The International Republican Institute: Promulgating Democracy of Another Variety
The International Republican Institute's (IRI) ostensible democracy-building mission serves only as a screen for its
energetic and unscrupulous promotion of an ultraconservative Republican foreign policy agenda.
The IRI is more a cloak-and-dagger operation than a conventional research group.
Over the past five years the organization has aligned itself with the most pro-U.S. and some of the most antidemocratic
factions in both Venezuela and Haiti and contributed to the fomenting of coups against leftist presidents Hugo Chavez
and Jean-Bertrand Aristide, all the while claiming to be engaging in "party building" and "educational seminars."
At the same time, the Institute's Cuba program is a blatant attempt to funnel taxpayer funds to boondoggle programs of
some of the most hardline factions of the Cuban-American community, who have long been a crucial pillar of support for
the Republican party, especially in Florida.
The IRI's gross misuse of federal funds (channeled through the National Endowment for Democracy and the U.S. Agency for
International Development) to pursue partisan and highly questionable democracy-destroying adventures abroad, should be
an immediate subject for Congressional scrutiny and if necessary curtailment.
If one thinks that IRI is a non-partisan group, have a look at its Board of Trustees.
The International Republican Institute, an organization that describes itself as being dedicated to “advancing
democracy, freedom, self-government and the rule of law worldwide,” has in the last two decades earned the questionable
distinction of being perhaps the least-known of a group of lethal Washington institutions devoted to the trade of
nation-building, or more accurately termed, nation undermining. Despite its elaborate rhetoric and claims to
nonpartisanship, the IRI in fact operates as the powerful and well-funded foreign policy arm of the ultra rightist wing
of the U.S. Republican Party. It is far more ideological and operational than its Democratic Party counterpart, the
National Democratic Institute, and is less concerned with democracy building than hunting down leftists and crushing
their causes. It would not be too much to say that the IRI engages in anti-populist witch-hunts with far more enthusiasm
than any of its research efforts exploring the history or politics of those countries where it wreaks its havoc. IRI’s
seemingly innocuous activities, which are said to include party-building, media training, the organization of leadership
trainings, the dissemination of newsletters and the strengthening of “civil society,” mask a far more aggressive and
calculated attempt by the organization and affiliated hard right Republican Party ideologues to destabilize liberal
political movements and governments (which it sees as containing the germ plasm of communism) in this hemisphere and
around the world. Its central, though unstated, mission is to see to it that such vanguard movements have leaders
perceived as being more agreeable to Washington’s orientation on a given issue.
Not surprisingly, an IRI targeted regime is characteristically headed by a leftist or populist leader who is committed
to ambitious social programs and skeptical of the now widely-discredited neoliberal reforms evoked by the phrase
“Washington consensus.” Entities backed by the IRI, on the other hand, invariably show marked solicitude for the
interests of large U.S. financial institutions and corporations—such as Chiquita Banana, whose former chairman Carl
Lindner has long been one of the country’s primary donors of soft money to the Republican Party and was recently named a
“Super Ranger” fundraiser for the Bush-Cheney reelection campaign.
A Focused Sense of Mission
The IRI prioritizes the maintenance of what is frequently deemed a “friendly business environment,” often to the
detriment of an array of desperately needed social policies. These overt attempts by the IRI to manipulate the domestic
political firmament of other nations in the image of the conservative values of the late President Reagan, are strongly
reminiscent of (albeit less bloody than) many of the excesses of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) when it toppled
Latin American governments that had failed to share so-called “American values.” Not surprisingly, many analysts have
characterized the IRI as well as its partner and primary funder, the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), as the
ideological heirs of the CIA, in which it is strenuously attempting to remake its image while transferring some of the
funding responsibility for its “softer” programs to that classic Cold War institution, the NED.
At the very least, the IRI’s extramural machinations deserve to be the subject of Congressional scrutiny that begins by
probing the IRI’s actual operations and mandate, which are subject to virtually no oversight by elected officials even
as the Institute aggressively implements a wide-ranging and inherently controversial foreign policy agenda. This agenda
is funded by taxpayers’ money routed through a variety of sweetheart arrangements with federally funded grant making
organizations, such as the NED and the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). Critics maintain that the IRI
should be prevented from continuing its suspect role as the power behind the curtain of its highly tendentious projects.
The IRI’s use of taxpayers’ money to fund clearly partisan misadventures begs to be audited; if found to be
inappropriate by Congress, the Institute's federal funding should be curtailed or abolished.
