter and Associates (now CLS
Strategies) signed with Mexican President-elect Enrique Peña Nieto’s transition
team in July 2012
The corruption scandals involving Enrique Peña Nieto grow larger by the year.
In 2019, it was reported that Peña Nieto had accepted a $100 million bribe from
the drug kingpin El Chapo, according to a witness at the drug trafficker’s
trial.
Then in August 2020, the former head of Mexico’s state oil company, Pemex,
revealed how the Peña Nieto administration had overseen a massive bribery
scheme to push through the government’s neoliberal economic policies.
Peña Nieto had campaigned on a promise of “energy reform” — that is to say,
privatization of Mexico’s oil industry, which had been controlled by the state
practically since the revolution. To push through these unpopular neoliberal
policies, Peña Nieto took millions of dollars of bribes from the Brazilian
corporation Odebrecht, which were rewarded with lucrative government contracts.
Peña Nieto then apparently used that dirty money to buy political support
inside Mexico. Leaked videos show that the Peña Nieto administration handed out
cash in transparent plastic bags to get the votes needed to pass the
privatization policies.
CLS Strategies’ work for this cartoonishly corrupt Mexican president was
particularly noteworthy because, according to Facebook, the firm went on to
create fake accounts to spread propaganda against Mexico’s current President
López Obrador, or AMLO, a left-wing nationalist.
The Grayzone has reported on the escalating campaign by right-wing oligarchs to
overthrow AMLO, and the opposition’s links to the United States.
CLS Strategies’ deep ties to the US government
CLS Strategies boasts on its website that it has a “team of veteran political
operatives, former journalists and corporate communications experts” who are
employed as “strategists, counselors and problem solvers.” Among those veteran
political operatives are some prominent former US government officials.
A senior advisor to CLS is Mark Feierstein, a longtime Democratic Party
operative who has spent decades overseeing regime-change policies in Latin
America.
Mark Feierstein Obama White House Latin America
CLS Strategies senior advisor Mark Feierstein in the White House helping Obama
prepare for a phone call with Mexican President Peña Nieto in May 2016
Feierstein played a key role in the Obama administration’s foreign policy team
as the president’s top advisor on Latin America, and served as senior director
for Western hemisphere affairs on the National Security Council.
While working in the Obama administration, Feierstein helped oversee a 2012
soft coup against elected left-wing President Fernando Lugo in Paraguay, as
first reported by Spanish researcher Julián Macías Tovar.
In his CLS Strategies professional bio, Mark Feierstein boasted that he “also
oversaw the United States Agency for International Development’s programming in
the Americas as assistant administrator for Latin America and the Caribbean, a
Senate-confirmed position, and later took on a global portfolio as USAID’s
deputy administrator for two years.”
USAID is a regime-change arm of the US government, and has been used to support
coup attempts against leftist governments in Latin America.
Feierstein’s CLS profile also trumpeted that he “was a principal strategist for
winning national campaigns in Austria, Bolivia, El Salvador, and Honduras, and
designed communications strategies for major multinational companies, including
Boeing, BP and Monsanto.”
Feierstein previously served in the Bill Clinton administration, and advised
the US ambassador to the OAS. He also worked at another US government
regime-change entity, the National Democratic Institute (NDI), in the late
1980s and early 1990s. In his CLS bio, Feierstein boasted that he spent his
time at the NDI helping the right-wing Nicaraguan opposition challenge the
Sandinista government.
Feierstein is also a close associate and friend of US regime-change operative
Roger Noriega, a neoconservative Washington insider who crafted Latin America
policy in the George W. Bush administration’s State Department and Ronald
Reagan’s USAID, where Noriega oversaw support for far-right Contra death squads
in Nicaragua.
Mark Feierstein’s political background was included in a bio he had on the CLS
Strategies website. But the PR firm removed Feierstein’s page, apparently in
response to the backlash over its fake news ring. Feierstein’s significant role
in CLS drew the attention of the Bolivian media.
Another senior advisor for the influential firm is David Romley, who previously
filled senior positions in the Department of Defense.
In his official CLS bio, Romley boasts:
“David served 20 years in the United States Marine Corps as a public affairs
officer where he was a press attaché to the Secretary of Defense and a Pentagon
spokesman. While there, he developed the department’s response to interagency
communication efforts following the capture of Saddam Hussein and during
operation Phantom Fury, the battle for Fallajuh, Iraq. He was senior Marine
spokesman during combat operations in Afghanistan for General Jim Mattis and
Task Force-58, and in Iraq he authored the combined Marine Corps and British
Royal Commando communications plan to integrate more than 340 news media
representatives into combat operations. As Director of Community Relations for
the United States Marine Corps he established its trademark and license office
and created the Corps’ signature public outreach and community relations
campaign, Marine Week.”
CLS Strategies David Romley Rumsfeld
Future CLS Strategies senior advisor David Romley in his Marines uniform with
Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld
After leaving the US military, Romley went on to serve as vice president for
communications at the Washington, DC-based German Marshall Fund, a hawkish
think tank created during the first cold war to turn up the heat on the former
Soviet Union. Flush with funding from the US and German governments, NATO,
European Union, and Western weapons corporations, the German Marshall Fund has
in the Trump era become a major home for neoconservative operatives.
