{"id":129302,"date":"2019-03-18T12:02:09","date_gmt":"2019-03-18T12:02:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=129302"},"modified":"2019-03-25T11:34:06","modified_gmt":"2019-03-25T11:34:06","slug":"us-regime-change-blueprint-proposed-venezuelan-electricity-blackouts-as-watershed-event-for-galvanizing-public-unrest","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2019\/03\/us-regime-change-blueprint-proposed-venezuelan-electricity-blackouts-as-watershed-event-for-galvanizing-public-unrest\/","title":{"rendered":"US Regime Change Blueprint Proposed Venezuelan Electricity Blackouts as \u2018Watershed Event\u2019 for \u2018Galvanizing Public Unrest\u2019"},"content":{"rendered":"

The US-funded CANVAS organization that trained Juan Guaido and his allies produced a 2010 memo on exploiting electricity outages and urged the opposition \u201cto take advantage of the situation\u2026towards their needs.\u201d<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

11 Mar 2019 – <\/em>A September 2010 memo<\/a> 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\u2019s electrical sector as \u201ca watershed event\u201d that \u201cwould likely have the impact of galvanizing public unrest in a way that no opposition group could ever hope to generate.\u201d<\/p>\n

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 \u2013 a crisis that Venezuela\u2019s government blames on US sabotage.<\/p>\n

It was authored by Srdja Popovic<\/a> of the Center for Applied Non-Violent Action and Strategies (CANVAS), a Belgrade-based \u201cdemocracy promotion\u201d organization funded by the US government that has trained thousands of US-aligned youth activists in countries where the West seeks regime change.<\/p>\n

This group reportedly hosted Guaido and the key leaders of his Popular Will party for a series of training sessions, fashioning them into a \u201cGeneration 2007\u201d determined to foment resistance to then-President Hugo Chavez and sabotage his plans to implement \u201c21st century socialism\u201d in Venezuela.<\/p>\n

In the 2010 memo, CANVAS\u2019s Popovic declared, \u201cA key to Chavez\u2019s current weakness is the decline in the electricity sector.\u201d Popovic explicitly identified the Simon Bolivar Hydroelectric Plant as a friction point, emphasizing that \u201cwater levels at the Guri dam are dropping, and Chavez has been unable to reduce consumption sufficiently to compensate for the deteriorating industry.\u201d<\/p>\n

Speculating on a \u201cgrave possibility that some 70 percent of the country\u2019s electricity grid could go dark as soon as April 2010,\u201d the CANVAS leader stated that \u201can opposition group would be best served to take advantage of the situation and spin it against Chavez and towards their needs.\u201d<\/p>\n

Flash forward to March 2019, and the scenario outlined by Popovic is playing out almost exactly as he had imagined.<\/p>\n

On March 7, just days after Guaido\u2019s return from Colombia, where he participated in the failed and demonstrably violent<\/a> 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<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Days later, electricity remains sporadic across the country. Meanwhile, Guaido has done everything he can \u201cto take advantage of the situation and spin it\u201d against President Nicolas Maduro \u2013 just as his allies were urged to do over eight years before by CANVAS.<\/p>\n

Rubio vows \u201ca period of suffering\u201d for Venezuela hours before the blackout<\/strong><\/p>\n

The Venezuelan government has placed the blame squarely on Washington, accusing it of sabotage through a cyber-attack on its electrical infrastructure. Key players in the US-directed coup attempt have done little to dispel the accusation.<\/p>\n

In a tweet on March 8, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo framed the electricity outage as a pivotal stage in US plans for regime change:<\/p>\n

No food. No medicine. Now, no power. Next, no Maduro.<\/em>
\n\u2014 Secretary Pompeo (@SecPompeo) March 8, 2019<\/a><\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

At noon on March 7, during a hearing on Venezuela at the Senate Foreign Relations Subcommittee, Sen. Marco Rubio<\/a> explicitly called for the US to stir \u201cwidespread unrest,\u201d declaring that it \u201cneeds to happen\u201d in order to achieve regime change.<\/p>\n

\u201cVenezuela is going to enter a period of suffering no nation in our hemisphere has confronted in modern history,\u201d Rubio proclaimed<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Around 5 PM<\/a>, the Simon Bolivar Hydroelectric Plant experienced a total and still unexplained collapse<\/a>. Residents of Caracas and throughout Venezuela were immediately plunged into darkness.<\/p>\n

At 5:18 PM, a clearly excited Rubio took to Twitter to announce the blackout and claim that \u201cbackup generators have failed.\u201d It was unclear how Rubio had obtained such specific information so soon after the outage occurred. According to Jorge Rodriguez<\/a>, the communications minister of Venezuela, local authorities did not know if backup generators had failed at the time of Rubio\u2019s tweet.<\/p>\n

