Category Archives: History

Genesis of U.S. Immigration Crisis

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Well, we can for sure say that the Democrats side with the Communists, Marxists and Revolutionaries.

Hat tip to Glenn Beck and my buddy Ami Horowitz for the great foot work and investigations to determine where this illegal insurgency is really coming from. Beck pulled out his chalkboard again and his presentation is a good one.

So, while these democrats are not students of history while others have very short memories, there is a longer history to all of this immigration crisis. You see, a few years ago, I read a book titled From the Shadows, written by former CIA Director Robert Gates. Gates was also the Secretary of Defense as part of his long government service resume. He wrote that book in 1996. A particular page stayed in my memory and I did a search in my Book Nook today to find it.

Okay is there more? Yes.There are so many moving parts to the legacy immigration crisis today. Who is to blame? Too many it seems. But for context read on, history does repeat itself.

Going back to an article/summary from 2006, how did we get to this cockamamie asylum policy? It goes to a crisis that was born in 1980.

Citation: The year 1980 marked the opening of a decade of public controversy over U.S. refugee policy unprecedented since World War II. Large-scale migration to the United States from Central America began, as hundreds of thousands of Salvadorans, Guatemalans, and Nicaraguans fled north from civil war, repression, and economic devastation. That same year, in the last months of the Carter administration, the U.S. Congress passed the Refugee Act, a humanitarian law intended to expand eligibility for political asylum in the United States.

The Refugee Act brought U.S. law into line with international human rights standards, specifically the 1951 UN Convention and the 1967 Protocol Relating to the Status of Refugees. The United States had ratified the Protocol in 1968, thus becoming bound by the Convention’s provisions. While the previous law recognized only refugees from Communism, the Refugee Act was modeled on the convention’s non-ideological standard of a “well-founded fear of persecution.”

The coincidence of the Central American exodus with the passage of the Refugee Act set the stage for a decade-long controversy that ultimately involved thousands of Americans. The protagonists in the controversy included, on one side, immigrants’ rights lawyers, liberal members of Congress, religious activists, and the refugees themselves. On the other side were President Reagan and his administration, the State Department, the Department of Justice (including the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI)), and conservative members of Congress. The first group invoked international human rights and humanitarian and religious principles, while the Reagan administration’s arguments centered on national security and the global fight against Communism.

The public debate took place in a number of arenas and with several sets of participants. The federal courts were the venue for class-action cases contesting systemic INS violations of refugee rights, as well as for the criminal prosecution of religious humanitarians.

Unprecedented numbers of Americans became involved through their churches and synagogues, which proclaimed themselves “sanctuaries,” as well as in bar association efforts to provide pro bono representation to Salvadorans and Guatemalans. Throughout the decade, in hundreds of individual immigration hearings, lawyers for asylum applicants and INS lawyers waged a low-intensity struggle over the nature of the conflict in Central America and the rights of individual Central Americans to asylum status.

In Congress, members debated the war and laws aimed at helping Central Americans rejected as refugees. The refugees themselves became a voice in the U.S. public debate. They formed their own community assistance groups and advocacy centers, which worked with lawyers, religious groups, and the movement against United States involvement in Central America.

Cold War by Proxy and Human Rights in Central America

In El Salvador and Guatemala, civil war had been years in the making, as oligarchies supported by corrupt military leaders repressed large sectors of the rural population. In Nicaragua, the socialist revolutionary Frente Sandinista had ousted the brutal right-wing dictator Anastasio Somoza in 1979. The civil war in El Salvador increased in intensity in early 1980. Government-supported assassins gunned down Archbishop Oscar Romero at the altar shortly after he had publicly ordered Salvadoran soldiers to stop killing civilians. In December 1980, four U.S. churchwomen were assassinated in El Salvador, an act of brutality that brought the violence “home” to the U.S. public.

The administration of President Ronald Reagan, who came to power in January 1981, saw these civil wars as theaters in the Cold War. In both El Salvador and Guatemala, the United States intervened on the side of those governments, which were fighting Marxist-led popular movements. In Nicaragua, however, the United States supported the contra rebels against the socialist Sandinista government.

During much of the early 1980s, international human rights organizations (such as Amnesty International and Americas Watch — later part of Human Rights Watch) regularly reported high levels of repression in El Salvador and Guatemala, with the vast majority of human rights violations committed by military and government-supported paramilitary forces.