The Myth of Nonpartisanship
Despite its name, the IRI goes to great lengths to assert that it is not in fact connected with the Republican party,
stating that it is a “nonpartisan organization, not affiliated with any political party. . .guided by the fundamental
American principles of individual liberty, the rule of law, and the entrepreneurial spirit.” Yet a quick glance at the
credentials and affiliations of the IRI’s Board of Directors undermines any grounds for the belief that this
organization is in any way a bastion of that rare Washington commodity, nonpartisanship. The board is a virtual
who’s-who of conservative Republican political and business panjandrums and is chaired by Senator John McCain of
Arizona. He is joined by his Hill colleagues Senator Chuck Hagel of Nebraska, hardliner Representative David Dreier of
California, and Representative Jim Kolbe of Arizona, all Republicans; by Hempstead, N.Y. Republican James A. Garner, the
first African-American mayor on Long Island who is also president of the U.S. Conference of Mayors; by the former
chairman of the Republican Party, Frank J. Fahrenkopf, Jr, and by former General Counsel to the Republican National
Committee, Michael Grebe.
GOP foreign policy luminaries are represented by Brent Scowcroft, National Security Adviser to the first President Bush
and now president of the Scowcroft Group, Inc.; Lawrence Eagleburger, Secretary of State under President George H.W.
Bush; and by Dr. Jeane Kirkpatrick, the lead Valkyrie of Cold Warriors, Ambassador to the U.N. under the Reagan
administration and resident at the conservative think tank, the American Enterprise Institute (on whose board another
IRI board member, Marilyn Ware, also serves.) The defense establishment is represented by Alison Fortier, a director of
Lockheed Martin Missile Defense Programs—a company long-beloved by Star Wars aficionados and Reaganite Defense
Department officials, who obligingly have steered billions of dollars in procurement contracts to the company—and by J.
William Middledorf II, former Secretary of the Navy and ambassador to the Organization of American States under the
Reagan administration. Needless to say, there is also generous representation of the corporate sector, with Ford, AOL
Time Warner and Chevron, Texaco among the multinational corporations with current or former officials serving on the
board.
Given this virtually overwhelming mass of veteran Republicans on the IRI board, with an enormous quantity of accumulated
expertise and experience, and the total absence of figures of comparable stature from the Democratic side of the aisle,
the theoretically nonpartisan character of the International Republican Institute is revealed as nothing more than a
meaningless boiler plate. Party connections extend into the group’s senior operating staff: George Folsom, who served as
President and Chief Executive Officer until several weeks ago, held positions in the Pentagon under Reagan and the
Treasury Department under Bush Sr., where he was the chief U.S. negotiator of the Enterprise for the Americas
initiative. Incoming President Lorne Cramer, who formerly served as IRI President from 1995 to 2001, has moved his
office to the IRI from the State Department, where President Bush had appointed him Assistant Secretary of State for
Democracy, Human Rights and Labor.
Vice President Georges A. Fauriol is a member of the Chairman’s Club of the Republican National Committee and co-chaired
the Americas Forum in Washington with Otto Reich (the virulently hard-line Cuban-American ideologue and propagandistic
policymaker). Until recently, Reich served as the President’s special envoy for hemispheric affairs and also as a member
of the Board of Visitors for the Western Hemispheric Institute for Security Cooperation (formerly School of the
Americas), the longtime training ground for many of Latin America’s most unsavory military thugs. Another IRI staffer,
Todd Harris, formerly a consultant to the government of Croatia for the Institute, was recently hired as a
communications director by the Bush reelection campaign—perhaps the clearest evidence of the organization’s ideological
fealty to Bush and his ultraconservative Latin American policy. Thus, while the IRI may be legally separated from the
domestic Republican party, it is clearly intimately intertwined with the party’s establishment at virtually all levels,
and steeped in the foreign policy experience, philosophy and biases of its most conservative and energized leaders.
