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1998-present: Venezuela
Shortly after Hugo Chávez’s election as president, the US government-funded National Endowment for Democracy (NED) initiated guidance of Venezuelan political parties towards his defeat. NED agents traveled to Venezuela and met individually with Venezuelan party leaders from the opposition, offering guidance on how to electorally defeat Chávez, construct coalition political platforms and reach out to youth. Stephen Kinzer and other scholars have cited the NED as a successor to the CIA’s regime change programs of the 1960s, dedicated to a neoliberal economic agenda. A coalition of all the main NED funded organizations spearheaded the two-month lockout and production stoppage at Venezuela’s central oil company, which, when it ended in February 2003, had cost the Venezuelan people approximately $10 billion in economic damage as a means of destabilizing the Chavez government. US diplomats also met with the opposition over the course of a decade to advise strategy against Chavez.

Agencies such as the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and Office of Transition Initiatives (OTI) initiated operations developing neutral-looking organizations in poor neighborhoods focused on community initiatives such as participatory democracy. U.S. ambassador William Brownfield described how USAID/OTI “directly reached approximately 238,000 adults through over 3,000 forums … providing opportunities for opposition activists to interact with hardcore Chavistas, with the desired effect of pulling them slowly away from Chavismo.”

USAID/OTI also materially supported the recently-developed anti-Chávez student movement, which produced the political career of Juan Guaidó and other young opposition leaders. OTI functionaries provided students with resources including paper and microphones, paid for travel expenses, and organized seminars to maximize resistance to the socialist government. According to a Washington Post analysis, “U.S. diplomats regularly met with opposition student leaders who primarily operated in Caracas, discussing plans of action against the Chávez government.”

The campaign against Venezuela’s left-leaning government continued under four US presidents. Most recently, the Trump administration has recognized the opposition leader Juan Guaidó as president and openly threatened to launch military action to overthrow the government of Nicolás Maduro.