#AskAn UpperClassVenezuelan
So who owns the website www. AskAVenezuelan. com? According to a search through godaddy.com, the website is owned by
Nelli Romero, a computer repair consultant who also owns a company called MyTeks.com. On Twitter, Romero goes by Nellie Belén Izarza. The company’s site on Zoominfo claims it has an annual revenue of $4.2 million.
On her Linkedin page, under the name Nelli R., she describes herself as an expert in “
political and social media engineering” in Washington, D.C.
Romero has also worked as a consultant and lobbyist with the liberal Sunlight Foundationnon-profit. Yet, in old social media posts, Romero supported and hyped up the violent guarimba protests that resulted in numerous deaths. One tactic familiar to the guarimbas was the
guaira, where pro-coup militants tied razor wire across streets that then resulted in the deaths of motorcyclists and passersby, some by decapitation.
In March of 2019, in apparent outrage that Washington had not yet authorized a military invasion of her homeland, Romero tweeted out (in Spanish): “
With no U.S. Marine Corps there is no paradise.”
The pro-Guaidó spokespeople often insist to reporters that the group is neither right-wing nor left-wing in its political ideology, and that they do not want war or intervention. However, a quick glance over the “
Ask a Venezuelan” website shows that it has repeatedly promoted Senator Marco Rubio’s (R-FL) calls for U.S. intervention and brutal sanctions. Both
Romero and
Bustillos have often retweeted and praised Rubio, a neoconservative considered one of the most militaristic members of the U.S. Congress.
In a testament to how astroturfed the #AskAVenezuelan campaign is,
the website admits that it was only started in response to a massive mobilization of anti-war activists in Washington who were protesting against Trump’s sanctions and intervention. In the “About” section, they say they “witnessed first-hand the high levels of misinformation about the situation in Venezuela.”
With the Republican Party in the U.S. already fully invested in the coup, ensuring support for regime change within the Democratic Party establishment, along with favorable coverage from liberal-leaning media outlets, is at the top of the opposition’s agenda. This is where
Romero and
Bustillos enter the picture, as both describe themselves as liberal Democrats, even while they support the ultra-militarism of Marco Rubio. Romero has taken on an important lobbying role, meeting recently with Hillary Clinton’s former 2016 running mate, Senator Tim Kaine (D-VA).
For her part,
Romero advocates for LGBTQ rights even while apparently controlling the #AskAVenezuelan brand. She is clearly not happy with those in the pro-Guaidó mob that have unleashed tirades of vitriolic homophobia against their political foes across the street and in the embassy. Together with
Bustillos, she is appearing to do all she can to repackage the angry, entitled roar of a largely right-wing mob into a bipartisan message that appeals to a war-weary U.S. public.
Beyond the PR strategy that governs the embassy siege, D.C.’s pro-Guaidó lobby appears intent on consolidating a new status quo where Caracas is permanently isolated both diplomatically and economically, and an escalation of the conflict is just over the horizon.
The D.C. regime-change crew
Besides the marketing strategists, a number of well-connected Venezuelan exiles and diaspora members from the D.C. area have mobilized alongside some demonstrably violent figures each day outside the embassy.
One pro-coup activist seen on embassy grounds is
Emerson Hevia, a
Senior Principal Architect at the arms manufacturer Raytheon. The company is considered one of the biggest war profiteers in human history.
Also present at the protests has been
Moises Rendon,
a fellow at the hawkish Center for Strategic and International Studies. Backed by NATO, defense contractors, and Gulf monarchies, this D.C. think tank was exposed by The Grayzone for hosting a private roundtable of Trump and Guaidó advisors to discuss the use of military force against Venezuela.
Alejandro Perez Barrios — a former employee of the World Bank and currently a senior manager at the International Finance Corporation (IFC), a member of the World Bank group — has also taken part in the embassy siege.
Another prominent pro-coup activist is
Carlos Alaya (also known as Carlos Alfredo Ayala Quintero),
a marketing strategist at the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB). One of Washington’s most important international financial institutions (IFIs) promoting neoliberal austerity across the hemisphere, the IDB recently hired a key architect of the coup in Venezuela, Ricardo Hausmann. The son of the President of the Venezuelan Association of Constitutional Law, Alaya has berated peace activists with vile epithets.
In fact, it has been common for many of the pro-coup activists to verbally assault female CODEPINK members, hurl racist invective at black anti-war activists, anti-Semitic slurs at reporters, and play jingoistic Trump speeches on loudspeakers.
Another character known as “
Mohamed” has aggressively attempted to rip food away fromembassy protectors and briefly broke into the embassy, where he ransacked an entire room.