Haiti: Behind the Ouster of Aristide
One of the few locations where the International Republican Institute’s normally discreet and low-profile activities
have been exposed to unwanted publicity—and to widespread denunciations—is in Haiti. Accusations have circled widely
that the IRI, with the backing of its Republican patrons in the upper echelons of the Bush State Department, openly
funded, equipped and lobbied for the country’s two heavily conservative and White House-backed opposition parties, the
Democratic Convergence and Group 184. The latter coalition, composed of many of the island’s major business, church and
professional figures, has been the source of the most vocal and intransigent hostility to the former administration of
President Jean-Bertrand Aristide. In fact, the stubborn refusal of these groups to come to any compromise with the
president, even after he made a host of major concessions to their ends, played a major role in the violent transfer of
power in Haiti earlier this year. This shift took place after an armed rebellion led by former military and paramilitary
leaders swept through the country with the open endorsement of the “non-violent” political opposition parties as well as
veiled support from Washington.
Charges regarding the IRI’s reprehensible machinations in Haiti have engendered sufficient controversy to compel the
Institute in Haiti to include on its official website a list of frequently asked questions about its controversial
programs in that country. This feature, not provided for on any other IRI project, is presumably intended to defuse the
more potent criticisms about the organization’s Haiti activities. The website entry notes that the IRI’s initiatives in
Haiti are not currently funded by the NED, an admission made in response to criticisms regarding the NED’s past
involvement in that country. This strained history included the funding of two anti-Aristide conservative union
organizations, the Federation of Trade Union Workers and the General Organization of Haitian Workers, in an attempt to
denature the radicalism of Haiti’s leftist trade-union movement, which was regarded as a threat to U.S. and local
businessmen like Andy Apaid, Jr. who had set up sweatshop-like assembly plants in the country. The NED also supported an
ironically named “human rights” organization, the Haitian Center for Human Rights (CHADEL)—whose director, Jean-Jacques
Honorat, had previously served as prime minister under the military junta that governed Haiti from 1991-1994—a brutally
repressive government responsible for the beatings and murders of several thousand political dissidents.
Perhaps because of these ongoing controversies over the NED’s activities, the IRI turned to the USAID to fund its most
recent program in Haiti. USAID has an equally questionable history on the island, and John R. Bolton—former U.S. Deputy
Attorney General, current Undersecretary of State for Arms Control and International Security, and longtime rightwing
demagogue and political extremist—famously described USAID as “a subsidiary of the CIA which serves to promote political
and economic desiderata of the federal government through its financial assistance programs abroad.” In fact, from
1981-1983, the Latin American division of USAID was directed by Otto Reich, the hard right ideologue later admonished
for violating the law by manufacturing specious anti-Sandinista propaganda from his new post as director of the Office
of Public Diplomacy. Almost a decade later, he was appointed to serve as a special envoy to the Western hemisphere in
the current Bush White House after his recess appointment to the Department of State position expired. USAID’s
subsequent activities in Latin America, specifically in Haiti, bear the mark of Reich’s extremist beliefs, heightened by
his years as an extremely well-paid lobbyist for some of the most politically connected corporations in the country.
In Haiti, USAID-funded organizations such as the Haitian International Institute for Research and Development (IHRED),
which maintained close relationships with the military government of General Henry Namphy, one of the so-called
post-Duvalier dictators who held power briefly in 1988. IHRED helped to form a group of anti-Communist political leaders
known as the Group of 10, a clique led by Mark Bazin, a Haitian national, former World Bank official and opportunistic
technocrat who was backed by Washington as the conservative, pro-business great hope in the 1990 presidential elections
(which was won overwhelmingly by the populist former priest, Aristide).
Bazin, always a compliant Haitian servitor to Washington’s causes, is now the finance minister in the intensely
anti-Lavalas interim government of Prime Minister Gerard Latortue, which the State Department helped to install
following Aristide’s ouster. In the early 1990s, Bazin was also linked to the conservative reorientation of a major
Haitian labor confederation, the Autonomous Central of Haitian Workers (CATH), which had previously been more militant,
but began to change its stripes after receiving USAID funding. Its more management-friendly rival, the business-tolerant
FOS, had long received such funds.
Subsequently, in May 1991, Congress authorized USAID to spend $24.5 million over four years in its Democracy Enhancement
Project in Haiti, which was designed to “strengthen legislative and other constitutional structures ... local
governments [and] independent organizations in the country of Haiti.” Despite the program’s highfalutin language and
apparent laudable goals, Americas Watch contends that its real goal was to strengthen conservative organizations that
would “act as an institutional check on Aristide.” Though suspended following the military coup later that year, parts
of the program, including support to the more conservative Haitian unions, were subsequently reactivated throughout the
tenure of the coup government. Tellingly, those organizations backed and funded by NED and USAID were generally spared
any repression by the military government, even as more radical or autonomous civil society organizations were being
hounded and brutally crushed. This is perhaps the clearest collateral evidence that USAID and NED made a practice of
funding those organizations whose objectives were distinctly different from those of a populist or pro-Aristide
orientation; not surprisingly, the U.S.-funded organizations were regarded as fundamentally non-threatening by the
military government.
