Below, swimming pool in new NATO HQ, 2017:
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Above pool in new NATO hq, via Assar architects
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1/29/19, “The Making of Juan Guaidó: How the US Regime Change Laboratory Created Venezuela’s Coup Leader,“ thegrayzone.com, Dan Cohen, Max Blumenthal
“Juan Guaidó is the product of a decade-long project overseen by Washington’s elite regime change trainers. While posing as a champion of democracy, he has spent years at the forefront of a violent campaign of destabilization.”
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7/27/2015, “The Making of Leopoldo López,“ Foreign Policy, Roberto Lovato, Caracas
“A closer look at the democratic bona fides of the rock star of Venezuela’s opposition.“ [Image, getty] “Leopoldo López was born in 1971 to one of Venezuela’s most elite families, a direct descendent of both 19th-century revolutionary leader Simón Bolivar and Venezuela’s first president, Cristóbal Mendoza. His mother, Antonieta Mendoza de López, is a top executive at the Cisneros Group, a global media conglomerate. His father, Leopoldo López Gil, is a restaurateur and businessman who sits on the editorial board of El Nacional.
“I belong to one percent of the privileged people,” López said as a teenager, long before the Occupy movement popularized the term, during an interview with a student newspaper at the Hun School of Princeton, an elite private boarding school in New Jersey. It was at Hun, whose alumni roster includes Saudi princes, the child of a U.S. president, and the child of a Fortune 500 CEO, that López said he experienced “an awakening of the responsibility I have towards the people of my country.”
López went on from Hun to Kenyon College, a liberal arts college in Ohio, where he developed relationships that would serve him to this day. It was a former classmate and political consultant, Rob Gluck, who led the effort to set up Friends of a Free Venezuela, the media-centered advocacy group behind a high-profile U.S. campaign for López’s release….
Among the Kenyon classmates helping to power Free Leopoldo in the United States is Republican Party operative Leonardo Alcivar, who ran communications strategies for the Romney campaign and the 2004 Republican National Convention and now works at a communications firm that advises companies on their online strategy. No other element of the Venezuelan opposition has anything resembling the U.S. media operation that López has through Free Leopoldo….
After Kenyon, López went to Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, [from which he received a Masters Degree in Public Policy in 1996] where he met another influential figure who would become a key supporter-Venezuelan national Pedro Burelli, a former JP Morgan executive and pre-Chávez-era member of the board of directors of PDVSA, Venezuela’s national petroleum firm, which controls the world’s largest crude reserves. The two first met, Burelli said, during a recruiting trip at Harvard while Burelli was still at JP Morgan. “Someone called my attention to this young Venezuelan who was at the Kennedy School where I had graduated many years before,” said Burelli, who is now a corporate consultant with B+V Advisors, “and I connected him.”*López went to work at PDVSA in 1996 and stayed there as an analyst for three years. In 1994, López’s mother joined PDVSA as well, becoming vice president of corporate affairs in 1998, after a long career at PDVSA subsidiaries.**…
In the nearly year and a half [2013-2015] since street protests rocked Caracas, the U.S. press has been kind to Leopoldo López, the 44-year-old jailed leader of Venezuela’s radical opposition. He has been painted as a combination of Nelson Mandela, Gandhi, and his distant grand uncle, Simón Bolívar, for his magnetic brand of in-your-face politics. Newsweek wrote of his “twinkling chocolate-colored eyes and high cheekbones” and called López a “revolutionary who has it all.” The New York Times published a photo of him, jaw out, fist in the air, in front of a crowd of screaming protesters and gave him a platform on its op-ed page. In New York, when the United Nations met last September, protestors rallied to show support for López….López, who has done interviews shirtless, came to embody freedom and democracy for audiences across the globe, with stars from Kevin Spacey to Cher rallying to his cause, while the hashtag #freeleopoldo rocketed across Twitter.
But in Venezuela the picture is far more complicated. López has been in jail since February 2014 on charges of arson, public incitement, and conspiracy related to the first big anti-government protest that year, on Feb. 12, 2014, which left three protesters dead and kicked off weeks of rallies, street blockades, vandalism, and violence….Outside the courtroom, the public debate continues to swirl between those who believe López is a freedom fighter facing trumped-up charges and those who believe he is the violent “fascista” the government of President Nicolás Maduro claims.
Ed.: This article has been updated. See below for clarifications and corrections. Read a rebuttal to this article from Leopoldo López’s international counsel here.
Compared to that wave of street protests-which ultimately left a total of 43 anti-government protesters, government supporters, and national guardsmen dead-López’s trial has proceeded largely without fanfare….When proceedings resumed this February, [2015] Venezuelan media barely took note….
