United States Agency for International Development and Mexico

Since March 16, 1960, when the CIA presented “A Program of Covert Action Against the Castro Regime” to the United States National Security Council, successive administrations in the White House, from Dwight Eisenhower’s to Barack Obama’s, have continually promoted subversion and political instability within the island.

The players and tactics have changed, but the imperial motivations have not. Nowadays, the United States Agency for International Development is a principal actor in the art of subversion and psychological warfare. This weapon, combined with and subordinate to the Pentagon and CIA, is used for monetary penetration. The United States Agency for International Development tried to control communism during the Cold War by offering development cooperation as a carrot; today, it is still a key tool in the imperial network of intervention in Latin America.

Under the cloak of diplomatic philanthropy, agents from the intelligence community, like Dan A. Mitrione, operated, taught torture and sponsored coups in this hemisphere. However, as a factory of ideological misinformation, the agency has funneled money to right-wing organizations and shadow foundations with empty acronyms. These groups then spread Washington’s propaganda, promoting agitation against countries considered enemies, like Cuba and Venezuela.

Since 1960, the United States has utilized clandestine radio transmissions for the purpose of attacking Cuba from the ether with stations like Radio Swan, Voice of America, Radio and TV Martí. Today, under the Obama administration and through contractors like DAI, Washington Software, Inc. and the Israeli company RRSat Global Communications, the CIA and United States Agency for International Development are counting on so-called cyberwarfare, which includes sophisticated and subversive technological activities.

Among these destabilizing activities is the creation of illegal communications networks and the seeding of anti-Cuban “dirty propaganda” on the Internet. There have been barrages of text messages containing propaganda to Cuban cellphone users; key words are substitute in individual messages as a technique of manipulation. There are satellite transmissions of dirty propaganda and encrypted messages to Cubans’ televisions, serving subversive and intelligence purposes. All this is under the control and supervision of the Broadcasting Board of Governors, a federal agency in charge of the operation of all television and radio stations in the United States.

A “Made in the USA” instrument of media terrorism, cyberwarfare is complemented by destabilizing activities of lesser reach and visibility, like conferences and presentations of propagandistic books, events that are financed by the United States Agency for International Development and friendly organizations like the right-wing foundations of Germans Konrad Adenauer and Friedrich Neumann. A specific example of this subversion and intervention took place in the Meliá Reforma Hotel in Mexico City last Dec. 5. It was the conference “Changes in the Cuban Process?” and the presentation of Gabriel Salvia’s book Diplomacy and Human Rights in Cuba, which was edited by the Konrad Adenauer Foundation and the Center for the Opening and Development of Latin America.

Directed by Salvia, Center for the Opening and Development of Latin America is an academic NGO that operates from Argentina as a satellite of the CIA and . It is involved in covert destabilization projects against Cuba, including the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America (specifically Venezuela and Bolivia) and the Mercusor. For its propagandistic activities, it receives millions from the United States National Security Council, the National Endowment for Democracy (a front for the CIA), Freedom House and the Adenauer and Neumann Foundations, among others.

Members of counterrevolutionary organizations based in Miami, Florida participated in both activities. They have also joined violent and interventionist offshoots like the National Cuban-American Foundation, Cuban Democratic Directorate and the lesser-known Organization of Cuban Exile Youth. All are subsidized by funds from U.S. contributors via United States National Security Counci, the National Endowment for Democracy, the International Republican Institute and the National Democratic Institute, which is under Obama’s party.

Washington’s conspiracy, developed on Mexican soil and aimed at regime change in Cuba, are nothing new. It was invigorated during Carlos Salinas and Ernesto Zedillo’s PRI regimes, and it deepened during the conservative administrations of Vicente Fox and Felipe Calderón. No country, especially the United States, permits the use of foreign money, whether it is in the hands of its own nationals or foreigners, to subvert its territorial and political integrity. Nor do they permit acts of civil disobedience sustained by lies fabricated via cyberwarfare.

In Mexico, the law prohibits political parties from receiving funds from foreign governments and companies, although the National Action Party took power in 2000 thanks to illegal contributions from organizations like Friends of Fox, among others, which are anti-Castro exile groups in Miami.

As a result, it is naive to ask the Calderón regime and Secretary Patricia Espinosa to stop the orchestration of provocative and subversive actions against Cuba on our nation’s soil. They themselves have facilitated clandestine destabilizing activity by the U.S. intelligence community against the Mexican people. Therefore, in order to honor the political thoughts and traditions of Benito Juárez, of friendship and solidarity with the Cuban people and government, it is time for the Congress of the Union to investigate the anti-Cuban activities within the national territory by the United States National Security Council, the Adenauer Foundation and CADAL.