Election “Monitoring” or Propaganda?
The IRI first emerged as a major subject of controversy in Haiti following Aristide’s return to the country accompanied
by 20,000 U.S. troops in 1994. The following year, the IRI sent a series of observer missions to monitor both
parliamentary and presidential elections, and soon found itself wrangling with the Clinton White House regarding the
reliability of the procedures and the fidelity of the results. Following elections in June 1995 for 18 of 27 Senate
seats, 83 seats in the Chamber of Deputies, 135 mayors and 565 community councils, the White House declared that they
reflected a “highly successful process” and suggested that those flaws that did occur were an inevitable byproduct of
lack of infrastructure and low levels of education on the part of both voters and elected officials. Moreover, J. Brian
Atwood, who served as the head of the official U.S. delegation in his capacity as the director of USAID, specifically
praised the conduct of President Aristide in the election, noting that he “stayed out of politics as he promised” and
“made TV and radio available to other parties, contrary to the history of the country.”
IRI in Opposition
The IRI delegation, on the other hand, issued a series of bitterly condemnatory reports, calling the election an
“organizational catastrophe.” Most tellingly, the leader of the IRI group, Representative Peter Goss (R-FL), issued a
series of public statements criticizing the elections and asking whether the new parliament would “have sufficient
credibility as an independent, separate branch of government for the customary checks and balances role, or will it be
just an Aristide rubber stamp?”
“Aristide rubber stamp” here serves as a code phrase that translates as “Lavalas majority parliament”—an outcome that
could have been easily predicted by every well-informed observer of the Haitian political scene, given the extremely
high levels of public support for Aristide and his party in the aftermath of his triumphal return from exile and the
ending of the much-reviled military government. The real grievance of the IRI seems to have been not so much any
concrete flaw in the mechanics of the election, which had been bankrolled by $11 million in funding from USAID, but
rather the fact that, in the eyes of Rep. Goss, the wrong man had won, raising the rather unpleasant prospect for the
IRI’s Republican patrons and corporate donors of a unified and successful leftwing Haitian government.
A similar dispute between the White House and the IRI unfolded in December, 1995, when presidential elections were held
to select Aristide’s successor. Again, the IRI denounced the elections, this time seizing on what it claimed was a low
turnout as evidence of voter dissatisfaction and low levels of democratic awareness. While there were undoubted flaws in
the electoral procedure, the mere fact that an election was held represented an enormously important milestone in
Haitian history, marking the first time when one elected leader prepared to peacefully turn over power to another
publicly chosen leader. Needless to say, the IRI was not concerned with the historical significance of the moment.
Instead, the IRI became disgruntled over the clear victory of René Preval, a Lavalas member and strong Aristide
supporter. Over subsequent years, the institution’s presence within Haiti became more and more controversial,
engendering repeated criticism from the Preval administration and Lavalas legislators that it was openly supporting
opposition parties aligned with the now-dissolved military as well as challenging the country’s sovereignty. Ultimately
in 1999, the Institute, under its Haiti field director, became so controversial that it was forced to shutter its office
in Port-au-Prince and began to run its Haiti programs from outside the country’s borders—a move that proved in later
years to have had very little impact on its ability to wreak havoc within the country and on its democratic
institutions.
The Institute that Helped Launch a Coup
The official IRI description of its current Haiti programming highlights its focus on information technology—the
launching of a website, www.haitigetinvolved.org, that includes chat rooms, mailing lists and the posting of “timely and
accurate data and analyses”— as well as its efforts to incorporate the diaspora into Haiti’s political process. Needless
to say, there is no mention of the seemingly obvious fact that an Internet-based information source is of virtually no
relevance to the vast majority of Haitian citizens, who do not have electricity or potable water, much less an Internet
connection. At the same time, the organization’s emphasis on the incorporation of Haitian-Americans is perhaps the most
eloquent testimony that the IRI’s reputation in Haiti itself has plummeted and alienated the local population to the
point that direct engagement with voting citizens of the Haitian polity had become impossible, forcing the IRI to set up
shop in the Dominican Republic.
