Feb 3, 2023 , 11:03 p.m.
The new "field of struggle" of Venezuelan NGOs are the negative effects of the 502 unilateral coercive measures applied by the United States and the European Union against Venezuela (Photo: Twitter)
Around the world there are groups and organizations that present themselves as independent and non-profit, in which the State does not participate and that seek to influence public life through the independent management of social, development or related issues. Human rights. This is how the so-called Non-Governmental Organizations (NGO) are defined.
What are NGOs?
These are private entities that synergize with projects commonly called "cooperation" and are financed by governments and corporations, although their name says otherwise. When they talk about cooperation, they refer to an interest in "guaranteeing public welfare", as defined by the NGO Oxfam.
They arose in the early 1960s from various groups of experts and volunteers with social, economic, environmental, cultural and other concerns, especially in regions of the world with marginalized majorities. However, analyst Aram Aharonian argues that they are part of non-military counterinsurgency strategies.
Regarding them, Article 71 of the Charter of the United Nations Organization says :
“ The Economic and Social Council may make suitable arrangements for consultations with non-governmental organizations dealing with matters within the Council's competence. Such arrangements may be made with international organizations and, if applicable, with national organizations, after consultation with the respective Member of the United Nations.”
Unlike government institutions, they have relative autonomy and freedom because they can define their methods and work rhythms. Many of them respond more to interests, trends, fashions and myths than to the needs of the social groups that receive their support. This is how they justify the use of funds and obtain immediate and spectacular results, some of their limitations:
Projects to promote techniques (such as green energy or climate-smart agriculture): They are carried out with a marketing approach, without really considering whether they correspond to the needs of the groups or their notions of sovereignty.
Welfare projects: Typical of some private cooperation organizations that make donations and promote a subsidized mentality among the recipients and that, on the other hand, tend to compete unfairly with local production.
“Corporate development” projects: They take up the productivist logic of the large cooperation apparatuses, setting up companies that do not take into account, for example, the logic of the productive systems of the local peasantry.
(Photo: Counterpunch)
They have great influence in the different instances of government and have escalated, together with the transnational elites, to multi-stakeholder associations (Multistakeholder partnerships, MSP) that are spaces for mediation and participation in which they exercise the representation of the different sectors of the society.
What are not NGOs?
It is not just about entities focused on “enriching democratic processes and meeting the needs of citizens” as pontificated by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID). Since its peak in the 1980s and 1990s, during the Reagan administration and the end of the Cold War, its fields of intervention have diversified: humanitarian emergencies, food, human rights and the environment. This allows them to become involved in the various facets of the internal politics of the countries.
An arsenal of organizations has dedicated itself to receiving funding from the USAID, NED (National Endowment for Democracy) and its satellites, Freedom House and George Soros's Open Society. Part of their narrative metabolism consists in affirming that they are not organizations that intend to "save" anyone. Oxfam affirms that it is the opposite, it is supposed that its "development aid projects" seek to eradicate the causes that make thousands of people plunge into poverty. Hence, terms such as "empowerment", "public advocacy" and "civil society" are legal tender when it comes to strategy.
Although the discourse with which they are conceived is plural, in reality many of them do not support a neutral approach to the economic model they advocate. Aharonian says that:
“ ...they are not part of the union resistance, nor of the neighborhood struggles, nor of the classist peasant organizations, nor of the sectors of thought and organic intellectuality to a national, popular and anti-imperialist project. On the contrary, they focus their activity on local private projects, promoting the private business discourse in local communities through micro-enterprises.”
This is how USAID presents its association with NGOs, within the neoliberal and globalizing model, based on the private sphere, which the United States tries to impose on the world. The problems that they address, and that are part of the cooperation agendas, are always related to a certain unilateral conception of the desirable socio-economic organization and insertion of the countries that receive it.
Many donors have policies that dictate the circumstances under which cooperation can take place. For example, four years after the earthquake in Haiti, a substantial proportion of US development funds in the country were still channeled through US companies, rather than Haitian companies. Although the reason may have been local corruption, there was a "misplaced" funds scandal surrounding the Clinton Foundation.
