ANTHONY FENTON: Well, indeed, obviously, there is an ongoing military occupation there ever since the forced ouster of President Jean-Bertrand Aristide in February of 2004 in a coup d’etat that was assisted and planned by the Canadian government, along with the U.S. government and the French government. Of course, speaking from Canada, Canada played an integral role in the overthrow of Aristide and continues to play an integral role in the post-invasion occupation of Haiti.
They're leading up to what are now the fourth scheduled period of elections. There have been several postponements. This is due in part -- the original intention of the invasion, of course, was to subvert the young process of popular democracy that existed in Haiti prior to the coup, and of course, if Aristide hadn’t been overthrown, Haiti would have already carried out their democratic election, their presidential elections.
And, of course, the fear of the United States and of organizations like the National Endowment for Democracy and the State Department, of course, was that popular democracy would take root in Haiti under another Lavalas government, and they have set about to undermine the popular movement that existed in support of Jean-Bertrand Aristide and the Lavalas Party. And we're seeing today the consolidation of the elite rule that they have long envisioned for Haiti ever since the fall of “Baby Doc” Duvalier in the mid-80s.
AMY GOODMAN: Anthony, can you just lay out what the National Endowment for Democracy is?
ANTHONY FENTON: Well, yeah, they were formed in the early 1980s under the Reagan administration. Ostensibly, they purport to promote pro-democracy organizations and democratic values across the world. Just last October, President Bush spoke at a National Endowment for Democracy gathering, reiterating the vision of Reagan as he set about to, as they say, “promote democracy throughout the world,” and they were given – they've been given various budgets allocated by Congress every year, as you said at the onset. Now their budget stands at $80 million a year. But they are, of course, just one organization among many that are linked to the U.S. Agency for International Development, as I said, the State Department. Hundreds of millions of dollars now, in fact, more money is now being spent than ever before on what they call democracy promotion.
Now, the historical record on the National Endowment for Democracy is very clear, when we look at the work of people like Philip Agee and William Robinson and William Blum, Noam Chomsky and others, and most recently, if we look at the work of attorney and independent journalist, Eva Golinger, who exposed, through Freedom of Information Act requests, the role that the N.E.D. played in attempting to subvert democracy and the revolutionary process that’s unfolding in Venezuela in 2002. The N.E.D. played a crucial role in fomenting the opposition to Hugo Chavez, and they did play a role in the attempted coup against him in April of 2002, and very much the same patterns we have seen develop in Haiti.
On your show, in 2004, you interviewed Max Blumenthal, who wrote an article, an important article for Salon that outlined the role of the International Republican Institute, and when we talk about the N.E.D., we can't talk about them without also talking about the International Republican Institute and the other affiliated organizations. There’s a virtual labyrinth of these organizations that receive funding that’s specifically earmarked for the undermining of any widespread social movements, any rudiments of popular democracy that should manifest, either in Latin America or anywhere in the world.
So, again, this is sort of the premise of what the National Endowment for Democracy really does, and as we look at what they're doing in Haiti – and how I was able to learn about what they’re currently doing in Haiti came about through the process of a first documentary reporting trip to Haiti in September and October of 2005, where we spoke to a number of N.E.D. grantees, Haitian organizations that received funding from the National Endowment for Democracy. I returned to Canada and set about to conduct a series of interviews with N.E.D. and any program officer, in particular, with I.R.I. officials, with in-country officials who are managing several million dollars in U.S.-funded democracy promotion activities, as you said also, that are linked closely to the Haitian elite, to the opposition organizations, such as the Group of 184, the Democratic Convergence. These are the organizations that agitated most strongly for the overthrow of Aristide and that were working with the N.E.D. and the I.R.I. in the years preceding the 2004 coup.
AMY GOODMAN: The I.R.I. being the International Republican Institute.