The IRI arrived at this point of deserved disrepute by its unwaveringly consistent backing for the most regressive,
elitist, pro-military factions in Haitian politics and its steadfast alliance with the elite opposition coalitions Group
184 and Democratic Convergence, which from the day of their inception devoted themselves entirely to derailing the
administration of President Aristide—a political figure still supported by at least a majority of the nation’s rural and
urban poor, who view him as the leader of their struggles against the Duvalier and post-Duvalier dictatorships. The IRI
organized conferences in the Dominican Republic (which was also, perhaps not coincidentally, the launching pad for the
armed rebellion this past February) at which up to 600 opposition leaders were able to liaise with their conservative
brethren from Washington, D.C. and build up a political base of support in the Bush administration. This networking was
amply rewarded as the State Department led the implementation of an economic boycott of Haiti, preventing Aristide from
fulfilling his pledge of social justice for his poor urban and rural supporters and thus whittling away at his public
support.
Even more tellingly, Secretary of State Colin Powell refused at the last moment to send an international force to Haiti
to protect the Aristide government until after an agreement had been reached between the government and the opposition,
knowing full well that the Group of 184 would accept no compromise short of Aristide’s resignation. Secretary Powell
obligingly played his part in this travesty, offering Orwellian doublespeak about the protection of democracy as a
rationale for his murder of a constitutional presidency. The opposition’s steadfast intransigence culminated in
Aristide's Washington-scripted exile and the arrival of U.S. troops immediately after his departure, an outcome for
which the IRI must bear much of the responsibility. In fact, Robert Maguire, director of the Haiti program at Trinity
College, has characterized the Institute as the “main actor” in Haiti, stating that it has been working with the
opposition groups. IRI has insisted that USAID had given it funding for its work in Haiti. While this is true, it is
also true that USAID has done so, only after kicking and screaming all the way. According to Maguire, the IRI has worked
exclusively with the Democratic Convergence groups in its party-building exercises and support.
The IRI Aims for the Kill
Perhaps the most sober indictment to be made regarding the IRI’s reprehensible role is that it employed as its principal
representative in Haiti the much-reviled Stanley Lucas, a Haitian national with a history of strong ties to the military
and whose family members were reputedly linked to the infamous Jean Rabel massacre. In June 1987, armed gangs paid by
local landowners killed some 140 peasants who were demonstrating for land redistribution in the northwestern region of
Haiti; the ringleader of this bloodbath was a landlord named Remy Lucas, a member of the same family, who was arrested
in June 1998, following a widespread popular outcry demanding that he be prosecuted. The former U.S. ambassador to
Haiti, Brian Dean Curran, has since contended that Stanley Lucas undermined efforts by a number of international
mediators to convince the Haitian opposition parties to take a more moderate stance vis-à-vis the Aristide government
and end its persistent political stonewalling. According to Senator Christopher Dodd (D-CT), Curran demanded that Lucas
be barred from contact with the IRI, a condition that USAID, which had provided $1.2 million for the Institute’s work in
Haiti, accepted and endorsed. The IRI, however, ultimately ignored this directive, and the very controversial Lucas
continued to work with the Institute.
This relationship, based on a single-minded hatred of Aristide that represented a collective sentiment, was emblematic
of the history of the IRI’s Haiti work. Its easy tolerance of individuals with established links to the country’s
brutally repressive military and paramilitary forces, as well as its close ties to millionaire Haitian businessmen—most
notably Andy Apaid, Jr., a particularly sleazy operator who, while allegedly illegally holding both U.S. and Haitian
passports, runs sweatshops in Haiti while feigning the role of a Quaker reformer—highlights the IRI's true orientation.
Apaid, coordinator of the Group of 184, seeks to gain huge profits by supplying U.S. contractors with goods produced by
Haitian workers at sweatshop wages; moreover, he was clearly complicit in Aristide's unconstitutional ouster, which many
Haitian experts view as the thirty-third coup.
It is to be hoped that the recent decision by the Organization of American States to open an investigation into the
circumstances of Aristide’s suspicious departure will further reveal the manifold connections between the IRI and the
Haitian opposition groups, both civil and military, and will spur the US Congress to recommit itself to a thorough
examination of the IRI’s work and the establishment of more careful oversight regarding its use of federal funds.
Senator Dodd has already called for a closer examination of the IRI’s role in Haiti; he should be joined in this
initiative by other senators and representatives from both sides of the aisle, as well as by presidential hopeful John
Kerry, who would do well to regard the taming of the IRI as an integral part of any comprehensive attempt to improve the
U.S.’s reputation in the hemisphere.
