Juan
Guaidó is the product of a decade-long project overseen by
Washington’s elite regime change trainers. While posing as a
champion of democracy, he has spent years at the forefront of a
violent campaign of destabilization.
by
Dan Cohen and Max Blumenthal
Part
6 - Towards violent destabilization
In
November, 2010, according to emails obtained by Venezuelan security
services and presented by former Justice Minister Miguel Rodríguez
Torres, Guaidó, Goicoechea, and several other student activists
attended a secret five-day training at a hotel dubbed “Fiesta
Mexicana” hotel in Mexico. The sessions were run by Otpor, the
Belgrade-based regime change trainers backed by the US government.
The meeting had reportedly received the blessing of Otto Reich, a
fanatically anti-Castro Cuban exile working in George W. Bush’s
Department of State, and the right-wing former Colombian President
Alvaro Uribe.
Inside
the meetings, the emails stated, Guaidó and his fellow activists
hatched a plan to overthrow President Hugo Chavez by generating chaos
through protracted spasms of street violence.
Three
petroleum industry figureheads – Gustavo Torrar, Eligio Cedeño and
Pedro Burelli – allegedly covered the $52,000 tab to hold the
meeting. Torrar is a self-described “human rights activist” and
“intellectual” whose younger brother Reynaldo Tovar Arroyo is the
representative in Venezuela of the private Mexican oil and gas
company Petroquimica del Golfo, which holds a contract with the
Venezuelan state.
Cedeño,
for his part, is a fugitive Venezuelan businessman who claimed asylum
in the United States, and Pedro Burelli a former JP Morgan executive
and the former director of Venezuela’s national oil company,
Petroleum of Venezuela (PDVSA). He left PDVSA in 1998 as Hugo Chavez
took power and is on the advisory committee of Georgetown
University’s Latin America Leadership Program.
Burelli
insisted that the emails detailing his participation had been
fabricated and even hired a private investigator to prove it. The
investigator declared that Google’s records showed the emails
alleged to be his were never transmitted.
Yet
today Burelli makes no secret of his desire to see Venezuela’s
current president, Nicolás Maduro, deposed – and even dragged
through the streets and sodomized with a bayonet, as Libyan leader
Moammar Qaddafi was by NATO-backed militiamen.
[Burelli
contacted the Grayzone after the publication of this article
to clarify his participation in the “Fiesta Mexicana” plot.
Burelli
called the meeting “a legitimate activity that took place in a
hotel by a different name” in Mexico.
Asked if
OTPOR coordinated the meeting, he would only state that he “likes”
the work of OTPOR/CANVAS and while not a funder of it, has
“recommended activists from different countries to track them
and participate in the activities they conduct in various countries.”
Burelli
added: “The Einstein Institute trained thousands openly in
Venezuela. Gene Sharpe’s philosophy was widely studied and
embraced. And this has probably kept the struggle from turning into a
civil war.”]
The
alleged Fiesta Mexicana plot flowed into another destabilization plan
revealed in a series of documents produced by the Venezuelan
government. In May 2014, Caracas released documents detailing an
assassination plot against President Nicolás Maduro. The leaks
identified the anti-Chavez hardliner Maria Corina Machado – today
the main asset of Sen. Marco Rubio – as a leader of the scheme. The
founder of the National Endowment for Democracy-funded group, Sumate,
Machado has functioned as an international liaison for the
opposition, visiting President George W. Bush in 2005.
“I
think it is time to gather efforts; make the necessary calls, and
obtain financing to annihilate Maduro and the rest will fall apart,”
Machado wrote in an email to former Venezuelan diplomat Diego Arria
in 2014.
In
another email, Machado claimed that the violent plot had the blessing
of US Ambassador to Colombia, Kevin Whitaker. “I have already
made up my mind and this fight will continue until this regime is
overthrown and we deliver to our friends in the world. If I went to
San Cristobal and exposed myself before the OAS, I fear nothing.
Kevin Whitaker has already reconfirmed his support and he pointed out
the new steps. We have a checkbook stronger than the regime’s to
break the international security ring.”
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