NACLA Update 7/15/10 - U.S. Funding Venezuelan Press/ CIA, Cold War and Cocaine

New on nacla.org

Buying Venezuela's Press With U.S. Tax Dollars
by Jeremy Bigwood
The U.S. State Department is secretly funneling millions of dollars to Latin American journalists. Newly released documents reveal that between 2007 and 2009, the State Department channeled at least $4 million to journalists in Bolivia, Nicaragua, and Venezuela through the Washington-based Pan American Development Foundation (PADF). Thus far, only documents pertaining to Venezuela have been released. They reveal that the PADF, collaborating with Venezuelan NGOs associated with the country's political opposition, has been supplied with at least $700,000 to give out journalism grants and sponsor journalism education programs. In funding the Venezuelan news media, the United States is funding one of the opposition's most powerful weapons against President Hugo Chávez.
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The CIA, the Cold War, and Cocaine: The Connections of Christopher "Dudus" Coke
by Kevin Edmonds
On June 22, Jamaican police arrested Christopher "Dudus" Coke in the Tivoli Gardens neighborhood of Kingston and immediately delivered him into U.S. custody. Many Jamaicans are hoping that Coke will now reveal the long history of connections between the country's political leaders, its business elite, and its gunmen in the street. Such revelations are likely to illuminate past actions of the CIA, which helped create one of Jamaica's most powerful organized crime organizations, the Shower Posse. These links are ever more important as the United States is poised to invest millions of dollars to make the Caribbean its newest front in the drug war, ostensibly fighting some of the same personalities and groups they themselves helped create.
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Oaxaca Votes Out Ruling Party as the Siege in San Juan Copala Continues
by Kristin Bricker
On July 4, Oaxacans made history: After 80 years of one-party rule, an opposition gubernatorial candidate defeated the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) at the polls. However, Oaxaca's lame duck and divisive governor, Ulises Ruiz Ortiz, will hand over a volatile political climate to the new administration. Oaxaca still lives in the wake of the 2006 social conflict that nearly drove Ruiz Ortiz from office. Now this tension is most prominently symbolized by a low-intensity war that continues in San Juan Copala where on April 27 gunmen ambushed an aid caravan to the town, killing two activists.
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