From FOIA documents, we see that, going back to the late '90s, just after Hugo Chávez came to power, the State Department, the National Endowment for Democracy, started providing large amounts of [U.S. taxpayer] money to the Atlas think tank network in Venezuela to orchestrate protest movements, to criticize his government, to try to delegitimize his government. In fact, when there was the kind of brief 2002 coup, that brought Hugo Chávez from power for not a very long period, but there was an attempt, and we see from these documents that the Atlas think tanks sprung into actions to try to legitimize the new coup government. There was the Carmona Decree, this kind of document that said from business leaders in Venezuela, saying, "Hugo Chávez has gone, and we’d like to move on and have a new government."
We see from this cache of documents that they are working hand in glove with the U.S. government, that these libertarian leaders, that had been trained in the United States and funded by the Atlas Network and from the [U.S. taxpayers] U.S. government, were part of a larger strategy to bring down the Chávez government.
Now, we don’t know exactly what’s going on now, but we know from the diplomatic cables from Chelsea Manning that after that period, there were repeated attempts to orchestrate large anti-government protests, to channel anger at the Chávez government and to hope for a similar situation where the opposition would be strong enough to bring the government down. So, I think it’s very likely that a similar strategy is playing out right now with the crisis in Venezuela. And indeed, we see the CEDICE and other [U.S. taxpayer funded] Atlas-backed think tanks in Venezuela promoting the opposition.
The National Endowment for Democracy, this [U.S. taxpayer funded] government-chartered foundation that’s an arm of American soft power abroad, that provides extensive financing to the Atlas Network think tanks all over the world, including in Venezuela and other places, after Trump was elected president, an Atlas Network economist and fellow, Judy Shelton, was elevated to be the chairperson of the National Endowment for Democracy. So now you have many Atlas Network think tank leaders or fellow travelers in senior positions in the administration, but also an Atlas Network employee helping to manage the U.S. foreign policy arm that’s financing the Atlas Network all across the world. […]
The Atlas Network is not only managing the protests on the street and the policy proposals, but they’re also introducing the Breitbart-style commentary and media figures in countries like Brazil.
The most surprising part of this [research] was finding out about the extensive U.S. government financing for this network, especially given their antigovernment rhetoric. I went to Buenos Aires, I went to New York, Las Vegas and Honduras, to speak to different Atlas Network leaders. But I also went to the Hoover Institute archives at Stanford University and went into the personal papers of Antony Fisher, the original founder of the first of these style think tanks, the Institute of Economic Affairs, and the original founder of the Atlas Network. And the [U.S. taxpayer] U.S. government financing comes from the very beginnings of this group. The Atlas Network was originally technically founded in 1981. As early as 1982, I found letters from Antony Fisher writing to Reagan administration officials asking for government money.
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