US regime change blueprint proposed Venezuelan electricity blackouts as ‘watershed event’ for ‘galvanizing public unrest’
The
US-funded CANVAS organization that trained Juan Guaido and his allies
produced a 2010 memo on exploiting electricity outages and urged the
opposition “to take advantage of the situation…towards their
needs”
by
Max Blumenthal
Part
1
A
September 2010 memo by a US-funded soft power organization that
helped train Venezuelan coup leader Juan Guaido and his allies
identifies the potential collapse of the country’s 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 Guaido moves to exploit nationwide
blackouts caused by a major failure at the Simon Bolivar
Hydroelectric Plant at Guri dam – a crisis that Venezuela’s
government blames on US sabotage.
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 US government that has
trained thousands of US-aligned youth activists in countries where
the West seeks regime change.
This
group reportedly hosted Guaido 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, CANVAS’s Popovic declared, “A key to Chavez’s
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 country’s
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 Guaido’s return from Colombia, where he
participated in the failed and demonstrably violent February 23
attempt to ram a shipment of US 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,
Guaido 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.
Source,
links:
https://thegrayzone.com/2019/03/11/us-regime-change-blueprint-proposed-venezuelan-electricity-blackouts-as-watershed-event-for-galvanizing-public-unrest/
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This puts yankee fingerprints on the blackouts.
ReplyDeleteDefinitely.
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