US Government Through the National Endowment for Democracy Funnels Millions of Dollars to Influence Haitian Elections

About two years after the overthrow of Aristide in Haiti, the nation will hold national elections next month. The top candidate is pro Aristide candidate Rene Preval.

The National Endowment for Democracy was set up in the early 1980s under President Reagan, in the wake of all the negative revelations about the CIA in the second half of the 1970s. The latter was a remarkable period. Spurred by Watergate-the Church Committee of the Senate, the Pike Committee of the House and the Rockefeller commission, created by the president, were all busy investigating the CIA. Seemingly every other day there was a headline about the discovery of some awful thing, even criminal conduct, the CIA had been mixed up in for years. The Agency was getting an exceedingly bad name, and it was causing the powers-that-be much
embarrassment.

Something had to be done. What was done was not to stop doing these
awful things. Of course not. What was done was to shift many of these
awful things to a new organization, with a nice sounding name-the
National Endowment for Democracy. The idea was that the NED would do
somewhat overtly what the CIA had been doing covertly for decades, and
thus, hopefully, eliminate the stigma associated with CIA covert
activities. It is a way to launder funds, that would formerly go to the CIA, to a non government agency (ngo).

The Endowment donated a quarter-million dollars of taxpayers' money to the Cuban-American National Fund, the ultra-fanatic anti-Castro Miami group. The CANF, in turn, financed Luis Posada Carriles, one of the most prolific and pitiless terrorists of modern times, who was involved in the blowing up of a Cuban airplane in 1976, which killed 73 people. In 1997, he was involved in a series of
bomb explosions in Havana hotels.

The NED operates with an annual budget of $80 million dollars from U.S. Congress and the State Department. In Venezuela, it's given money to several political opponents of President Hugo Chavez. With elections underway in Haiti, it's reportedly doing the same to groups linked to the country's tiny elite and former military.

It was exposed last month that an Associated Press reporter, funded by NED, was sending reports from Haiti. She has since been terminated.

According to Canadian Journalist Anthony Fenton, who has written a new book Canada in Haiti: Waging War on the Poor Majority, "So you see this family meeting on a weekly basis, coordinating their activities. They’re funneling millions of dollars to the political parties, by way of giving them credits for TV advertising, for pamphlets, for t-shirts and all sorts of other activities. And, of course, this is all geared towards -- they're hoping, I think, right now, that there will be a run-off election, sort of like there was in Liberia, where the International Republican Institute and these other organizations played a central role, as well, because if there’s a run-off election -- and it’s possible that one of their rightwing candidates, perhaps such as Marc Bazin, who's running under the Lavalas name today, but of course was a World Bank candidate that Aristide beat in a landslide in 1990 -- they're hoping that one of these candidates, maybe it'll be Henri Baker, will be able to win in a run-off."

For more info see: Democracy Now, Le Colonal Chabert and No Simple Matter. RENEGADE EYE