Venezuela: A Coup Reversed
There are striking parallels between the history of the Institute in Haiti and its presence in Venezuela: both countries
experienced coups against leftist presidents that had become targets of Washington’s odium and in which the IRI was
heavily involved, if not directly implicated. However, the pro-Chávez forces in Caracas proved strong enough to return
their president to office only hours after his ouster—a fate that Aristide has not shared. The role of the Bush
administration in the rapidly aborted coup against Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela that unfolded in April
2002 has long been debated, with one school contending that the State Department and the U.S. embassy in Caracas
actively conspired with the military leaders planning the coup.
Before the Venezuelan coup, the Bush administration’s chief dirty-tricks operator for the western hemisphere, Otto
Reich, met with chief Venezuelan plotter Pedro Carmona and a group of his co-conspirators. In the wake of the failed
coup, Carmona subsequently fled the country. Back in Washington, Powell’s rightwing subordinate, Assistant Secretary of
State for Inter-American Affairs Roger Noriega, acting in tandem with his confederate Reich, recognized the coup
government almost immediately after the attempted putsch, subsequently placing Powell in the rather embarrassing
position of having to disavow Noriega’s overly hasty statements in support of Chávez’s return to power. Within
forty-eight hours, Chávez was restored to authority after the military threw its support behind him.
Yet even if one maintains reservations about the State Department’s and Reich’s involvement in the coup, it is
abundantly clear that the IRI was generously funding the anti-Chávez “civil society” groups that had militantly opposed
his leadership since 1998. Beginning in that year, the Institute began working with Venezuelan organizations to produce
media campaigns, including newspaper, television and radio ads, with a distinctly anti-Chávez tilt. The IRI also funded
expeditions to Washington by Chávez opponents to meet with U.S. officials, including a trip by politicians, union
leaders and civil society leaders that occurred only a month before the coup, at a time when predictions of a military
uprising were already widespread.
Simultaneously, the NED, the IRI’s principal funder, was mounting its own initiative in support of anti-Chávez
organizations. Grants made by the NED, and laundered through the IRI, included generous funding for the Confederation of
Venezuelan Workers (CTV), a coalition historically linked to the corrupt political parties which had been repudiated as
a result of Chávez ’s electoral victories, and which later played a major role in the anti-Chávez “destabilization
campaign” leading up to the coup. Another NED beneficiary was the Assembly of Educators, headed by Leonardo Carvajal,
who became education minister during Carmona’s two-day presidency; Carvajal’s group was one of the first organizations
to organize anti-Chávez demonstrations. Yet another NED recipient, Prodel, is directed by prominent Chávez opponent
Ignacio Betancourt, a former secretary for the country’s notorious former dictator, Carlos Pérez Jiménez, who was heard
in a television recording obtained by dissident elements of the Venezuelan media planning the overthrow of Chávez in a
conversation with the president of CTV. Perhaps most damning, the NED directly funded Súmate, an organization devoted to
mounting a signature-gathering campaign to present a petition calling for Chávez’s recall. While the Endowment claimed
that the funding was only for the observation and monitoring of the process, clearly Súmate has taken a far more active
role in promoting Chávez’s ouster than simply watching passively as the recall process unfolded.
The NED also made a major grant to the IRI for its programs in Venezuela, increasing its funding from $50,000 in 2000 to
$399,998 in 2001, a nearly six-fold enhancement. Thus endowed, the Institute went about its trademark subterfuge
“party-building” activities, including organizing a series of workshops to which only opposition candidates were
invited; it also funded and worked closely with Primero Justicia, vehemently anti-Chávez organization directly linked to
the coup. Two leaders of this organization, Leopoldo López and Leopoldo Martinez (who was named finance minister in the
short-lived coup government), signed the Carmona decree during the brief coup that dissolved several of Venezuela’s
basic democratic institutions. This decree, a shocking violation of constitutionality and democratic process in one of
Latin America’s older democracies, was also signed by the heads of a number of other NED-funded organizations.
The IRI also purportedly partnered with the Venezuelan organization, Federación Participación Juvenal (FPJ, the Youth
Participation Foundation.) Yet the FPJ proves to be surprisingly ephemeral; not only is it virtually unknown on the
Internet, a large number of Venezuelan politicians and civil society leaders declared that they had never heard of it.