ANTHONY FENTON: Yes. We know that – for example, just the other day, I spoke to a woman who is the leader of an organization called COFEL. It’s an umbrella organization of women political leaders. In the years before the coup against Aristide in 2004, the I.R.I. would bring in, they would bus in or fly in groups of anywhere between 60 and 80 of these women. And, of course, they're busing in other men and other political figures in Haiti. But they would bus them into the Dominican Republic, because in 1999, at the time, Ambassador Timothy Carney – he was the U.S. ambassador at the time. That’s very important, because Ambassador Carney is the current interim ambassador to Haiti, and he was also a member of the lobby – the think tank in Washington called the Haiti Democracy Project that played an integral role in fomenting this demonization campaign against Aristide.
In any case, in 1999, the I.R.I. was closed down. Their operations were shut down. They were forced to leave Haiti, and until the coup in 2004, the I.R.I. did not have an in-country presence, so they were doing most of their work in the Dominican Republic with people like Stanley Lucas, who is well known as a card-carrying Republican Haitian American who was hired by the International Republican Institute during the first coup period against Aristide in the early 1990s, and he’s the one who sort of helped to build the political opposition from the Dominican Republic and enable the coup to take place. But that process has just followed through since the coup. Well, of course, the International Republican Institute now has an in-country office in Haiti, and through that office they're able to penetrate all sectors of Haitian civil society in their attempt to undermine the popular movement.
Now, I would like to mention that in my interview, and this is a rare interview with an N.E.D. program officer, and this is the program officer in Washington who is responsible for Haiti currently, a woman named Fabiola Cordoba. She took over in, I believe in, November, as the program officer, and she revealed to me, not only an extensive list of documents that show the N.E.D.’s approved grants for 2005. These are, in a sense, declassified, because these are documents that are not supposed to be published until May of 2006, at least according to another N.E.D. spokesperson. But what’s clear in these documents is that the N.E.D. went from, for example, a zero dollar budget in Haiti in 2003 to a $540,000 budget in Haiti in 2005.
What they’ve also done -- and many Haitian people that I speak to have told me that Haiti is considered the laboratory for these sort of subversive activities on the part of the United States government. And in the context of this experimental process, they’ve hired, for the first time, an in-country program officer, as you mentioned, Régine Alexandre, who was a stringer for the Associated Press and the New York Times, was doubling, moonlighting as an N.E.D. program officer, and the Associated Press severed ties with her as a result.
Now, Fabiola Cordoba also told me that when she was in Haiti in 2002, working for one of the N.E.D.’s affiliated organizations, the National Democratic Institute, she said a lot of lines were being drawn between Haiti and Venezuela, where although 70% of the population supported Aristide, there was a very fragmented opposition. The rest of the 30% was divided between 120 different opposition groups, so the objective of the I.R.I. and the N.E.D. was to consolidate this opposition to build a viable opposition to somehow break the grip that the popular movement in Haiti had on the political environment there. And she said that Chavez – something very similar was happening in Venezuela, and of course, in 2002, the coup d’état happened there on the basis of this sort of analysis, the basis, this fear that the United States has of popular democracy and the need to subvert any attempts at consolidating popular rule and implementing policies that are in the interests of the majority poor in places like Venezuela and Haiti.
AMY GOODMAN: We’re talking to Anthony Fenton, independent author and journalist who has exposed a A.P. stringer in Haiti, Régine Alexandre, as also being on the payroll of the National Endowment for Democracy. And now talking about those parallels between Haiti and Venezuela, of course, 2002, the attempted coup against Hugo Chavez, what is your understanding of the U.S. involvement in terms of the, you know, dollar amount in Venezuela, putting money into the opposition?
ANTHONY FENTON: Well, it is very interesting, because since the activities of the N.E.D. have been so thoroughly exposed by the likes of Eva Golinger and Jeremy Bigwood through The Chavez Code, they're very concerned with their perception in the area. So what they’re doing, in a way, they’ve continued to funnel large amounts of money into Venezuela, but they're doing it also by outsourcing, if you will. For example, they have given a grant to a Canadian think tank called the Canadian Foundation of the Americas, and through that, they're attempting to go through the back door, if you will, riding the perception of Canada as being a benign counterweight to the U.S. in the hemisphere, in order to penetrate Venezuelan civil society.
Commentary 
U.S. Gvt. Channels Millions Through National Endowment for Democracy to Fund Anti-Lavalas Groups in Haiti
