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The Venezuelan Experience: "democracy promotion" or subversion?

The United States, Venezuela, and “democracy promotion”: William I Robinson interviewed
William I Robinson
Jonah Gindin
4 - 8 - 2005


The “Bolivarian revolution” led by Venezuela’s combative president Hugo Chàvez provokes bitter opposition – much of it from the United States in the guise of “promoting democracy” in the oil-rich Latin American country. William I Robinson explains to Jonah Gindin how this serves the US’s long-standing, global political strategy.





The instruments of United States foreign policy have changed since the 1980s. Its interests and objectives remained more or less the same after the fall of communism in 1989-91, but the mechanisms for obtaining them have continued to evolve.

This evolution draws on thinking and planning done in what turned out to be the later years of the cold war. From the early 1980s, during their campaign against Sandinista-led Nicaragua, US policymakers began experimenting with a strategy of “promoting democracy”. This, however, is a euphemism equivalent to “national security” or the “war on terror”, says William I Robinson, professor of sociology at UC-Santa Barbara, who has tracked the idea and the policy since the 1980s.

Robinson worked as a journalist, and later an editor, with the Agencia Nueva Nicaragua in 1980-87, before becoming an advisor on US foreign policy to the Nicaraguan foreign ministry from 1987-90. He witnessed at firsthand US electoral intervention in the Nicaraguan poll of 1990.

Robinson documented all this in his 1992 book, A Faustian Bargain: U.S. Intervention in the Nicaraguan Elections and American Foreign Policy in the Post-Cold War Era, and then set out to theorise this whole shift in US foreign policy, and to look at it around the world. Those efforts culminated in his 1996 book, Promoting Polyarchy: Globalization, U.S. Intervention, and Hegemony.

In a March 2005 interview with Venezuelaanalysis.com, ex-CIA agent Phil Agee drew a parallel between US intervention in the 1990 elections in Nicaragua and the current application of the same model of intervention in Venezuela.

Many US organisations are involved in Venezuela – including the National Endowment of Democracy and its sub-foundations, the International Republican Institute, the Center for international Private Enterprise, and the AFL-CIO’s Solidarity Center; the NDI and IRI have offices in Caracas.

These groups – along with the US Agency for International Development (Usaid), and a private company on contract from Usaid called Development Alternatives International – are funding Venezuela’s political opposition.

Perhaps the best-known example is the “civil society” group Súmate, whose director Maria Corina Machado was invited to meet President Bush at the White House on 31 May – an honour Hugo Chávez, Venezuelan president, has yet to receive. But Súmate is only the tip of the iceberg: many political parties and partisan NGOs receive grants from these and other channels as part of a multi-faceted US attempt to unseat Hugo Chávez and destroy his “Bolivarian revolution”.

Robinson writes in Promoting Polyarchy:

“Unlike earlier US interventionism, the new intervention focuses much more intensely on civil society itself, in contrast to formal government structures, in intervened countries.” This new political intervention “emphasizes building up the forces in civil society of intervened countries which are allied with dominant groups in the United States and the core regions of the world system.” Thus, civil society plays a key role in “democracy promotion” strategies as “an arena for exercising domination.”
The latest test of Chávez’s popularity is local elections on 7 May, part of an electoral cycle that will culminate in the next presidential poll scheduled for late 2006. With Chávez’s approval-rating at around 70.5%, the US regime-change machine will be hard at work using whatever avenues present themselves. “This is a full-blown operation … to overthrow the government of Hugo Chávez”, says Robinson. “The U.S. state is going to assess all the different instruments” it has available to it in pursuing that end.

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To read this very interesting and eye-opening interview, please click on here:www.opendemocracy.net

posted by Annamarie at 11:12 PM