In El Salvador, the military and death squads were responsible for thousands of disappearances and murders of union leaders, community leaders, and suspected guerilla sympathizers, including priests and nuns. In Guatemala, the army’s counter-insurgency campaign focused on indigenous communities, resulting in thousands of disappearances, murders, and forced displacements.

The Intersection of Foreign Policy and Asylum Policy

It is estimated that between 1981 and 1990, almost one million Salvadorans and Guatemalans fled repression at home and made the dangerous journey across Mexico, entering the United States clandestinely. Thousands traveled undetected to major cities such as Washington, DC, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Boston, New York, and Chicago. However, thousands were also detained at or near the Mexico-U.S. border.

The Reagan administration regarded policy toward Central American migrants as part of its overall strategy in the region. Congress had imposed a ban on foreign assistance to governments that committed gross violations of human rights, thus compelling the administration to deny Salvadoran and Guatemalan government complicity in atrocities. Immigration law allowed the attorney general and INS officials wide discretion regarding bond, work authorization, and conditions of detention for asylum seekers, while immigration judges received individual “opinion letters” from the State Department regarding each asylum application. Thus the administration’s foreign policy strongly influenced asylum decisions for Central Americans.

Characterizing the Salvadorans and Guatemalans as “economic migrants,” the Reagan administration denied that the Salvadoran and Guatemalan governments had violated human rights. As a result, approval rates for Salvadoran and Guatemalan asylum cases were under three percent in 1984. In the same year, the approval rate for Iranians was 60 percent, 40 percent for Afghans fleeing the Soviet invasion, and 32 percent for Poles.

The Justice Department and INS actively discouraged Salvadorans and Guatemalans from applying for political asylum. Salvadorans and Guatemalans arrested near the Mexico-U.S. border were herded into crowded detention centers and pressured to agree to “voluntarily return” to their countries of origin. Thousands were deported without ever having the opportunity to receive legal advice or be informed of the possibility of applying for refugee status. Considering the widely reported human rights violations in El Salvador and Guatemala, the treatment of these migrants constituted a violation of U.S. obligations under the 1951 Refugee Convention.

As word of the conditions in Central America and the plight of the refugees began to come to public attention in the early 1980s, three sectors began to work in opposition to the de facto “no asylum” policy: the religious sector, attorneys, and the refugees themselves.

Although a number of Congressmen and women were influenced by the position of religious organizations, the administration thwarted their efforts. In 1983, 89 members of Congress requested that the attorney general and Department of State grant “Extended Voluntary Departure” to Salvadorans who had fled the war. The administration denied their request, stating such a grant would only serve as a “magnet” for more unauthorized Salvadorans in addition to the hundreds of thousands already present. In the late 1980s, the House of Representatives passed several bills to suspend the deportation of Salvadorans, but none passed the Senate.

The Sanctuary Movement

The network of religious congregations that became known as the Sanctuary Movement started with a Presbyterian church and a Quaker meeting in Tucson, Arizona. These two congregations began legal and humanitarian assistance to Salvadoran and Guatemalan refugees in 1980.

When, after two years, none of the refugees they assisted had been granted political asylum, Rev. John Fife of Southside Presbyterian Church in Tucson announced — on the anniversary of the assassination of Salvadoran Archbishop Oscar Romero — that his church would openly defy INS and become a “sanctuary” for Central Americans. The Arizona congregations were soon joined by networks of religious congregations and activists in Northern California, South Texas, and Chicago.

At the Sanctuary Movement’s height in the mid 1980s, over 150 congregations openly defied the government, publicly sponsoring and supporting undocumented Salvadoran or Guatemalan refugee families. Another 1,000 local Christian and Jewish congregations, several major Protestant denominations, the Conservative and Reform Jewish associations, and several Catholic orders all endorsed the concept and practice of sanctuary. Sanctuary workers coordinated with activists in Mexico to smuggle Salvadorans and Guatemalans over the border and across the country. Assistance provided to refugees included bail and legal representation, as well as food, medical care, and employment.

The defense of the Salvadorans and Guatemalans marked a new use of international human rights norms by U.S. activists. Citing the Nuremberg principles of personal accountability developed in the post-World War II Nazi tribunals, religious activists claimed a legal precedent to justify their violation of U.S. laws against alien smuggling. Other activists claimed that their actions were justified by the religious and moral principles of the 19th-century U.S. abolitionist movement, referring to their activities as a new “Underground Railroad.” Many U.S. religious leaders involved in the Sanctuary Movement had prior experience in the 1960s civil disobedience campaigns against racial segregation in the American South.