The German Marshall Fund sponsors a neo-McCarthyite organization called the
Alliance for Securing Democracy, which has worked to fuel the new cold war on
Russia and China. Its slogan is, “Putin knocked. We answered.” And the outfit
devotes an increasing amount of resources to attacking independent Western
journalists who report critically on US foreign policy.
After leaving the German Marshall Fund, CLS senior advisor David Romley found
cushy positions at other bellicose DC think tanks, including the
neoconservative Hudson Institute and the Center for a New American Security
(CNAS), which was closely linked to the Obama administration and was used to
fill his State Department and Pentagon with experienced hawks.
But Feierstein and Romely are by no means the only powerful figures involved
with CLS Strategies. The PR firm is also deeply tied to the Washington
juggernaut the Atlantic Council, NATO’s de facto think tank.
This is ironic, given that Facebook — which took down the CLS fake news ring on
its platform — is itself a major financial sponsor of the Atlantic Council.
Other donors to the think tank include the governments of the United States,
Britain, and the United Arab Emirates, NATO, and the European Union, along with
corporate arms manufacturers and fossil fuel companies.
Before rebranding as CLS Strategies in 2014, the PR firm was called Chlopak,
Leonard, Schechter and Associates. The S in CLS comes from its co-founder Peter
Schechter.
Schechter is one of the most influential operatives in Washington, DC working
on Latin America related issues, and has extensive experience representing
powerful right-wing heads of state.
In 2013, Schechter was the founding director of the Atlantic Council’s Adrienne
Arsht Latin America Center, which has pushed a hawkish line against the leftist
governments in the region, advancing the interests of right-wing regimes and
pushing neoliberal economic policies.
Peter Schechter Atlantic Council Latin America Center
CLS founder Peter Schechter, former director of the Atlantic Council’s Latin
America center
In 2017, Schechter left the Atlantic Council to found Altamar, a political
communications consulting firm that has been hired by Colombia’s former
right-wing President Juan Manuel Santos and Peru’s former neoliberal President
Pedro Pablo Kuczynski, who was forced to resign during impeachment proceedings
over major corruption charges.
As The Grayzone contributor Alexander Rubinstein reported, Schechter went on to
co-found a DC restaurant in 2019, called Immigrant Food. Located blocks from
the White House, Immigrant Food sought to capitalize on liberal opposition to
President Donald Trump and his xenophobic rhetoric.
CLS Strategies and neoconservative Democratic Party operatives
Given CLS Strategies’ extensive work with right-wing Latin American leaders, it
might seem as though the influential PR firm would be affiliated with the
Republican Party, a traditional bastion of antipathy toward socialist
governments across the Global South. But in reality it emerged from the heart
of the Democratic Party.
Like Mark Feierstein and Peter Schechter, fellow CLS Strategies co-founder
Robert “Bob” Chlopak has deep ties to the Democratic Party. Before creating the
PR firm in the 1990s, Chlopak served as the executive director of the
Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee and the deputy director of the
Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, where he boasts on his CLS profile
that “he recruited candidates, mobilized grassroots support and raised campaign
funds for tight races in helping to elect a Democratic majority.”
CLS Strategies Robert Chlopak National Democratic Senatorial Committee
Future CLS Strategies founder Robert “Bob” Chlopak back in 1988, as executive
director of the National Democratic Senatorial Committee
A review of individual contributions by CLS Strategies employees filed with the
US Federal Election Commission (FEC) shows that the majority of candidates
supported are mainstream Democrats.
Joe Biden is particularly popular among CLS Strategies staff. Co-founder Robert
Chlopak donated $1,000 to Biden in March 2020, while fellow co-founder Peter
Schechter donated the maximum $2,800 to Biden in April.
CLS Strategies FEC contributions Democrat
Campaign contributions by employees of CLS Strategies
Schechter has poured tens of thousands of dollars into supporting the campaigns
of right-wing Democrats like Hillary Clinton and Kirsten Gillibrand.
Chlopak, too, has donated many thousands of dollars to Democratic candidates
over the years. He is a Democratic Party stalwart.
While lobbying for right-wing leaders in Bolivia, Honduras, and Mexico, CLS
Latin America specialist Juan Cortiñas has donated to both Democrats and
Cuban-American Republicans like Marco Rubio and Ileana Ros-Lehtinen.
If Joe Biden wins the 2020 presidential election, CLS senior advisor Mark
Feierstein is likely to play a major role in the Democratic administration’s
Latin America policy.
As one organ of the blob of Beltway think tanks and contractors that prop up
and profit from the bipartisan foreign policy consensus, CLS Strategies is
hardly unique in its willingness to lobby for right-wing Latin American
regimes, or in its zeal to destroy their leftist competitors.
Washington, DC is a base for propaganda schemes like the kind that CLS ran. But
it is rare that they are exposed to the public in such a clear and
comprehensive fashion.
The scandal only further illustrates the extent to which Washington sets the
standard for the online disinformation campaigns it accuses its own enemies of
deploying.
