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
3 - Training from the “‘export-a-revolution’ group that sowed
the seeds for a NUMBER of color revolutions”
On
October 5, 2005, with Chávez’s popularity at its peak and his
government planning sweeping socialist programs, five Venezuelan
“student leaders” arrived in Belgrade, Serbia to begin training
for an insurrection.
The
students had arrived from Venezuela courtesy of the Center for
Applied Non-Violent Action and Strategies, or CANVAS. This group
is 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; and offshoots like the International
Republican Institute and the National Democratic Institute for
International Affairs. 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.”
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 gained
international fame — and Hollywood-level promotion — by
mobilizing the protests that eventually toppled Slobodan Milosevic.
This
small cell of regime change specialists was operating according to
the theories of the late Gene Sharp, the so-called “Clausewitz of
non-violent struggle.” Sharp had worked with a former Defense
Intelligence Agency analyst, Col. Robert Helvey, to
conceive a strategic blueprint that weaponized protest as a form of
hybrid warfare, aiming it at states that resisted Washington’s
unipolar domination.
Otpor
was supported by the National Endowment for Democracy, USAID,
and Sharp’s Albert Einstein Institute. Sinisa Sikman, one of
Otpor’s main trainers, once said the group even received direct CIA
funding.
According
to a leaked email from a Stratfor staffer, after running Milosevic
out of power, “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 training opposition movements that led pro-NATO regime
change operations across Eastern Europe.
While
monitoring the CANVAS training program, Stratfor outlined its
insurrectionist agenda in strikingly blunt language: “Success is
by no means guaranteed, and student movements are only at the
beginning of what could be a years-long effort to trigger a
revolution in Venezuela, but the trainers themselves are the people
who cut their teeth on the ‘Butcher of the Balkans.’ They’ve
got mad skills. 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.”
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