by WorldTribune Staff, October 8, 2018

The United States should help Venezuelans take their country back by providing “arms, equipment, training, intelligence, and logistical support to worthy Venezuelans to organize their own insurgent force,” the Center for Security Policy said.

Citing the success of the Reagan administration’s Contras program in Nicaragua, the think tank proposed that the Trump administration help the Venezuelan opposition.

“The Bolivarian regime in Venezuela, kept in power by Cuban security personnel, is an international threat. The Venezuelan people themselves can solve the problem, provided the United States and others can help them to mutual benefit.”

The United States “has a successful precedent for arming people oppressed by a regime that surrendered national sovereignty to Cuba and other powers,” the Oct. 4 decision brief said.

“That precedent was President Reagan’s support for the Nicaraguan resistance that fought the Soviet-sponsored Sandinista regime in the 1980s. Opposition to his arming of the Nicaraguan resistance or ‘Contras was driven by Soviet active measures campaigns and Sandinista supporters in the U.S.”

The Contras “succeeded in their goal to force the Sandinista regime to allow free and fair elections, and the Nicaraguan people voted for the candidate whom the Contras had supported,” the brief said. “The problem was poor follow-through on the U.S. side: The Bush ’41 administration abandoned the Contras as the Sandinistas assassinated them after the elections. It then allowed the Sandinistas to rule from below and through the security apparatus with impunity. Those strategic policy failures from the American side allowed the Sandinistas to remain a problem ever since. Indeed, their leader, Daniel Ortega was returned to power in 2007 and has been running the country into the ground ever since. Yet, there are successful ways to dismantle the remains of totalitarian regimes to prevent such a deplorable resurgence.”

What the Trump administration can do, the brief said, includes:

• Authorize the Department of Defense and CIA to help Venezuelan opposition figures rapidly to organize and raise an insurgent Venezuelan resistance army to liberate their country from the Cuban-backed Bolivarian regime.
• Mandate proper recruitment, vetting, training, equipping, and arming of a Venezuelan resistance army, and provide those forces with proper logistical and intelligence support.
• Seek and welcome all forms of support from friendly countries. Some of Venezuela’s neighbors may be willing to allow a Venezuelan resistance army to use their territory as safe haven for bases and logistics.
• Take appropriate measures against any government or group that opposes the effort.
• Narrowly limit any U.S. military action to special operations against Cuban, Iranian, Hizbullah, narcotraffickers, and regime targets, and to certain forms of defense of the Venezuelan resistance army.

Subscribe to Geostrategy-Direct __________ Support Free Press Foundation

  Center for Security Policy, Contras, Nicolas Maduro, socialism, Think tank makes case for arming Venezuelans to recover lost sovereignty, WorldTribune.com