NGOs to finance terrorism? No sir!
Published at: 26/01/2024 03:00 PM
There is an organized network between Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) and the North American empire. Behind the façade of humanitarian aid, NGOs work to destabilize Peoples, they have become a tool for invasion with the excuse of helping to appease welfare problems and support social development; it is through these organizations that they manage to influence communities and thus unbalance the region.
According to the nature of their creation, NGOs are independent, non-profit organizations that arise as a result of civil and popular initiatives and are generally linked to social, cultural, development or other projects that generate structural changes in certain spaces, communities, regions or countries. By carrying out more detailed research on the threads and connections of NGOs and external governments, as explained in the Funding Manual for Political Activity of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), we discovered that they operate from places, doing community collaboration linked to right-wing political parties, protected by supposed solidarity and good will; in this way they recruit a lot of people and serve various sectors.
The magazine Scenarios, of the National University of La Plata (Argentina) published the article New forms of participation today: NGOs as a strategy of researchers Agustín Zuccaro and Mariana Santín, in which they explain that they are presented as a new form of participation that finds its social legitimacy in the media field: “It is the communication media which give visibility to these new actors and who promote the excessive value for the management of the social conflict characteristic of any society. They are the mainstream media that state these forms of participation as valid, considering that they are those where politics loses its meaning (poverty, health, education and food)”.
The researchers add, that they are spaces where one avoids discussing the history of these problems in order to state that each subject is the architect of his destiny and in this sense the social and the collective are lost as a value, giving strength to the political project of capitalism.
As detailed in the Manual on Financing Political Activity of the USAID Office of Democracy and Governance, NGOs are “mechanisms of social participation that focus their territorial approach as the executing arm of North American interests and their function is to incorporate themselves into communities through the organization of popular sectors to build ideologically based on ideas of empowerment and local projects.”
If these organizations are dedicated, as reflected on their websites, to development assistance tasks, meeting education needs and poverty reduction; when they are funded by entities from other countries such as the United States, there is a question about the type of autonomy they have, or if they respond to interests linked to those who finance it.
However, these types of organizations are clear about the restrictions they present and that do not seem to comply, since according to the research called What is and what is not an NGO published by Correo del Orinoco, some limitations they present are the following:
- Technical promotion projects (such as green
energy or climate-smart agriculture). They are carried out with a marketing
approach, without really considering whether they correspond to the needs
of the groups or to their notions of sovereignty.
- Welfare projects. Typical of some private cooperation organizations that make donations and promote a subsidized mentality among the recipients and that, on the other hand, tend to compete unfairly with local production.
- “Corporate development” projects. They return to the productivist logic of large cooperation apparatuses through the installation of companies that do not take into account, for example, the logic of the productive systems of the local peasantry. They have great influence in the different instances of government and have scaled up, together with transnational elites, to multi-stakeholder associations that are spaces for mediation and participation where they represent the different sectors of society.
Structures for the control of resources managed by NGOs
According to reviewed complaints, there are cases where there is evidence of the interference of NGOs in the political structures of the country where they are located and that also serve to launder money and finance terrorist groups. This is why national, regional and international institutions have been created to monitor the use of the resources provided for their operation.
Thus, we have the Financial Intelligence Unit (FIU), Egmont Group, which is an international entity that has 150 affiliated countries and is responsible for receiving reports from its members on suspicious money-laundering operations provided by financial institutions and other entities, analyzing them and transmitting information about these to the competent authorities and to the justice service, to the FIUs of other countries. operations, in order to combat and prevent any illegal activity.
Venezuela belongs to the Egmont Group, through the National Financial Intelligence Unit (UNIF), which processes and analyzes Suspicious Activity Reports (RAS) submitted by the various obligated entities designated by the Organic Law against Organized Crime and the Financing of Terrorism, in order to reveal to the MP and public order authorities, information that may provide evidence of possible punishable acts and the identification of their perpetrators, as well as the information they require to carry out their investigations.
Our country is also a member of the Caribbean Financial Action Group (GAFIC), which is a regional organization of States and Territories of the Caribbean Basin that have agreed to implement common measures against money laundering and terrorist financing. Since September 2001, GAFIC has deepened its focus on regulating financial services and charitable organizations. To this end, he created Recommendation 8 in which he warned countries about the “particular vulnerability” of NGOs to be misused to raise, move funds or provide support to terrorist organizations. In addition, GAFIC encourages countries to implement supervisory and regulatory mechanisms with the clear objective of confronting illegal activities.
In addition, the regulation of NGOs does not only apply in Latin America; when we review the research carried out by Misión Verdad and published in the Orinoco Post called What is and what is not an NGO, we see how the legislation of Europe and the United States is “full of regulations that claim to guarantee freedom of association, but NGOs are not they work at their own discretion. In 2007, the Committee of Ministers of the Council of Europe issued Recommendation 14 to member States on the legal status of NGOs in Europe and established as a cause for the termination of their legal personality that they have committed serious misconduct in the sense of voluntarily participating in activities that are incompatible with the objectives for which the NGO was founded”.
Misión Verdad also explains that “ international standards related to information and disclosure requirements for NGOs, issued by the Council of Europe in 2018, stipulate the duties of public officials to disclose to a supervisory authority their membership in certain types of them; they also require them to submit annual activity reports, in addition to financial statements. Through the Patriot Act, a U.S. government official can impose fines and prison sentences of up to 15 years for anyone who provides material support or resources that are used in acts classified as terrorist.”
It adds that “the legal regulation of NGO activities in the Global North seeks to create records that require the declaration of their existence, their activities and their sources of funding, as well as the relationships they may maintain with other subjects, national or international”. In addition, for Europe, the funding of these organizations is limited by laws “relating to the funding of elections and political parties”, as analyzed by a study on the legal status of NGOs”.
In order to ensure the good use of their resources and that they carry out activities associated with social assistance and development, the United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV) presented for the first discussion in the National Assembly (AN) on January 24, 2023, the bill on oversight, regularization, action and financing of non-governmental and related organizations, which will strengthen the Venezuelan legal system in this area.
It seems then that, only in our country, regulating the field of action and
the transparency of its funding “is an act of repression, a possible point
of no return in the closure of civic space, if sanctioned, the law on NGOs can represent a point of no
return in the closure of civic and democratic space in Venezuela,” as warned Marta Valiñas, president of the UN Fact-Finding Mission.
As Deputy Diosdado Cabello said, during the
presentation of the project report in the Plenary, “this law
seeks to review and follow up on NGOs
that receive funding and are not supervised” and, accordingly, what is sought
is to guarantee their legal sponsorship, in addition to accompanying their management within our nation.
The question then arises: Is there a political bias in refusing to approve it? Or can it be regulated in other parts of the world and in Venezuela, right? Why?