Juan GuaidĂł, 2nd from the right, at FIU. Photo: libertarianinstitute.org.
By Covert Action Magazine – Oct 18, 2023
After leading a failed military coup, a failed mercenary invasion of his country, and a non-existent presidency, Juan GuaidĂł gets his golden parachute at an intelligence-adjacent US university.
This article was originally published by Jeremy Kuzmarov in Covert Action Magazine.
Florida International University has appointed Juan GuaidĂł, a Venezuelan coup leader created in the U.S. regime-change laboratory, as a visiting professor.
An engineer by training, GuaidĂłâs appointment is at the Adam Smith Center for Economic Freedom, which FIU describes as a âworld-class, independent, non-partisan think tankâ with a mission âto advance economic and individual freedom and human prosperity.â
During the fall semester, GuaidĂł will conduct eight study group sessions, in addition to mentoring students, conducting research and being part of public conferences and seminars.
He will be paid $40,000, FIU said.
This compensation is more than FIU adjunct professors get who are far more qualified to teach FIU students than GuaidĂł, as they often hold Masterâs and in most cases Ph.D. degrees in their field.
GuaidĂłâs main specialty is in inciting societal divisions and plotting failed uprisings against Venezuelan socialist leader NicolĂĄs Maduro.
According to Luis Vicente LeĂłn, Venezuelaâs leading pollster, GuaidĂł spent his career in the most violent faction of Venezuelaâs most radical opposition party, positioning himself at the forefront of one destabilization campaign after another.
LeĂłn wrote that âthese radical leaders [referring to GuaidĂł and his mentor Leopoldo LĂłpez] have no more than 20 percent in opinion polls.â GuaidĂłâs party remained isolated because the majority of the population âdoes not want war.â
Despite his lack of popular support in Venezuela, with fewer than one in five Venezuelans even knowing who he was at the time, GuaidĂł was recognized by the Trump administration in 2019 as Venezuelaâs president.
Worshipped for a time in Western media in a manner reminiscent of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, GuaidĂłâs stock fell when some of his supporters were captured and killed after launching an amateurish raid into Venezuela from Colombia in an attempt to overthrow Maduro that was dubbed the âstupid Bay of Pigs,â a reference to the failed CIA-backed invasion of Cuba in 1961.
In Venezuelan custody, ex-Green Beret and Silvercorp mercenary Luke Denman confirms contract with Juan Guaido, says plan was to kidnap Venezuelan Pres. Maduro and fly him to the US as a captive #BayOfPiglets pic.twitter.com/hg46mbBfRz
— Max Blumenthal (@MaxBlumenthal) May 6, 2020
GuaidĂłâs representatives in Colombia were also caught embezzling $125,000 meant for humanitarian aid, and GuaidĂł was indicted by Venezuelaâs Attorney General last week, accused of stealing the resources of the state owned oil company, Petroleos de Venezuela (PDVSA) for his own benefit, costing taxpayers $19 billion.
Guaidó has meanwhile advocated for sanctions that led to the deaths of thousands of his own countrymen.
As the standard bearer of Venezuelaâs Bolivarian Revolution, Maduro has sustained popular support despite making some mistakes, winning the 2018 election with 6.2 million votes (67.7%) compared to challenger Henri FalcĂłnâs 1.9 million (21%).
Venezuela’s National Assembly Condemns GuaidĂł Gang’s Scheme to Auction CITGO
Jimmy Carter called the technical aspects of Venezuelaâs electoral system âthe best in the world.â
Launched by Hugo ChĂĄvez, a socialist who ruled Venezuela from 1998 until his death in 2013, the Bolivarian revolution had sought to establish Venezuelaâs economic independence through national control over the countryâs oil, whose revenues were used to develop the economy and uplift the poor.
Throughout much of the 20th century, Venezuela was ruled by an oligarchy, which monopolized the countryâs oil wealth and allowed it to be exploited by U.S. based multinational corporations.
By 2013, when ChĂĄvez died of cancer, poverty and inequality had been reduced substantially, literacy had increased, and Venezuelaâs UN Human Development Index, a composite measure of national income (GDP), access to education, and child mortality, rose from seventh in the region to fourth.
U.S. hostility to Venezuelaâs government and support for right-wingers like GuaidĂł stems from the threat of a good example and fear of the loss of traditional U.S. hegemony in Latin America that dates back to the 19th century.
As a de facto puppet of the U.S, Guaidó advocated for privatizing PDVSA, lowering the corporate tax rate, and defunding social programs that greatly improved the quality of life for Venezuelans, while reintegrating Venezuela with Washington dominated financial institutions.
Creation of U.S. Regime-Change Laboratory
In January 2019, Max Blumenthal and Dan Cohen published an important article for The Grayzone entitled: âThe Making of Juan GuaidĂł: How the U.S. regime-change laboratory created Venezuelaâs coup leader.â It examined GuaidĂłâs incitement of violent anti-Maduro protests and his deep ties to U.S. intelligence and government agencies.
Blumenthal and Cohen wrote that âalongside a cadre of right-wing student activists, GuaidĂł was cultivated to undermine Venezuelaâs socialist-oriented government, destabilize the country, and one day seize power.â
In 2002, a young Guaidó helped lead anti-government rallies after the Venezuelan government declined to renew the license of Radio Caracas Televisión (RCTV), a privately owned station that played a leading role in the 2002 coup against Hugo Chåvez.