In response, the Institute conceded that the FPJ was not currently extant, but asserted that it had been active in the
1998 elections organizing youth forums featuring the major presidential candidates. If real, the forums proved to be
less than memorable, as neither the candidates nor the television stations supposedly involved have any recollection of
the group.
Ultimately, perhaps the clearest evidence of the IRI’s cavalier behavior and its complicity in the anti-Chávez coup came
from Washington, where the Institute’s president, George A. Folsom, jubilantly welcomed the president’s ouster. Since
this represented a military uprising against a democratically elected president, Folsom’s enthusiasm was not entirely
appropriate for the head of a tax-exempt organization that is almost entirely funded by US taxpayers, not all of whom
support the IRI’s rather dubious version of democracy promotion. Folsom, although relatively unknown outside of his
immediate circle, proved himself in this instance to be a neocon ideologue to the hilt, declaring that “the Venezuelan
people rose up to defend democracy in their country...[and] were provoked into action as a result of systematic
repression by the Government of Hugo Chávez. He then went on to applaud “the bravery of civil society leaders - members
of the media, the Church, the nation's educators and school administrators, political party leaders, labor unions and
the business sector - who have put their very lives on the line in their struggle to restore genuine democracy to their
country.”
Even after the above rather overblown statement—a blatant, even exultant endorsement of an extra-constitutional transfer
of power in a sovereign nation, in clear violation of several OAS resolutions —the IRI continued to receive generous
funding (approximately $300,000) from the NED, courtesy of U.S. taxpayers, for its Venezuela programming. The Institute
also maintained its close partnership with the pro-coup Primero Justicia, not once denouncing its clearly
anti-democratic stance in the tumultuous events of April, and even declared itself to be working “closely with Primero
Justicia in developing the party's platform.” One might wonder whether this platform will include respect for the
democratic electoral processes that the IRI claims to be building in Venezuela and across Latin America.
Cuba: A Boost for the GOP in Miami?
Given the IRI’s ties to some of the most conservative and virulently anti-Castro Republican foreign policy
figures—including former ambassador to the U.N. Jeane Kirkpatrick, who sits on its board—it is hardly surprising that
the group has enthusiastically embraced the right’s ratcheting up of its mindless crusade against Havana. The official
IRI “background information” on Cuba includes a lengthy denunciation of the Castro government’s political, economic and
human rights practices. Needless to say, comparable information is not included for a number of the other countries in
which IRI operations are warmly received, yet which have suffered from abysmal human rights records for decades (such as
Guatemala, El Salvador and Nicaragua, with their histories of brutal military governments suppressing leftist guerrilla
movements, or Peru, with its infamous record of military justice under the antiterrorism decree-laws imposed by its
former authoritarian president, Alberto Fujimori).
Furthermore, the IRI fails to take note of the less-than-exalted human rights practices of many of the rightist
paramilitary organizations turned political parties that it has worked with and funded in Central America. On the
contrary, the Castro government is the sole target of its vehement outrage over human rights abuses—even though, by any
reasonable standard, the violations in that country were often far less serious than abuses that have long been
commonplace over a protracted period elsewhere in the hemisphere. However, in the latter instance, these violations were
committed by conservative regimes considered to be friendly to Washington’s policies. IRI’s capacity for selective
indignation when it comes to rights violations is well known. It provides still further evidence that the Bush
administration and its foreign policy surrogates—such as the Institute—are pursuing a well established strategy whereby
human rights concerns, which have never been of particular interest to conservatives, serve primarily as a foil for a
dogmatic anti-Communism strategy carried over from the Cold War years.
In fact, the IRI has made no small contribution to the Republican party’s relentless effort to use its human rights
policy towards Cuba to secure crucial segments of the Cuban vote in one of the country’s most pivotal swing states—an
effort witnessed earlier this year when President Bush announced a tightening of restrictions on travel of U.S. citizens
to Cuba and remittances sent to relatives on the island, even though significant segments of the immigrant community,
primarily more recent arrivals, have bitterly opposed such measures.
