Young ‘Chavista’ lawmaker Robert Serra killed in Venezuela

[Octafish]

5. They never arrive as fast as the ''Protect the CIA'' crowd, though.

Here's what a (now deceased) CIA man had to say on the subject of Venezuela:

The Nature of CIA Intervention in Venezuela

By JONAH GINDIN
VENEZUELANALYSIS.COM, March 22nd 2005

Philip Agee is a former CIA operative who left the agency in 1967 after becoming disillusioned by the CIA’s support for the status quo in the region. Says Agee, “I began to realize that what I and my colleagues had been doing in Latin America in the CIA was no more than a continuation of nearly five-hundred years of this, exploitation and genocide and so forth. And I began to think about what, until then would have been unthinkable, which was to write a book on how it all works.” The book, Inside the Company: CIA Diary, was an instant best-seller and was eventually published in over thirty languages. In 1978, three years after the publication of CIA Diary, Agee and a group of like-minded journalists began publishing the Covert Operations Information Bulletin (now Covert Action Quarterly), as part of a strategy of “guerilla journalism” aimed at destabilizing the CIA and exposing their operations.

SNIP...

What was the most prominent strategy of US intelligence when you were at the CIA, for protecting US ‘strategic interests’ in Latin America?

When I was in the agency from the late 1950s on through to the late 1960s, the agency had operations going internationally, regionally, and nationally, attempting to penetrate and manipulate the institutions of power in countries around the world, and these were things that I did in the CIA—the penetration and manipulation of political parties, trade unions, youth and student movements, intellectual, professional and cultural societies, religious groups and women’s groups and especially of the public information media. We, for example, paid journalists to publish our information as if it were the journalists’ own information. The propaganda operations were continuous. We also spent large amounts of money intervening in elections to favor our candidates over others. The CIA took a Manichean view of the world, that is to say there were the people on our side, and there were people who were against us. And the agency’s job was to penetrate, weaken, divide, and destroy those political forces that were seen to be the enemy, which are those to the left of social democrats, normally, and to support and strengthen the political forces that were seen to be friendly to US interests in all these institutions I just mentioned a few minutes ago.

One of the constant problems that the CIA had from the beginning of these types of operations, that is 1947, was the difficulty that the people and organizations that received their money had in covering it up, because when you get large amounts of money coming in it can be difficult to conceal. So the agency, early on, established a series of foundations, or worked out arrangements with established foundations. Sometimes the foundations of the agency were simply ‘paper foundations’ run by a lawyer in Washington on contract to the CIA. From the early 1950s the international program of the National Students Association of the United States—this is the University association that is on practically every campus—was run in fact by the CIA, the whole international program of the National Students Association was a CIA operation. And as each President of the NSA would come into office over the years they were briefed on how this international program worked under CIA direction. But the man who came into the Presidency of NSA in 1966—and this is the time of the Vietnam war and the protest movement—he refused to go along, and he told the whole story to Ramparts Magazine in California, a magazine that had connections with the Catholic church. And Ramparts published the story creating an enormous scandal. Well, it didn’t stop there, because every news media picked up on the Ramparts story and in February 1967 the Washington Post published a lengthy exposé of the CIA’s international funding network. In other words they named foundations, and quite a few of the foreign recipient organizations of CIA money in these different institutions that I mentioned earlier—political parties, trade unions, student movements, and so forth—and it was a disaster for the agency. I happened to be at headquarters in between assignments in Ecuador and Uruguay when this happened, and it was a huge disaster for the CIA.

Within less than two months, after the collapse of this international funding mechanism, Dante Fascell—a member of the House of Representatives for Miami, with close ties to the CIA and to the right-wing Cuban-Americans in Miami—proposed in Congress the establishment of a non-governmental foundation that would receive funding from Congress and would in turn pass the money out openly to the different organizations that until that time would have been funded by the CIA secretly, under the table. But this was 1967 and bi-partisan consensus on foreign policy had, to a point, broken down and so Fascell’s proposal went nowhere.

For that reason the CIA continued, even after the collapse of its international funding mechanism, to be the action agency for the US government in these activities known as ‘covert operations.’ For example, the CIA was responsible for undermining the Salvador Allende government in Chile from 1970 on. It happens that Allende was nearly elected in 1958. Elections came every 6 years in Chile and in 1964, the next election year, the CIA began early on, more than a year ahead of time, working to prevent his election in 1964. The money was spent in part to discredit Allende and the Socialist party and his coalition known as Unidad Popular and to finance Eduardo Frei’s campaign—the Christian Democratic campaign. Frei won that election, but when the next elections came around in 1970 Allende was finally elected. It’s documented that the CIA tried to prevent his ratification by Congress following the election by provoking a military coup, which failed. Allende took power and the CIA was then the action agency for fomenting popular discontent, for continuous propaganda against Allende and his government, for fomenting the very damaging strikes that occurred, the most important of which was the truckers, which stopped the delivery of goods and services over a period of months, and which eventually provoked the Pinochet coup against Allende in September 1973.

CONTINUED...

http://venezuelanalysis.com/analysis/1015

You sure are right. There is a lot of crime in Venezuela.