Western regime-change operatives launch campaign to blame Bolivias Evo
Morales for Amazon fires
As Brazils Bolsonaro allows elite landowners to incinerate the Amazon,
professional regime-change operatives like Jhanisse V. Daza seek to redirect
blame for the fires onto the leftist government of Bolivia, whose President
Evo Morales faces elections in October.
By Wyatt Reed
With fires set by landowners raging throughout the Amazon for nearly a
month, a group of Western-backed information warriors has begun working to
redirect outrage from the far-right Brazilian government toward a more
convenient target.
After a flurry of media pinned the blame on everyone from poor people eating
meat to China, a new target has come into focus: the leftist Bolivian
government of President Evo Morales.
Originally content to merely accuse Bolivians of not responding fast enough,
the regime-change machine is switching gears and making the absurd claim
that Bolivia bears the majority of responsibility for the Amazon fires.
The campaign has been orchestrated by Jhanisse Vaca Daza, an anti-Morales
operative identified merely as an environmental activist in a recent BBC
report pointing the finger at the Bolivian president for the fires.
A closer look at Dazas work, however, reveals that she is the spearhead of
a network of Western organizations that trained and advised the leaders of
regime-change operations from Venezuela to Eastern Europe to the ongoing
anti-China protests in Hong Kong.
#SOSBolivia
Jhanisse V. Dazas invective against Bolivias Evo Morales social-democratic
government, which she regularly caricatures as an authoritarian regime,
could hardly be cruder.
On her social media accounts, she has shared memes portraying the
democratically elected president as a dictator clad in a sailor cap, and
with a Hitler-style mustache that reads no.
Jhanissa Vaca Daza Evo Morales dictator
When the Amazon fires broke out, however, her strategy changed.
Employing the hashtag #SOSBolivia, Daza and her allies have mobilized to
ensure that the environmental crisis is exploited to its maximum propaganda
potential despite reports from Bolivias government that more than 85
percent of the fires had been extinguished in around eight days of its
operations.
A report from NASA pointing out that the fires were concentrated in Brazil,
and another report explaining that Bolivias most-affected area,
Chiquitanía, is not even in the Amazon, was also of little apparent
interest to those behind the hashtag campaign.
Proponents of regime change in Bolivia, ranging from outspoken libertarians
to self-proclaimed leftists, have drawn from the same playbook theyve
deployed against Venezuela, Nicaragua, and Cuba for decades. They are
recycling techniques that employ economic, physical, and media-based warfare
designed to undermine and delegitimize anti-imperialist governments at every
turn.
The SOS hashtag was popularized in recent years among Latin Americas elite
as a way of drawing attention to the supposed dictatorships they endure
under democratically elected socialist governance. They have employed the
slogan in various violent revolts of the upper classes most notably
throughout the Venezuelan guarimbas of 2014 and 2017 and the Nicaraguan
tranques of 2018.
Tellingly, the most frequent users of the SOS hashtag rarely, if ever,
extend their plea for international assistance to the many victims of the
right-wing, US-supported governments of Honduras or Brazil.
At the core of the #SOSBolivia social media campaign is a little-known NGO
named Ríos de Pie, or Standing Rivers. The group was founded just over a
year ago by Jhanisse V. Daza, a self-described human rights activist.
Though the hashtag was kicking around online for a week or so, it took off
after Dazas organization began publishing glossy infographics accusing the
Bolivian government for the spread of the fires.
Their advertising materials, tweets, and publicity stunts aimed to force the
Bolivian government to agree to international aid. And when the Morales
administration accepted the token aid offered by Western states, there was
scant evidence it did so because of an online public pressure campaign. That
didnt stop Daza from taking credit at a rally.
Do you know why [the aid] arrived? Because citizens who arent authorities,
citizens who some of us are influencers
we organized, and pressured, and
the aid arrived, she proclaimed.
The other major goal of Daza and her allies is to gin up outrage abroad,
especially among leftists in the Global North, and mobilize climate
activists against Bolivia. Corporate greenwashing groups like Extinction
Rebellion aimed less at radically challenging capitalism and more at
keeping it from eating itself alive have called for rallies outside
Bolivias embassies this weekend throughout Europe.
And some former colonial European powers like what they are hearing. When
Jhanisse Vaca Daza gave a speech for TEDx in February, outlining a
strategic nonviolent struggle approach to overthrowing Morales, her event
was sponsored by Spains embassy in Bolivia.