The NGO-based model of civic engagement is not neutral either, nor are the governments that most promote it. In 2001, executive order 13,224 (Patriot Act ratified in 2004) of the US government established the prohibition of transactions with persons and organizations that the Executive Branch, not the Judiciary, considered associated with terrorism. This allowed the government to freeze the assets controlled or owned by these entities and those who support them.
In contrast, USAID financed "support for democracy" with 248 million dollars in the second half of 2022 in countries of the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS), made up of former Soviet states Russia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Kazakhstan , Kyrgyzstan, Moldova, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan. The administrator of the aforementioned agency, Samantha Power, clarified that they invested only 243 million in all of 2021.
The United States has long struggled to expand its influence and soft power in the CIS, so USAID has significantly increased its investments in the region, particularly in peripheral CIS states Armenia, Georgia and Moldova, where the The biggest beneficiaries of the new grants have been NGOs and the media.
Free but not that much
Even though the laws of Europe and the United States are replete with regulations that claim to guarantee freedom of association, NGOs do not operate at their own discretion. In 2007, the Committee of Ministers of the Council of Europe issued Recommendation 14 to the Member States on the legal status of NGOs in Europe and established as a cause for termination of their legal personality that "they have committed a serious offense in the sense of voluntarily participating in activities that are incompatible with the objectives for which the NGO was founded (including being an essentially non-profit organization)” (Literal 89).
The International Standards related to information and disclosure requirements for NGOs, issued by the Council of Europe in 2018, stipulate the duties of public officials to disclose to any supervisory authority their membership of certain types of them, also obliging them to submit annual reports of activity, in addition to the financial statements.
Via the Patriot Act, a US government official can establish fines and prison sentences of up to 15 years for those who give material support or resources that are used in acts classified as terrorist. The sentence can be lifelong if the official considers that the act causes the death of a person.
The legal regulation of the activities of NGOs in the Global North seeks to create records that require the declaration of their existence, their activities and their sources of financing, as well as the relationships they may maintain with other subjects, national or international. In addition, for Europe the financing of these organizations is limited by laws "relating to the financing of elections and political parties", as analyzed by a study on the legal status of NGOs.
a carousel of money
The so-called international cooperation is based on the fact that the countries of the Global North have a mass of economic, financial, human, technical and military resources that can be transferred to the Global South, so that each country "develops capacities and adopts political actions to solve certain problems ”. The altruistic and humanitarian façade of those countries hides the fact that these funds come from the accumulated profit that the countries of the North have obtained by using the resources of the countries of the South.
This is demonstrated by a study led by Jason Hickel, a researcher at the Institute of Environmental Science and Technology of the Autonomous University of Barcelona (ICTA-UAB), in Spain, who has analyzed the environmental footprint to calculate the scale and value of resource hoarding. of the South between the years 1990 and 2015.
There is no level playing field in the NGO world , a study carried out by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) revealed that 20% of NGOs concentrate 80 to 90% of all available resources. This leads to furious competition between them for funding from donors.
In Venezuela, key aspects of how they influence national politics and the transparency of their actions have been revealed . Last Tuesday, January 31, Jorge Barragán, spokesman for International Affairs of the Alianza del Lápiz party, denounced the destination of the 1 billion dollars of supposed humanitarian aid revealed by the former Secretary of State of the United States, Mike Pompeo, in his last book "Never give an inch":
“ We reviewed reports from USAID where they reveal that this cooperation agency shows that, of 100% of the resources assigned for humanitarian aid, only 2% reached people who really needed it. In other words, only 2% of the 1,000 million that Mike Pompeo said in the book, had the ability to reach people. The other 98% is not auditable, it got lost along the way.”
The new outpost of NGOs in Venezuela not only privileges the issue of human rights but has begun to broaden the spectrum in other areas such as the environment, health , unions , gender , social assistance, LGBTIQ+ activism , among others. It has been reviewed how they have tried to exert social pressure by turning the socioeconomic effects suffered by the working population as a result of the 502 unilateral coercive measures applied by the United States and the European Union against Venezuela into a “field of struggle”.
Behind the financial circuits established for the operation of NGOs lives the vision of a south that needs to be civilized, this legitimizes intervention and interference.
