By Katu Arkonada on March 8, 2021
Andrés Manuel López Obrador. Photo: Roberto García / La Jornada.
During the last few months, Andrés Manuel López Obrador has been criticizing the United States for interfering in the internal affairs of the country, due to the financing it grants to several “civil society” groups, but with an active participation in the political and media battering against López Obrador’s government.
One of these organizations is Mexicans Against Corruption, directed until recently by the junior Claudio X. González, whose family owns Kimberly-Clark in Mexico, and who has financed the opposition platform Yes for Mexico.
López Obrador’s denunciations are just a sample of the broad scaffolding that the U.S. administration deploys in Mexico against this nation, which also includes other countries in the region. But just as we know the history of the interference of the political, economic and media elites in Mexico, there is much ignorance of how the money from the United States arrives for the coup operation against the government of López Obrador.
Most of it is channeled through the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), created by Ronald Reagan’s administration to legitimize covert actions carried out by the CIA. From 2016 to date, the NED has allocated about $8,376,549 to programs in Mexico on democracy, gender violence, emigration, elections and “political empowerment.”
Another institution, the National Democratic Institute (NDI), also created under the umbrella of Reagan, the cold war, and the fight against communist guerrillas in Central America, has received from 2016 to now around $3,000,000 for its operation in Mexico. It would be a great exercise in transparency for both NED and NDI to declare what the funds have been used for, especially those linked to political programs and media (which then operate against the government).
But in addition to NED and NDI, the Mexican opposition has sought help on other fronts to attack López Obrador’s administration, such as the Cuban extreme right. There we have the case of the ultra-right National ANTI-AMLO Front (FRENAAA), a self-styled peaceful and citizen movement outside of political parties, created by businessmen that includes Pedro Luis Martin Bringas, Juan Bosco Abascal, and Rafael Loret de Mola.
But the best known figure of FRENAAA, because he is so grotesque, is Gilberto Lozano, and we are in a position to affirm that he maintains close relations of coordination with the Miami-based Cuban opposition leader Rosa María Payá, with a view to developing joint actions from Mexico.
These links between Gilberto Lozano, FRENAAA and the Cuban Rosa María Payá are given by the closeness of Payá with the National Action Party (PAN) youth, since they converged in the Latin American Network of Youth for Democracy, a network that has had the PAN as its main quarry, and whose president was Rosa María Payá. And who is Rosa María Payá? President of the NED project “Cuba Decide”, she has been a figure linked in the last decade to destabilizing figures in the region such as Luis Almagro, Secretary General of the Organization of American States (OAS), and politicians such as Donald Trump and former Prime Minister of Spain José María Aznar.
Payá has been linked to the violent riots in Cuba last July 11-12, and the call for an invasion of the island. FRENAAA had a prominent and active participation with opponents in the demonstrations in front of the Cuban embassy in Mexico, where other figures financed by the NED who also participated, such as the former deputy of the extreme right-wing PAN René Bolio Hollarán.
René Bolio, president of the “Mexican Commission for the Defense and Promotion of Human Rights”, also has links to the historical Cuban exile in Miami linked to State terrorism, and to the organization Cuban Democratic Directorate (DDC), also involved in the official request for military intervention in Cuba. It is therefore necessary to put a magnifying glass on the organizations in Mexico that receive money from the NED.
One of them, the Mexican Council on International Affairs (COMEXI) ran between 2017 and 2018 the subversive program “Voices of Cuba”, with a NED budget that last year alone amounted to $130,000. Other entities that receive NED funding in Mexico and are active in subversion against Cuba are the Mexican section of the NGO Article 19, the Institute for Competitiveness (IMCO), the Institute for War and Peace Reporting (IWPR), Amnesty International, Mexicans Against Corruption and Impunity (MCCI), and Investigación e Innovación (Factual A.C.).
President López Obrador is therefore right when he says that no foreign government should intervene in the affairs of our country, that it should respect Mexican sovereignty: The financing of the U.S. government for these projects is an act of interventionism that violates our sovereignty. It is a foreign government; it cannot give money to political groups from another country.
Source: Mileno, translation Resumen Latinoamericano – English