Jhanissa Vaca Daza Bolivia TedX Spanish embassy
Spain colonized the land of modern-day Bolivia for hundreds of years, and
continues to undermine the countrys socialist government today. President
Morales has lashed out at foreign powers like Spain seeking to retrench its
control over his countrys political system and natural resources: We will
always fight against colonialism and imperialism.
The coup kids go to Harvard
The push to get progressives in the imperial core to equivocate between the
far-right Bolsonaro and the Pink Tide progressives is part of a larger
strategy aimed at isolating Bolivia internationally by convincing its only
potential allies that it is not actually socialist.
But Jhanisse Daza is hardly a socialist herself, and far from an impartial
observer. Her LinkedIn hypes up her anti-government credentials, claiming
that Ríos de Pie is currently fighting the Morales regime and organizing
ordinary citizens to defend their rights through nonviolent protests.
According to her publicly available Facebook profile, Daza has a Bolivian
passport and lists her hometown as the countrys capital Sucre. She has
spent a significant portion of her educational and professional career in
the United States, however.
She attended Ohios Kent State University, where her thesis focused on
Authoritarian Regimes in South America, and subsequently completed
academic programs in Britain and Chile.
Daza then studied at the elite Harvard Kennedy School, participating in its
Leading Non-Violent Movements for Social Progress program.
Jhanissa Vaca Daza Harvard Kennedy School
The Kennedy School has become a haven for expat regime-change cadres since
the progressive wave swept over Latin America. Among the schools alumni and
faculty is a whos who of the coup administration the US has recently sought
to install in place of Venezuelas elected government: Ricardo Hausmann,
Leopoldo Lopez, Juan Ignacio Hernandez, and Carlos Vecchio.
These figures have since spearheaded the bid to re-privatize Venezuelas
oilfields, hoping to secure their own personal financial interests by
helping to hand over Venezuelas oil wealth to the US energy sector. They
maintain plausible deniability by insisting they are mere functionaries of a
would-be Venezuelan government rather than emissaries of the oil companies
on whose behalf theyve represented. (As The Grayzone reported, Vecchio is
the former lawyer for ExxonMobil.)
Incidentally, Daza is indirectly linked to the longtime hard-right leader of
Venezuelas regime-change push, Leopoldo Lopez, through his first cousin,
Thor Halvorssen, who supports her work through his Human Rights Foundation.
(Daza also praised Lopez on her publicly available Instagram account.)
The son of a Venezuelan oligarch, Halvorssen is a former campus libertarian
activist who entered the human rights industry with help from right-wing
billionaires like Peter Thiel, conservative foundations, and international
NGOs like Amnesty International.
His Human Rights Foundation (HRF) has been referred to in media puff pieces
as the Davos for dissidents, and indeed, it functions as a training
network for exiled activists seeking to topple the governments of states
targeted by Washington.
Non-violent action
as a weapon of mass destruction
This May, the HRF began issuing Freedom Fellowships to ten
anti-authoritarian activists in places which NATO governments seek to
destabilize, including Venezuela, Nicaragua, Russia, and Hong Kong.
Jhanisse V. Daza was appointed by HRF as the manager of the Freedom
Fellowships. On the foundations page, she declares that, Thanks to the
Freedom Fellowship, [she] co-founded a movement in Bolivia named Ríos de
Pie. It already is becoming one of the leading non-violent resistance
movements to Evo Morales authoritarian regime.
Back in 2014, the BBC attended training sessions overseen by Halvorssens
HRF at the Oslo Freedom Forum. In the basement of an Oslo luxury hotel,
correspondent Laura Kuenssberg described witnessing a school for
revolution where activists including US-funded leaders of the Uyghur World
Congress and front-line activists in Hong Kongs Occupy Central protests
learned how to be successful and topple a government for good.
The BBCs Kuenssberg reported, Weve been told many of Hong Kongs
demonstrators were trained long before they took the streets to use
non-violent action, as they describe it, as a weapon of mass destruction.
Daza has been consistently involved with the Oslo Freedom Forum since 2015.
At its event in New York in 2018, she linked up with leading Venezuelan
regime-change activists, including Joanna Hausmann, the daughter of
US-appointed coup leader Juan Guaidós top economic adviser and a YouTube
personality who collaborated with the New York Times for an anti-Chavista
propaganda video that violated the newspaper of records own ethics code.