The Department of Justice responded by initiating criminal prosecutions against two activists in Texas in 1984, followed by a 71-count criminal conspiracy indictment against 16 U.S. and Mexican religious activists announced in Arizona in January 1985. The Texas trials resulted in split verdicts, one conviction and one acquittal.

The Arizona trial became a major focus of organizing and publicity for the Sanctuary Movement, attracting a stellar team of volunteer criminal defense attorneys. Although the Department of Justice maintained the case was an ordinary alien-smuggling prosecution, the general counsel of INS attended sessions of the lengthy trial.

Despite the judge’s order barring the defense from presenting evidence of conditions in El Salvador or Guatemala, the Sanctuary Movement managed to turn the publicity surrounding the trial into an indictment of the Reagan administration’s war in Central America and its treatment of the refugees. All the Arizona defendants were convicted, but none were sentenced to jail time. After the Arizona trials, the movement continued to attract more congregations.

The Department of Justice did not bring any more criminal indictments of sanctuary activists after the Texas and Arizona cases.

The Lawyers

Along the U.S.-Mexico border, from the Rio Grande Valley to San Diego, local lawyers and religious activists set up new legal services projects to help detained refugees. In Los Angeles, Boston, San Francisco, Washington, DC, Chicago, and other cities, existing nonprofit legal services projects and lawyers in private practice started representing individual refugees. Pro bono panels put together by local and national bar groups — including the National Lawyers Guild Immigration Project, the American Immigration Lawyers Association, and the American Bar Association — supplemented their work.

Through coordinated strategies in individual cases, these lawyers began to address detention conditions as well as develop the new case law of the Refugee Act. In California and Texas, civil rights lawyers filed class-action cases to establish basic due process rights. While some of the cases (regarding work authorization, translation assistance, and transfer of detainees between facilities) were not successful, other decisions established national standards for the treatment of detained Salvadoran and Guatemalan asylum seekers.

The refugees and their lawyers faced enormous challenges in asylum hearings, as the required opinion letters from the Department of State, which greatly influenced immigration judges, uniformly denied the existence of human rights violations in El Salvador and Guatemala. However, in some cases, attorneys won important victories before the Board of Immigration Appeals and in the federal circuit courts that established precedents helpful to all asylum applicants. Other efforts, such as an attempt to establish that all Salvadoran civilian young men were a social group persecuted by the government, were less successful.

Finally, a group of lawyers from the National Lawyers Guild, the American Civil Liberties Union, and other organizations brought a major, national class-action case on behalf of religious organizations, legal services projects, and Salvadoran and Guatemalan refugees, claiming that the administration’s wholesale denial of political asylum claims and prosecutions of those who assisted refugees violated their constitutional, statutory, and internationally recognized human rights.

In the case, known as American Baptist Churches v. Thornburgh, the federal courts had dismissed religious organizations’ claims. However, in 1991 the U.S. District Court in San Francisco approved a settlement that allowed the reopening of denied political asylum claims and late applications by refugees who had been afraid to apply. The decision also granted class members work authorization and protection from deportation.

The settlement agreement between the plaintiffs and the government (by that time the Bush administration) included language stating that government decisions on political asylum cases would not be influenced by foreign policy considerations.

The Refugees

In many cities, Salvadoran and Guatemalan refugees formed mutual assistance organizations. Projects such as Casa Guatemala, Casa El Salvador, Comite El Salvador, and others gave the community the ability to get legal advice and information about conditions back home as well as to learn about local health care and food assistance. These groups also worked with local lawyers’ organizations and religious and antiwar activists, who assisted in decisions regarding class-action litigation and supported individual asylum applicants.

Over 20 years later, a number of these immigrant-led projects, including Centro Presente in Boston, Centro Romero in Chicago, and El Rescate in Los Angeles, still exist as full-service, nonprofit legal and community services centers. Many of the leaders of these efforts remain active in the immigrants’ rights movement, as well as in other social justice projects in the United States, El Salvador, and Guatemala.

Congress

In 1990, after its earlier frustrations to address the Central American asylum seekers, Congress finally passed legislation allowing the president to grant Temporary Protected Status (TPS) to certain groups in need of a temporary safe haven. The first TPS legislation contained one provision (never codified as part of the Immigration and Nationality Act) explicitly designating Salvadorans for TPS.

