It Figures: Florida International University Hires Juan Guaidó as Visiting Professor
By Jeremy Kuzmarov
Another insult to genuine democracy: Florida International University Hires Failed Venezuelan Coup Plotter as Visiting Professor at Adam Smith Center For Economic Freedom
Juan Guaidó, 2nd from the right, at FIU. [Source: libertarianinstitute.org]
The CIA has long had a presence on American college campuses—whether as recruiters or in political science and Russian Studies Departments.
Foreign CIA assets or political leaders or intellectuals receiving funding from the National Endowment For Democracy (NED), which finances propaganda, have been frequently appointed to faculty positions at prestigious universities.
Kanan Makyia, author of an NED-funded study documenting human rights abuses by Saddam Hussein and a cheerleader for the Iraq War, was appointed to the faculty of the political science department at Brandeis University when I was a graduate student there during the buildup to the Iraq War as one example of this.
SCUM IN HIGH PLACES: Kanan Makiya giving a speech at Brandeis University at the Crown Center for Middle East Studies. The Crown Center is funded by the Crown family which was a primary owner in the past of General Dynamics, the leading weapons maker that profited massively from the Iraq War. [Source: brandeis.edu]
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Juan Guaidó. He even got a standing ovation from the US Congress, under the Trump regime, which plotted openly for a coup and to steal Venezuela's oil. [Source: freedom.fiu.edu]
During the fall semester, Guaidó 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 a lot more money than FIU adjunct professors get who are far more qualified to teach FIU students than Guaidó as they hold Master’s and in most cases Ph.D. degrees in their fields.
Guaidó’s main specialty is in inciting hate and plotting failed uprisings against Venezuelan socialist leader Nicolás Maduro so perhaps he could give courses on that.
According to Luis Vicente León, Venezuela’s leading pollster, Guaidó spent his career in the most violent faction of Venezuela’s most radical opposition party, positioning himself at the forefront of one destabilization campaign after another.
León wrote that “these radical leaders [referring to Guaidó and his mentor Leopoldo López] have no more than 20 percent in opinion polls.” Guaidó’s party remained isolated because the majority of the population “does not want war.”
Juan Guaidó and Leopoldo López at the barricades. [Source: peru21.pe]
Despite his lack of popular support in Venezuela, with fewer than one in five Venezuelans even knowing who he was at the time, Guaidó was recognized by the Trump administration in 2019 as Venezuela’s president.
Worshipped for a time in Western media in a manner reminiscent of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, Guaidó’s 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 “stupid Bay of Pigs,” a reference to the failed CIA-backed invasion of Cuba in 1961.
Guaidó’s representatives in Colombia were also caught embezzling $125,000 meant for humanitarian aid, and Guaidó was indicted by Venezuela’s 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.
Jimmy Carter meeting with Hugo Chávez in 2012. [Source: foreignpolicy.com]
Venezuela’s late President Hugo Chávez unveils a photograph-like portrait of Venezuela’s independence hero Simón Bolívar on the 229th anniversary of Bolívar’s birth at Miraflores Presidential Palace in Caracas, Venezuela, on Tuesday, July 24, 2012. [Source: trtworld.com]
Launched by Hugo Chávez, a socialist who ruled Venezuela from 1998 until his death in 2013, the Bolivarian revolution had sought to establish Venezuela’s economic independence through national control over the country’s 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 country’s oil wealth and allowed it to be exploited by U.S. based multinational corporations.
The ample founding (private and public) and proliferation of antidemocratic institutions in the US university system, without any visible challenges from the public, politicians or media, show that America completely lacks a vigorous democracy. Only in a rightwing dictatorship or an oligarchy operating as a "capitalist democracy" can such odious things not only exist but prosper. —Ed
U.S. hostility to Venezuela’s government and support for right-wingers like Guaidó 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, Dan Cohen and Max Blumenthal of The Grayzone Project published an important article titled: “The Making of Juan Guaidó: How the U.S. regime-change laboratory created Venezuela’s coup leader.” It examined Guaidó’s incitement of violent anti-Maduro protests and his deep ties to U.S. intelligence and government agencies.
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 Chávez.
Anti-government rallies in Caracas in 2002 that were part of a coup plot against Hugo Chávez. [Source: nl.pinterest.com]
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 Chávez.
Luis Enrique Berrizbeitia [Source: lapatilla.com]
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 Chávez in 2002 and was sentenced to 13 years in prison for inciting uprisings against Maduro in 2014.
Anti-Milošević protesters in Belgrade in 2000 waving Otpor flag. [Source: wagingnonviolence.org] The hotel meeting reportedly received the blessing of Otto Reich, a fanatically anti-Castro Cuban exile working in George W. Bush’s Department of State and were financed by three petroleum industry figureheads. Otto Reich [Source: cubansinamerica.us] Inside the meetings, leaked emails stated that Guaidó and his fellow activists hatched a plan to overthrow Hugo Chávez by generating chaos through protracted spasms of street violence. Four years later, Guaidó 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, Guaidó took to the stage with Leopoldo López to urge the crowd to march on the office of the Attorney General. Guaidó 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 “prisoner of conscience.” [Source: thegrayzone.com] 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 weren’t even in Washington on the day of the January 6 riots). according to Cohen and Blumenthal, “whitewashed a deadly tactic that had killed; unarmed civilians like Santiago Pedroza and decapitated; a man named Elvis Durán, among many others.” Family members of Guarimba victims display photos of loved ones that were killed. [Source: venezuelaanalysis.com] Students taking Guaidó’s 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. Venezuela, however, is not a dictatorship as its government has won popular elections, and Guaidó was not defending democracy when he plotted coups and the destabilization of his own country in alliance with fascistic extremists. The Pentagon’s ties to the Adam Smith Center for Economic Freedom are evident in that its founding director, Carlos Díaz-Rosillo, was Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs as well as a policy adviser to Donald Trump. 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. Carlos Díaz-Rosillo [Source: freedom.fiu.edu] Ileana Ros-Lehtinen [Source: freedom.fiu.edu] Paula Dobriansky [Source: freedom.fiu.edu] Dave Webb [Source: freedom.fiu.edu] [3] Álvaro Uribe Vélez [Source: freedom.fiu.edu] Uribe Vélez and Guaidó’s appointment to prestigious positions reflects the moral corruption of higher education today and its function in supporting U.S. imperialism. support for a journal funded by the CIA-linked Ford Foundation that promotes misinformation under the guise of combatting it. 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. ↑ ↑ ↑ When you donate to CovertAction Magazine, you are supporting investigative journalism. Your contributions go directly to supporting the development, production, editing, and dissemination of the Magazine.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR / SOURCE 
Jeremy Kuzmarov is Managing Editor of CovertAction Magazine. He is the author of four books on U.S. foreign policy, including Obama’s Unending Wars(Clarity Press, 2019) and The Russians Are Coming, Again, with John Marciano (Monthly Review Press, 2018). He can be reached at: jkuzmarov2@gmail.com.
Jeremy Kuzmarov is Managing Editor of CovertAction Magazine. He is the author of four books on U.S. foreign policy, including Obama’s Unending Wars(Clarity Press, 2019) and The Russians Are Coming, Again, with John Marciano (Monthly Review Press, 2018). He can be reached at: jkuzmarov2@gmail.com. Print this article
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