Jhanissa Vaca Daza Joanna Hausmann facebook
Links to US government-funded regime-change groups
HRF is not the only Western government-backed regime-change group to have
propelled the career of Jhanisse V. Daza.
When the Human Rights Foundation announced Daza was one of its freedom
fellows in 2019, the organization noted that this pilot opportunity was
sponsored in partnership with CANVAS, or the Center for Applied
Non-Violent Action and Strategies.
CANVAS also co-sponsored the online program Daza graduated from at Harvards
Kennedy School. Students like her gained a systematic opportunity for
nonviolent social movement mid-level leaders to learn from the experiences
of peers and through the coaching of Harvard/CANVAS faculty, according to
Kennedy School literature.
As The Grayzone has reported, CANVAS had been funded largely through the
National Endowment for Democracy, a CIA cut-out that functions as the US
governments main arm of promoting regime change.
According to 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.
CANVAS grew out of the Otpor! movement, a US-backed cadre of youth activists
that brought down Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic, who was targeted for
overthrow by NATO for being insufficiently compliant.
An email by a Stratfor staffer boasts: 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 revealed that CANVAS turned its attention to Venezuela in 2005,
after cultivating opposition movements that led pro-NATO regime-change
operations across Eastern Europe. Among those trained by CANVAS were the
leaders of Venezuelas coup attempt this year, including Juan Guaido,
Leopoldo Lopez, and scores of figures associated with the US-supported
Popular Will party.
Theyve got mad skills, Stratfor said of CANVAS trainers. When you see
students at five Venezuelan universities hold simultaneous demonstrations,
you will know that the training is over and the real work has begun.
Suddenly, the real work of professional regime change-makers like HRF and
CANVAS has been concentrated on Bolivia, a progressive Latin American
government that has yet to face full wrath of Washington in the way
Venezuela, Nicaragua, or Cuba have.
And Daza is a direct ally of CANVAS founder Srdja Popovic, the former leader
of the Western-backed Serbian regime-change group Otpor!. He has been
promoting her on his Twitter account, accusing Bolivia of bad governance
and environmental disaster.
The relationship goes back further. In May 2018, the Bolivian anti-Morales
activist posted a photo with Popovic on her public Facebook page, remarking,
Im in heaven right now.
Jhanissa Vaca Daza Srdja Popovic Facebook
Silence on Bolsonaro, warnings of violence against Evo
Just like her counterparts in other countries targeted by the US, Jhanisse
V. Daza cloaks cynical regime-change ambitions with a veneer of humanitarian
goodwill, broadcasting ostensible concern for indigenous people and other
marginalized groups.
But her dubious implication that the worlds first indigenous president
secretly harbors anti-indigenous sentiment has not resonated with the actual
people in question. Indigenous groups in Bolivia have backed Morales
candidacy by wide margins throughout the past three elections, and this
support is largely projected to continue into the next.
This is why Dazas efforts are so crucial to ongoing Western efforts to
overthrow progressive governments in Latin America. By perpetuating a
narrative in which the devastating fires throughout the Amazonian basin are
actually a byproduct of socialism, and not the capitalist expansionism
widely acknowledged, even by mainstream media, as the source of the crisis,
Daza is able to simultaneously demonize progressive governments and
indemnify the far-right government of Brazil.
Her bosses at the Human Rights Foundation have not mentioned Bolsonaro once
on Twitter since the far-right demagogue took power. Despite near universal
condemnation from across the globe for his many racist, sexist, xenophobic,
anti-indigenous, and homophobic remarks and policies, the organization has
kept silent.
It is clear that for the foundation and their Freedom Fellowship recipients,
the externally imposed right-wing governments currently privatizing Latin
Americas riches are not human rights violators worth discussing.
While she touts her Rios de Pie NGO for spreading the use of non-violence
as the main form of protest, Daza warned on the blog of Iyad al-Baghdadi
another regime change activist promoted by HRF that one citizens movement
alone cannot guarantee Bolivians will not take to more radical measures.
Violence is a real risk when people find their will overturned by
authoritarian structures.
Wyatt Reed
Wyatt Reed is a Virginia-based activist and journalist who covers climate
and racial justice movements and foreign policy issues. Follow him on
Twitter
