VENEZUELA : A CLUE AS TO WHAT IS GOING ON

Venezuela has been a target for regime change by the USA for decades. The most well known attempt was the attempted coup in April 2002 during which Hugo Chavez was held hostage.

The current crisis in Venezuela is due to the crash in oil prices. Oil accounts for 95% of Venezuela's exports.

But capitalising on this crisis is the Democratic Unity Roundtable, which is a coalition formed to fight the socialist ideology of Chavez and Maduro.

But who constitutes Democratic Unity Roundtable?

The party with the largest number of seats in the National Assembly is Primero Justicia with 33 seats.

The party with the fourth largest number of seats is Voluntad Popular with 14 seats.

Both of these parties were seeded with grants from the National Endowment for Democracy.

The NED also finances another major opponent of the Chavez/Maduro party: Maria Corina Machado.

Anti-government protests in Venezuela that seek regime change have been led by several individuals and organizations with close ties to the US government. Leopoldo Lopez and Maria Corina Machado- two of the public leaders behind the violent protests that started in February – have long histories as collaborators, grantees and agents of Washington. The National Endowment for Democracy “NED” and the US Agency for International Development (USAID) have channeled multi-million dollar funding to Lopez’s political parties Primero Justicia and Voluntad Popular, and Machado’s NGO Sumate and her electoral campaigns.

These Washington agencies have also filtered more than $14 million to opposition groups in Venezuela between 2013 and 2014, including funding for their political campaigns in 2013 and for the current anti-government protests in 2014. This continues the pattern of financing from the US government to anti-Chavez groups in Venezuela since 2001, when millions of dollars were given to organizations from so-called “civil society” to execute a coup d’etat against President Chavez in April 2002. After their failure days later, USAID opened an Office of Transition Initiatives (OTI) in Caracas to, together with the NED, inject more than $100 million in efforts to undermine the Chavez government and reinforce the opposition during the following 8 years.

[source : The Dirty Hand of the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) in Venezuela, Venezuela Analysis, http://venezuelanalysis.com/analysis/10641, 25th April 2014]