Five years later, after graduating from Andrés Bello Catholic University of Caracas, Guaidó moved to Washington, DC to enroll in the Governance and Political Management Program at George Washington University, under the tutelage of Venezuelan economist Luis Enrique Berrizbeitia, one of the top Latin American neoliberal economists.
Berrizbeitia is a former executive director of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) who spent more than a decade working in the Venezuelan energy sector, under the old oligarchic regime that was ousted by Chåvez.
In 2009, after returning to Venezuela, Guaidó formed a new right-wing political party led by Leopoldo López, a Princeton-educated former mayor of a wealthy district in Caracas who was part of one of the three families that tried to orchestrate a coup against Chåvez in 2002 and was sentenced to 13 years in prison for inciting uprisings against Maduro in 2014.
In November 2010, GuaidĂł attended a secret five-day training at a hotel in Mexico run by Otpor; Belgrade-based regime-change operatives backed by the U.S. government who had helped overthrow Slobodan MiloĆĄeviÄâs socialist government after the Clinton administrationâs bombing of Serbia.
Venezuela’s Public Ministry Has Over 20 Cases Open Against GuaidĂł
The hotel meeting reportedly received the blessing of Otto Reich, a fanatically anti-Castro Cuban exile working in George W. Bushâs Department of State and were financed by three petroleum industry figureheads.
Inside the meetings, leaked emails stated that GuaidĂł and his fellow activists hatched a plan to overthrow Hugo ChĂĄvez by generating chaos through protracted spasms of street violence.
Four years later, GuaidĂł tweeted a video showing himself clad in a helmet and gas mask surrounded by masked armed elements that engaged in a violent clash with police. This was during the so-called Guarimbas protests that resulted in the death of 126 people, majority of them Chavistas, and mass destruction of public infrastructure.
At one point during the uprising, GuaidĂł took to the stage with Leopoldo LĂłpez to urge the crowd to march on the office of the Attorney General.
GuaidĂł alongside Lopez at February 12, 2014 Guarimba rally. Lopez was later sentenced to 13 years in prison for inciting the violent uprising, though has since been feted by the NED, which described him as a great democrat and âprisoner of conscience.â
The Proud Boys and other alleged instigators of the January 6 Capitol Riots were given long prison sentences for sedition for far less incendiary provocations (some of the Proud Boys convicted on sedition charges werenât even in Washington on the day of the January 6 riots).
In a televised appearance in 2016, Guaidó dismissed deaths resulting from guayasâa guarimba tactic involving stretching steel wire across a roadway in order to injure or kill motorcyclistsâas a âmyth.â His comments, according to Cohen and Blumenthal, âwhitewashed a deadly tactic that had killed unarmed civilians like Santiago Pedroza and decapitated a man named Elvis DurĂĄn, among many others.â
What will GuaidĂł teach students at FIU?
Students taking GuaidĂłâs seminar at FIU this semester are likely oblivious to the violent past of their new professor, or his fanatical right-wing views or use as a tool of the U.S. regime-change establishment.
Publicly, GuaidĂł has thanked FIU for offering âa new stage and an opportunity to talk about the challenges of defending democracy, resisting a dictatorship and accompanying the most vulnerable.â
Venezuela, however, is not a dictatorship as its government has won popular elections, and GuaidĂł was not defending democracy when he plotted coups and the destabilization of his own country in alliance with fascistic extremists.
The Pentagonâs ties to the Adam Smith Center for Economic Freedom are evident in that its founding director, Carlos DĂaz-Rosillo, was Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs as well as a policy adviser to Donald Trump.
The Adam Smith Center for Economic Freedomâs Board of advisers include: a) Paula Dobriansky, a neoconservative State Department official and member of the Board of Directors of the NED who is the daughter of Ukrainian Nazi; b) David Webb, a founder of the Tea Party in New York; and c) Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, a former congresswoman from Florida who was also an NED Board member and part of the Miami anti-Castro Cuban mafia.
In the Spring, the Adam Smith Center for Economic Freedom named former Colombian president Ălvaro Uribe VĂ©lez (2002-2010) as a fellow. A right-wing idealogue and favorite of the U.S. like GuaidĂł, Uribe VĂ©lez presided over large scale killings of left wing guerrillas, was accused of creating illegal paramilitary death squads, and was listed in a Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) report as a Medellin drug cartel collaborator.
Uribe VĂ©lez and GuaidĂłâs appointment to prestigious positions reflects the moral corruption of higher education today and its function in supporting U.S. imperialism.
CovertAction Magazine has recently reported on Columbia Universityâs appointment of an arguable war criminal to its faculty, Hillary Clinton, who served as Secretary of State in an administration that pushed for regime change in Venezuela among other countries; and Harvard Universityâs support for a journal funded by the CIA-linked Ford Foundation that promotes misinformation under the guise of combatting it.
Another article focused on the military use of college campuses for developing and testing new weapons systems.
All of these cases exemplify the betrayal of the academic mission of institutions whose primary purpose should be to provoke critical thinking among students and to cultivate new ideas for the betterment of society.
The latter becomes impossible when students are being instructed by violent thugs, narco-traffickers, state propagandists and war mongers along with conservative ideologues whose life mission is to expunge the humanistic ideals associated with socialism.
Jeremy Kuzmarov
Jeremy Kuzmarov is Managing Editor of CovertAction Magazine. He is the author of four books on US foreign policy, including Obamaâs Unending Wars (Clarity Press, 2019) and The Russians Are Coming, Again, with John Marciano (Monthly Review Press, 2018).
