The group that trained Juan Guaidó and his allies laid out plans for
galvanizing public unrest in a 2010 memo, Max Blumenthal reports.
By Max Blumenthal
Grayzone
A September 2010 memo by a U.S.-funded soft power organization that helped
train Venezuelan coup leader Juan Guaidó and his allies identifies the
potential collapse of the countrys 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 Guaidó moves to exploit nationwide
blackouts caused by a major failure at the Simon Bolivar Hydroelectric Plant
at Guri dam a crisis that Venezuelas government blames on U.S. sabotage.
Srdja Popovic (CANVAS)
Srdja Popovic. (CANVAS)
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 U.S. that has trained thousands of U.S.-aligned
youth activists in countries where the West seeks regime change.
This group reportedly hosted Guaidó 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, published by WikiLeaks, CANVASs Popovic declared, A key
to Chavezs 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 countrys
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 Guaidó return from Colombia, where he
participated in the failed and demonstrably violent Feb. 23 attempt to ram a
shipment of U.S. 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,
Guaidó 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 Period of Suffering
Venezuela has placed the blame squarely on Washington, accusing it of
sabotage through a cyber-attack on its electrical infrastructure. Key
players in the U.S.-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 U.S. 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 U.S. 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 p.m., 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 p.m., 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 Rubios tweet.
Back in Caracas, Guaidó 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, Guaidó 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, Guaidó was at the center of an 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, Guaidós supporters
responded, Intervention! Intervention!
Exploiting Crisis
As Dan Cohen and I reported here at the Grayzone, Guaidós 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.
Panoramic view of the Guri Dam. (Wikimedia)
Panoramic view of the Guri Dam. (Wikimedia)
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 U.S.
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 U.S. governments 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 an 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 Guaidó 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 Guaidós Popular
Will party, Popovic has attempted to publicly distance himself from his
record of training Venezuelas opposition.
Today, however, Popovics 2010 memo on exploiting electricity outages reads
like a blueprint for the strategy that Guaidó and his patrons in Washington
have actively implemented. Whether or not the blackout is the result of
external sabotage, it represents the watershed event that CANVAS has
prepared its Venezuelan cadres for.
Max Blumenthal is an award-winning journalist and the author of books
including best-selling Republican Gomorrah, Goliath
