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
3 - Exploiting crisis to “get back into a position of power”
As Dan
Cohen and I reported here at the Grayzone, Guaido’s rise to
prominence – and the coup plot that he has been appointed to
oversee – is the product of a decade-long project overseen by the
Belgrade-based CANVAS outfit.
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 worked
alongside US soft power organizations to mobilize the protests that
eventually toppled the late Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic.
CANVAS
has been 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. 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.”
A leaked
email from a Stratfor staffer noted that after they ousted
Milosevic, “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
subsequently revealed that CANVAS “turned its attention to
Venezuela” in 2005, after training opposition movements that
led pro-NATO regime change operations across Eastern Europe.
In
September 2010, as Venezuela headed for a parliamentary election,
CANVAS produced a series of memos outlining the plans they had
hatched with “non-formal actors” like Guaido and his cadre
of student activists to bring down Chavez. “This is the first
opportunity for the opposition to get back into a position of power,”
Popovic wrote at the time.
In his
memo on electricity outages, Popovic highlighted the importance of
the Venezuelan military in achieving regime change. “Alliances
with the military could be critical because in such a situation of
massive public unrest and rejection of the presidency,” the
CANVAS founder wrote, “malcontent sectors of the military will
likely decide to intervene, but only if they believe they have
sufficient support.”
While
the scenario Popovic envisioned failed to materialize in 2010, it
perfectly describes the situation gripping Venezuela today as an
opposition leader cultivated by CANVAS seeks to spin the crisis
against Maduro while calling on the military to break ranks.
Since
the Grayzone exposed the deep ties between CANVAS and Guaido’s
Popular Will party, Popovic has attempted to publicly distance
himself from his record of training Venezuela’s opposition.
Today,
however, Popovic’s 2010 memo on exploiting electricity outages
reads like a blueprint for the strategy that Guaido and his patrons
in Washington have actively implemented. Whether or not the blackout
is the result of external sabotage, it represents the “watershed
event” that CANVAS has prepared its Venezuelan cadres for.
***
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