Back in Caracas, Guaido immediately set out to exploit the situation, just as his CANVAS trainers had advised over eight years before. Taking to Twitter just over an hour after Rubio, Guaido declared<\/a>, \u201cthe light will return when the usurpation [of Maduro] ends.\u201d Like Pompeo, the self-declared president framed the blackouts as part of a regime change strategy, not an accident or error.<\/p>\n

Two days later, Guaido was at the center of opposition rally he convened in affluent eastern Caracas, bellowing into a megaphone<\/a>: \u201cArticle 187 when the time comes. We need to be in the streets, mobilized. It depends on us, not on anybody else.\u201d<\/p>\n

Article 187 establishes the right of the National Assembly \u201cto authorize the use of Venezuelan military missions abroad or foreign in the country.\u201d<\/p>\n

Upon his mention of the constitutional article, Guaido\u2019s supporters responded,<\/a> \u201cIntervention! Intervention!\u201d<\/p>\n

Exploiting crisis to \u201cget back into a position of power\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n

As Dan Cohen and I reported here at the Grayzone<\/a>, Guaido\u2019s rise to prominence \u2013 and the coup plot that he has been appointed to oversee \u2013 is the product of a decade-long project overseen by the Belgrade-based CANVAS outfit.<\/p>\n

CANVAS is a spinoff of Otpor, a Serbian protest group founded by Srdja Popovic<\/a> in 1998 at the University of Belgrade. Otpor, which means \u201cresistance\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

CANVAS has been funded<\/a> largely through the National Endowment for Democracy<\/a>, a CIA cut-out that functions as the US government\u2019s main arm of promoting regime change. \u00a0According to leaked internal emails<\/a> from Stratfor, an intelligence firm known as the \u201cshadow CIA<\/a>,\u201d CANVAS \u201cmay have also received CIA funding and training during the 1999\/2000 anti-Milosevic struggle.\u201d<\/p>\n

A leaked email<\/a> from a Stratfor staffer noted that after they ousted Milosevic, \u201cthe kids who ran OTPOR grew up, got suits and designed CANVAS\u2026 or in other words a \u2018export-a-revolution\u2019 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 ;).\u201d<\/p>\n

Stratfor subsequently revealed that CANVAS \u201cturned its attention to Venezuela\u201d in 2005, after training opposition movements that led pro-NATO regime change operations across Eastern Europe.<\/p>\n

In September 2010, as Venezuela headed for a parliamentary election, CANVAS produced a series of memos outlining the plans they had hatched with \u201cnon-formal actors\u201d like Guaido and his cadre of student activists to bring down Chavez. \u201cThis is the first opportunity for the opposition to get back into a position of power,\u201d Popovic wrote at the time.<\/p>\n

In his memo on electricity outages, Popovic highlighted the importance of the Venezuelan military in achieving regime change. \u201cAlliances with the military could be critical because in such a situation of massive public unrest and rejection of the presidency,\u201d the CANVAS founder wrote, \u201cmalcontent sectors of the military will likely decide to intervene, but only if they believe they have sufficient support.\u201d<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Since the Grayzone exposed the deep ties between CANVAS and Guaido\u2019s Popular Will party, Popovic has attempted to publicly distance himself<\/a> from his record of training Venezuela\u2019s opposition.<\/p>\n

Today, however, Popovic\u2019s 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 \u201cwatershed event\u201d that CANVAS has prepared its Venezuelan cadres for.<\/p>\n

___________________________________________________<\/p>\n

Max Blumenthal is an award-winning journalist and the author of several books, including best-selling <\/em>Republican Gomorrah<\/a>,\u00a0Goliath<\/a>, The Fifty One Day War<\/a>, and <\/em>The Management of Savagery<\/a>. He has produced print articles for an array of publications, many video reports, and several documentaries, including\u00a0<\/em>Killing Gaza<\/a>. Blumenthal founded <\/em>The Grayzone in 2015 to shine a journalistic light on America\u2019s state of perpetual war and its dangerous domestic repercussions.<\/em><\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 thegrayzone.com<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

11 Mar 2019 – The US-funded CANVAS organization that trained Juan Guaido and his allies produced a 2010 memo on exploiting electricity outages and urged the opposition \u201cto take advantage of the situation\u2026towards their needs.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":129207,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[57,65,53],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-129302","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-militarism","category-anglo-america","category-latin-america-and-the-caribbean"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/129302","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=129302"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/129302\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/129207"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=129302"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=129302"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=129302"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}