Photo: Screenshot from the website of the National Endowment for Democracy
In recent months, Andrés Manuel López Obrador has been criticizing the United States for interference in the internal affairs of the country, due to the financing it grants to various “civil society” groups, but with active participation in the political and media beating against the government of López Obrador.
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 Sí por México.
López Obrador’s complaints are just a sample of the extensive scaffolding that the US administration deploys in Mexico against this nation, and that also includes other countries in the area. 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 pounding operation against the López Obrador government.
Most of it is channeled through the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), created by the Ronald Reagan administration to legitimize the covert actions carried out by the CIA. From 2016 to date, the NED has allocated around $8,376,549 to programs in Mexico on democracy, gender-based 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 dollars 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 the media (which later operate against the government).
But in addition to the NED and the 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 far-right National Front ANTI-AMLO (FRENAAA), a self-styled peaceful and citizen movement outside political parties, created by businessmen such as Pedro Luis Martín Bringas, Juan Bosco Abascal, or Rafael Loret de Mola.
But the best-known figure of FRENAAA, because he is grotesque, is Gilberto Lozano, and we are in a position to affirm that he maintains close coordination relations with the Miami-based Cuban opponent 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 Payá’s closeness to PAN youth, since they converge in the Latin American Network of Youth for Democracy, a network that has had the National Action Party of Mexico as its main quarry. , and whose president was Rosa María Payá.
And who is Rosa María Payá? President of the NED project “Cuba Decide”, 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 José María Aznar.
Payá was linked to the violent disturbances in Cuba on July 11 and 12, and to the US government’s request for an invasion of the island. FRENAAA had an outstanding and active participation together with opponents in the demonstrations in front of the Cuban embassy in Mexico, where other figures financed by the NED also participated, such as the former far-right PAN Deputy René Bolio Hollarán.
René Bolio, president of the “Mexican Commission for the Defense and Promotion of Human Rights”, also has ties to the Cuban historical exile in Miami linked to State terrorism, and to the Cuban Democratic Directorate (DDC), also implicated in the petition. military intervention officer in Cuba. Therefore, we must put a magnifying glass on the organizations that in Mexico receive money from the NED.
One of them, the Mexican Council of International Affairs (COMEXI) executed between 2017 and 2018 the subversive program “Voces de Cuba”, with a budget from the NED that only last year amounted to 130,000 dollars. Other entities that receive funding from the NED in Mexico and that 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 Research and Innovation (Factual AC).
Therefore, President López Obrador is 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 United States Government is an act of interventionism that violates our sovereignty. It is a foreign government, it cannot deliver money to political groups from another country.