It is already customary that many of these organizations are part of the offensives of the global elites to ensure the unipolarity of the global order. Although such an order claims to be "rule-based," the question remains as to who sets the rules and how they are enforced.
https://misionverdad.com/venezuela/ong- ... que-no-son
THE SHADOW OF HRW AND AMNESTY INTERNATIONAL
THE TRAIL OF THE US IN THE SPONSORSHIP OF INTERNATIONAL NGOS
Feb 1, 2023 , 10:14 a.m.
When NGOs claim to be "independent", they really mean that they are "funded by the West" (Photo: Getty Images)
Organizations that revolve around the theme of "human rights" and "democracy," and that call themselves independent, are really just another arm of US imperialism. It is a reality that, from this rostrum, has been addressed on multiple occasions, especially due to the role they have played in foreign intervention plans against Venezuela.
Billionaires and politicians from the US government, but also with disbursements from the European Union , are in charge of increasing the accounts of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) so that they act as managers in all kinds of chaotic or destabilizing situations in countries whose governments do not follow the directive of Washington, since "color revolutions" and political crises.
Now that the National Assembly approved in its first discussion a bill that seeks to "supervise and regularize" NGOs, which has unleashed a national and international public relations campaign to discredit it, it is important to review the entities and actors that instrumentalized for their political ends.
BEHIND THE CURTAIN OF "DEMOCRACY" AND "HUMAN RIGHTS"
NGOs such as Human Rights Watch (HRW) and Amnesty International (AI) say they do not allow any government to finance their activities. The first has written on its website that, to ensure its supposed independence, "we do not accept government funds directly or indirectly", and the second maintains the same thing : "we neither request nor accept funds from governments or political parties for our activity of research in human rights".
Regarding financing of corporate origin, both assure, in different words, that they refrain from receiving donations from private donors that could compromise their research work.
We can verify that their claims are fallacious. Although there is a certain degree of discretion that avoids knowing, in great detail, the origin of the money received by HRW and Amnesty International, information continues to leak that exposes the NGOs regarding the bosses and orders to which they are subordinate.
Certain NGOs are fundamental actors in the tables of political violence and destabilization against governments (Photo: Reuters)
In this sense, we review some data published by the journalist Benjamin Norton that demonstrate the link between HRW and AI with the US government and large corporations.
"HRW and Amnesty are the main players in the Western human rights industry. Both insist on being independent, but are the opposite, with extensive ties to the US and other Western governments," says Norton.
First, there is the statement that former US Secretary of State Colin Powell once offered in October 2001, weeks after the George W. Bush administration began its invasion of Afghanistan. Powell, who was at a foreign policy conference with nongovernmental organization leaders, stressed the importance of ensuring that the State Department and other branches of government have "the best relationship with NGOs," because NGOs "are for us a force multiplier, such an important part of our combat team."
Later, he dismisses the idea that NGOs are not a political arm of the government, precisely by noting that the manufactured illusion of independence is "what makes them so valuable" and what "gives them the flexibility" to do their job. .
Today, the Biden administration has reaffirmed this. His secretary of state, Antony Blinken, met in March 2022 with the heads of HRW and AI to discuss "human rights challenges, including in Ukraine, Russia, China and the Middle East." The information, which was posted on his Twitter account, was accompanied by a link to a report titled " US Support for Human Rights Defenders ." Norton writes that the document shows how the State Department uses alleged human rights defenders to promote Washington's interests abroad.
The report refers to "civil society" organizations operating in countries of the Global South, but also extends to HRW and AI.
The ways in which these NGOs are linked to the US government should not only be seen as direct financing, of which there is opacity from its sources and little transparency in this regard, but there are also other types of links. Norton explains that HRW is used to hiring former White House officials, as well as "CIA operatives and NATO war criminals."
At the corporate level, HRW is financed by the financial speculator George Soros, through the Open Society Foundations, which distributes donations to a vast network of NGOs for the neoliberalization of state structures throughout the world, under the concept of "societies open". It is known, for example, that in 2010 he gave 100 million dollars to HRW .