The Institute sponsors an extensive array of “pro-freedom” Cuban programs, partnering in this effort with the Cuban
Democratic Directorate (the Directorio), which is, not surprisingly, based in Miami and closely linked to the city’s old
guard, anti-Castro Cuban-American community. The Directorio’s work, funded by the IRI with money originally allocated by
the NED, includes various nebulously defined informational, educational and media activities, as well as the creation of
Cuban “solidarity committees” in Latin America and Europe. These programs, though theoretically devoted to the
advancement of democracy, would not easily stand up to an audit, as they involve a good deal of dining, traveling and
entertaining that has less to do with promoting democracy in Cuba than with contributing to the lifestyle of some
Cuban-American boulevardiers. Furthermore, these organizations seem to serve primarily as a bully pulpit for the more
extreme elements of Miami’s Cuban community to denounce Castro, who eliminated corruption and ended the favoritism
enjoyed by many of their relatives during the golden era of longtime Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista.
The Institute is also connected indirectly with another Cuban-American anti-Castro organization, the Center for a Free
Cuba. USAID, which funded the IRI’s previous programs in Cuba from 1997 to 2002 with millions of dollars, simultaneously
financed a number of other organizations theoretically devoted to democracy-building in Cuba, including the Center for a
Free Cuba. Such programs represent an audacious raid on the U.S. Treasury and are little better than bag money given as
a payoff to pro-Bush partisans who are being rewarded for getting out the vote. Current and past board members of the
Center include Kirkpatrick, Otto Reich—whose membership in such a virulently anti-Havana organization would seem to
constitute a clear conflict of interest with his public duties, recently ended, as a former interim Assistant Secretary
of State for Inter-American Affairs and subsequently as special presidential envoy to the hemisphere—and, not
surprisingly, Georges Fauriol, vice-president and resident Latin American expert at the IRI. The CFC has a vague mission
curiously akin to that of the Directorio, stating that it “gathers and disseminates information about Cuba and Cubans to
the media, NGOs and the international community.”
The IRI’s work, which essentially amounts to the energetic propagandizing of a, distinctly skewed perception of Cuba’s
current geopolitical realities hardly seems to be a “democracy building” activity of sufficient worth to warrant the
allocation of a torrent of federal funds. Rather, it projects a picture whereby the IRI, in conjunction with the NED and
USAID, plays the role of a cash cow, lavishing taxpayer funds on rump Cuban-American groups that generate no particular
product other than the trumpeting of their own hard-line pitch. It should be asked, what any of these somewhat low grade
archly sectarian propaganda groups have to do with the promotion of democracy in Cuba.
Behind this network of Cuban-American organizations, funded by the NED and the IRI, and led and supported by an array of
ultra-conservative Republican figures, lies a clear political intent that is far different from simple “democracy
promotion” in today’s Cuba. On the contrary, the goal of the generous funding for these organizations is to cement the
Republican loyalty of some of the most wealthy and powerful members of the U.S.-based Cuban community, whose leadership
eagerly defends the interests of such organizations in each funding cycle of the IRI and NED grant making. The IRI
played an important role in paving the way for Governor Jeb Bush’s rise to power in Florida, appointing him as co-chair
of an IRI “Cuba Transition Team” in 1995 after he lost his first race for governor of Florida. This position helped
allow him to build the strong ties he maintains to this day with the most conservative faction of Florida’s
Cuban-American community, which has been crucial to his gubernatorial victories as well as his brother’s victory four
year ago in the presidential race. Such party-strengthening maneuvers are precisely the object of the IRI’s Cuba
initiatives; the programming is nothing more than a pro-Republican rip off, funneling substantial amounts of federal
funds to organizations with little or no purpose beyond offering a platform for the rantings of a handful of obsessively
anti-Communist (and not coincidentally hard-line Republican) Cuban-Americans.
An Institute in Desperate Need of a Makeover
For the nearly two decades since its founding under the Reagan administration, the IRI has operated with virtual
impunity, ranging across the hemisphere and the world to promote ultra-right Republican foreign policy objectives by
selectively supporting kindred political parties and so-called “civil society organizations.” In the process, it has
supported coups in Venezuela, allied itself with former military thugs in Haiti and promoted pro-U.S. and pro-corporate
interests throughout Latin America disregarding the consequences of these activities for the hemisphere’s many fragile
polities. The IRI has long been the dirty little secret of Washington’s conservative foreign policy establishment, a
stealth weapon deployed as necessary. It is time that the true extent of the IRI’s activities be revealed and condemned.
While the Institute should certainly be left to freely continue its work of sowing discord, factionalism and even
staging coups across the hemisphere, it should not be doing so at the taxpayer’s expense nor with the White House’s
automatic writ.
This analysis was prepared by Jessica Leight, COHA Research Fellow