He was then allowed by Secret Service police to walk freely among the mob outside, where he was seen providing private security to Guaidó’s faux ambassador Carlos Vecchio.
Cathy Caminero is a consistent participant of the pro-coup mob. She has been seen openly in public making threatening gestures against embassy defenders.
Her partner,
Cesar Caminero, has also taken part in the pro-coup siege. On his Linkedin profile, Cesar Caminero states that he is a senior level IT Engineer with an active Department of Defense (DoD) secret clearance. DoD secret clearances are provided only to either DoD employees or approved employees of a DoD associated contractor. Caminero currently works as a senior Windows engineer team leader for Navstar Inc., a firm that provides IT and other services for U.S. intelligence agencies and the Department of State. Video on Twitter shows Cesar together with Guaidó’s fake ambassador Carlos Vecchio.
Perhaps the most prominent non-Venezuelan supporter of the embassy siege is a neighbor of the embassy. He is
Jim McCarthy of CounterPoint Strategies. According to its website, CounterPoint has “specialized in an aggressive, combative style of crisis management.” Earlier in his career, McCarthy is said to have “handled a variety of Fortune 500 and foreign government accounts” for two major public relations agencies in Washington. With a slew of wealthy clients, his company has been said to be “often at odds with Greenpeace” while “McCarthy helped pioneer the practice of using Google ads to target journalists.” On Twitter, McCarthy has denounced Venezuela’s elected government and promotes an interventionist position.
Many in the pro-Guaidó mob appear to work for either international financial institutions, hawkish D.C. think tanks, or arms- and military-oriented contractors.
Candid audio of members of the opposition recorded surreptitiously and obtained by
MintPress News expresses fear of revealing their identities linked to their professions(including one opposition protester who describes herself as being involved in “national security”).
Hailing from affluent backgrounds and overflowing with entitlement, the regime-change crew besieging the embassy does not mind brutalizing the anti-war activists that stand in their way. As numerous media reports show, the so-called “peaceful” and “pro-democracy” mob enjoys blaring 120 dB air horns just inches away from the eardrums of anti-war activists, and flashing bright strobe and scuba lights directly in the eyes of embassy defenders, even the elderly. Secret Service officers coordinating with Trump’s Department of State have stood by and done little to nothing. Violating international law, electricity has been cut off to the embassy and recently D.C. police themselves began to actively stop food and water from getting to those inside.
One anti-coup activist often present outside the embassy wondered if the fake ambassador, Vecchio, had hired a top-flight PR firm to control the messaging of the pro-coup mob. He explains:
"Between Tuesday and Wednesday [May 7-8] there was a huge, concerted shift. People were seen coaching young Venezuelan-American women on how to cry and to wave their passports. They removed some of the more vitriolic opposition and dressed up some golpistas [coup supporters] in rainbow LGBTQ flags to downplay their rampant homophobia.”
On May 7, oppositionists wrapped themselves in at least a dozen pride flags, but the following day, the flags had totally disappeared.
As national media focuses its lenses on the delegated spokespeople of the pro-coup mob outside the Venezuelan Embassy, the voices of millions of working-class Venezuelans who voted in large numbers for their elected government, or even just those who do not want to see an escalation of the conflict, have been wholly ignored.
Instead, Americans are instructed to consult a carefully conceived “Ask a Venezuelan” campaign that was designed by corporate marketing strategists. It is the brainchild of elite members of the diaspora with ties to the U.S. government, the military-industrial complex, and the Guaidó coup administration. And, as with a number of other PR campaigns, it is designed to distract Americans from the deeply unsettling reality unfolding in the heart of their nation’s capital.
Feature photo | Carla Bustillos of Alexandria, Va., carries her son Carlos as she yells into a bullhorn with supporters of US-backed self-declared president Juan Guaido during outside of the Venezuelan Embassy in Washington, April 30, 2019. Andrew Harnik | AP
Jeb Sprague lectures at the University of Virginia and formerly taught at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He is the author of Globalizing the Caribbean: Political Economy, Social Change, and the Transnational Capitalist Class (Temple University Press, 2019) andParamilitarism and the Assault on Democracy in Haiti (Monthly Review Press, 2012), and is the editor of Globalization and Transnational Capitalism in Asia and Oceania (Routledge, 2016). He is a founding member of the Network for Critical Studies of Global Capitalism (NCSGC)
Alexander Rubinstein is a staff writer for MintPress News based in Washington, DC. He reports on police, prisons and protests in the United States and the United States’ policing of the world. He previously reported for RT and Sputnik News.