Let us quote the description that the Hungarian-born billionaire himself has of open societies : "The concepts of open society and market economy are intimately connected, and global capitalism has given us the closest thing to an open global society." According to Soros, the United States and the European Union are close to being classified as open societies. In other countries, the NGOs financed by Open Society have the objective of pressing for a change towards that model that consigns capitalism in its neoliberal phase as a dogma of faith.
As for AI, it and its subsidiaries receive money from the Open Society, but also from the Ford Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation. Norton cites historian Frances Stonor Saunders, who notes that these groups are linked to the CIA, describing them as "conscious instruments of America's covert foreign policy," and that they are "an integral component of the Cold War machine." of the United States".
Its origins are another factor that makes it possible to appreciate how the appearance of an independent organization is a facade to hide its true face as an agent of the United States, the European Union and corporations. One of AI's co-founders, Peter Benenson, "was an outspoken anti-communist with close ties to the British Foreign and Colonial Office, who supported the Apartheid regime of South Africa at the request of the British government," writes MintPress journalist Alan MacLeod. , in a research paper on the support of NGOs for the coup d'état in Bolivia against former President Evo Morales, in 2019.
Luis Kutner, the other co-founder of the NGO, was an agent of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI, its acronym in English) who became involved in the assassination carried out by the US government against the leader of the Black Panther political organization. "Kutner went on to form an organization called 'Friends of the FBI,' dedicated to countering and combating criticism of the Bureau," adds MacLeod.
NGO REGULARIZATION IS A REASONABLE ACT OF A SOVEREIGN STATE
In Latin America, Venezuela is a recurring target of NGOs, understood as instruments for intervention. The obsession of the HRW Americas division confirms this. To mention some recent grievances, we have that, at a time when the plan for regime change via "parallel government" had greater support from the United States' partners, NGOs took it upon themselves to attack the country with biased reports on the humanitarian situation, paving the way to undermine the image of legitimacy of the Venezuelan State and its government in favor of the US agenda (the "Guaidó project", now "Delegate Commission").
The schedule continues today. AI took advantage of the visit of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, Volker Türk, to send him a letter expressing "concern over the situation in Venezuela regarding human rights." The nomenclature of "humanitarian crisis" is agitated in the country due to the signing of agreements at the Dialogue Table in Mexico (with which the lifting of illegal sanctions is sought), the end of the "interim period" and the deterioration of the political forces of the Venezuelan oppositions.
The case is not exclusive in the region. During the last five years, the failed attempts to destabilize the governments of Cuba and Nicaragua , and the coup d'état in Bolivia , have been conducted largely thanks to the efforts of NGOs, contributing to the creation of a context of political violence. , institutional and social destabilization and anti-state public relations campaigns.
The law that is under discussion in the National Assembly seeks to prevent foreign forces, through NGOs, from interfering in the internal affairs of Venezuela. In response, efforts are now focusing on denouncing the Venezuelan government's action, calling it "another attempt to restrict and control civil society," AI said in a statement published on January 25. According to this entity, NGOs "are at risk" when it really comes down to being more transparent with respect to their financing channels, by entry and exit.
In an analysis published in this forum on the Wilson Center report that suggests the application of a new US strategy for Venezuela, data is provided on the opaque financing that different organizations (political and non-governmental) receive through the National Foundation for Democracy (NED):
"For USAID, which since 2018, the year in which the floodgates were opened through the UN to different modalities of 'humanitarian aid' as a mechanism primarily for political decompression, by September 2022 had announced having allocated 367 million of dollars in 'additional humanitarian assistance' In the same sense, the NED declares, according to its last rendering of accounts (2021, in February they will publish that of 2022) to have publicly allocated under its standards the bulky figure of 4 million 324 thousand 293 dollars , since it is an increase of approximately one million dollars with respect to the previous year .
"Which could establish the question of to what extent, in reality, these alleged dividends are actually being destined to assist people in extreme precariousness, in poverty or despair (which has a lot to do with the also well-known picture of depression economic product of the 'sanctions') and how much, in reality, is being allocated to the 'strengthening' of that 'democratic civil society', 'human rights defenders' or 'independent media'".
As certain NGOs continue to contribute to a pattern of social destabilization and undermining of Venezuela's national security, submitting their activities to the rule of law becomes an inevitable and urgent requirement to continue moving towards more stable governance.
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