While López was honing his political skills and building his base, he stayed in the shadow of his former ally in the Venezuelan opposition, Henrique Capriles, who remained the leader of Primero Justicia, running for president twice. But Capriles lost badly to Chávez, by more than 1 million votes, in 2012, contributing to catastrophic losses by the opposition coalition in governors’ races later that year. In 2013, Capriles lost again to Maduro, albeit in a tighter race. These losses created new divisions among the opposition and-combined with Venezuela’s economic downturn and the long wait until Maduro’s term expires in 2019-sparked López and his student allies to take to the streets in February of last year, where they clamored for “Libertad!” and “Democracia!” They also began to call for the “salida,” or exit, of Maduro, a cry that was used widely against Chávez in 2002….
On March 9, [2015] the Obama administration piled on, declaring the situation in Venezuela an “extraordinary threat to the national security and foreign policy of the United States.” (The administration has since backed away from this statement.)”…
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Added: 2017-2018-On the crucial position of US Ambassador to Colombia, Trump’s #1 objective is that Soros continue to be free to undermine the people of Colombia without oversight. Trump confirms this on 5/1/19 by nominating arch-interventionist, regime change Soros acolyte, Philip Goldberg. Goldberg “is an integral member of the U.S. intelligence bureaucracy and a “deep state” functionary of the highest order. Goldberg’s placement in Cuba [in 2018] by Trump is yet another indication that Trump’s rhetoric about his combating the “deep state” is pure political rhetoric having no basis in fact.”
11/29/2017, “Trump picks top Clinton aide for key ambassador slot. Why?" Powerline, Paul Mirengoff
“President Trump has nominated Joseph McManus to be the U.S. ambassador to Colombia….
Even if McManus had played no role in Benghazi and the email scandal, it’s not clear why one of Hillary Clinton’s top aides should be our ambassador to Colombia. Her foreign policy is certainly not [what we believed was] President Trump’s foreign policy. Nor does McManus’s bio indicate a strong background in Latin American affairs.
Thus, I agree with Sen. Mike Lee who says:
“At a time when we should be cleaning up the State Department and realigning our foreign-policy priorities to reflect those of the current administration, an Obama-era diplomat is not the right person to head our embassy in Colombia, a critical U.S. ally in the region.”
When one factors in McManus’ involvement in Benghazi and the email scandal, the case against him becomes even stronger, it seems to me.
And there is one more element to that case. Susan Crabtree of the Washington Free Beacon reports that McManus recently rebuffed Sen. Lee, Sen. Ted Cruz, and four other conservative GOP senators who asked for an investigation into whether the State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development [USAID] were using taxpayer dollars to support liberal causes funded by George Soros. The senators cited several Soros-funded projects, including one in Colombia in which USAID funds support a Soros-owned media portal that has criticized Trump, capitalism, and “patriarchal society.”
According to Crabtree, MacManus’ response to the senators defended USAID’s work without addressing the their concerns. If this reporting is accurate — if McManus blew off the issue of USAID funds being used to advance Soros’s left-wing agenda — then his nomination is not just misguided, but scandalous.
How did it come about? Apparently, McManus was the choice of Thomas Shannon, another career State Department man who was the acting Secretary of State until Rex Tillerson took over. A source told the Free Beacon that the McManus nomination “shows the State Department bureaucrats are running roughshod over the White House political team who frankly ought to be embarrassed for allowing the nomination to be made.”
This seems like a fair assessment. Perhaps it’s not too late to derail this nomination.”
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Added: July 2018–Trump won’t bend, he wants Soros protector in Colombia or will keep the Obama holdover. As of Feb. 18, 2019, an Obama appointee remained US Ambassador to Colombia:
July 3, 2018, “Senator [Mike Lee-R] blocks Trump’s choice for Colombia ambassador,” AP, Joshua Goodman, Bogota, Columbia
“A Republican senator has been blocking President Donald Trump’s choice to become the next ambassador to Colombia, citing concerns that one of the State Department’s most senior career diplomats mishandled the aftermath of the deadly assault on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya.
Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, led a small chorus of conservatives who raised doubts about Joseph Macmanus’ nomination almost as soon as it was announced last November and has used a procedural rule known as a “hold” to prevent any vote from taking place.
If he doesn’t lift it, Trump could be forced to either select a new person or wait until a new Congress begins in January [2019] to nominate Macmanus again.
A spokesperson for Lee’s office said the senator has no plans to remove the hold but declined further comment.
Macmanus is the longest delayed of 20 ambassadorial nominees awaiting confirmation, according to the American Foreign Service Association. Another 41 top ambassadorial posts are vacant….
Macmanus was chosen to replace Ambassador Kevin Whitaker at a crucial timein relations with Washington’s staunchest ally in the region.…
Several Republicans expressed reservations about Macmanus when he was nominated. Lee, in December, called him “the wrong man for Colombia,” saying he doesn’t share [what we believed was] Trump’s “America First” foreign policy…Some of Macmanus’ backers were hopeful Lee’s objections had eased after Pompeo didn’t put forward another candidate upon being sworn in as secretary of state, and the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in May backed his nomination, sending it to the Senate floor for a vote.
But Lee’s hold has so far prevented a vote from ever taking place.”
“Associated Press writer Matthew Lee in Washington contributed to this report.”
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Added: Soros has a long history of destabilizing Colombia and supporting terrorists there.
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