Through the early 1990s, Salvadoran and Guatemalans who had arrived in the 1980s were able to stay in the country under a series of discretionary measures and under the terms of the 1991 settlement in the American Baptist Churches litigation. It was not until the late 1990s that their status was finally settled in a legislative agreement with the supporters of the anti-Sandinista Nicaraguans. The passage of the 1997 Nicaraguan Adjustment and Central American Relief Act finally allowed Salvadorans and Guatemalans protected under the American Baptist Churches settlement to apply for permanent residence.

Conclusion

What spurred the activism of the Sanctuary Movement and Central American refugees and their lawyers was the manner in which the Reagan administration linked the fate of individual asylum seekers to its foreign policy interests. Today, the use of immigration enforcement as a “magic bullet” for national security concerns requires close examination by the U.S. public.

Immigrant communities, members of Congress, policy analysts, religious leaders, and legal experts must determine whether the human rights of individual immigrants and asylum seekers are being trampled in a rush to create a public perception of effective security.

The development of a stronger anti-immigrant grassroots movement in certain areas of the country presents new challenges. Similarly, restrictions on access to the federal courts for review of certain immigration decisions create new obstacles for advocates to overcome. However, at the same time, immigrant-led organizations and immigrants’ rights coalitions have become more sophisticated in their lobbying and public education efforts.

The proimmigrant religious sector (particularly the Catholic Church) is vocal once again, as humanitarian assistance to the undocumented may be criminalized in proposed legislation. Whether the current decade will end with even limited victories for the human rights of immigrants is as yet unknown.

 

 

Pompeo Hits Cuba with Helms Burton due to roles in Venezuela

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Helms-Burton was passed in 1996 as legislation, signed by President Clinton,  that further tightens the economic blockade on Cuba, but Title III, which allows lawsuits to be filed in federal courts over properties nationalized by the revolutionary government, was suspended every six months by all the administrations of that country from then until recently, when President Donald Trump began to threaten and give deadlines for its application.

Image result for helms burton act

In part from the McClatchy: The Trump administration will postpone its decision on whether to fully implement the Helms-Burton Act for two weeks. The move actually increases pressure on companies — primarily from Spain, Canada and the United States — because they could potentially be sued for “trafficking” in properties confiscated by the Cuban government as much as 60 years ago.

The decision, announced Wednesday, comes amid intense criticism of the government of Cuba for its role in supporting Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela.

In a notice sent to Congress, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said the U.S. “continues to examine human rights conditions in Cuba, including ongoing repression of the rights of the Cuban people to free speech, free expression and free assembly.” He added that the State Department “is also monitoring Cuba’s continued military, security, and intelligence support” to Maduro, “who is responsible for repression, violence, and a man-made humanitarian crisis in Venezuela.”

The subject of fully implementing Helms-Burton began to make its rounds on social media earlier this week.

“The regime in #Cuba is the single biggest reason why the Maduro regime is still able to repress, jail, torture and kill the people of Venezuela,” Florida Republican Sen. Marco Rubio posted on Twitter on Monday. Then he added the hashtag “#HelmsBurton,” without giving more details.

National Security Adviser John Bolton, who also tweeted on Monday, posted: “The U.S. will hold Cuba accountable for its subversion of democracy in Venezuela and direct hand in Maduro’s ongoing repression of the Venezuelan people.”

President Donald Trump broke with the practice from previous administrations of suspending the Title III provision of the Helms-Burton Act every six months, which allows Americans to file lawsuits in U.S. courts to seek compensation for property that was confiscated by the Cuban government after Fidel Castro seized power in 1959. The Helms-Burton Act codified the Cuban embargo into law.

Since Jan. 16, when it issued a 45-day waiver, the administration has been shortening the suspension period of the provision, signaling that is willing to tighten the embargo.

In early March, the administration partially implemented the provision to allow lawsuits against some 200 Cuban companies with ties to the military that now control properties confiscated by the Cuban government. But it postponed for a month a decision on whether to allow foreign companies on the island to be sued, too, amidst negotiations to seek international support to oust Maduro.

Spain, Canada and France would be among the countries most affected by a full implementation of Title III, as they have investments in tourism and mining on the island. The routine six-month suspension of this provision was the response to the complaints of U.S. allies, which protested the extraterritorial effects of the law. More details here.

 

Action Plan for NoKo’s Nuclear Program Same as 1991/2

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So, in Hanoi, Vietnam, President Trump is meeting for two days with Kim Jung Un.

Il prossimo meeting tra Kim Jong-Un e Donald J. Trump ...

The White House said Trump would meet Kim at Hanoi’s French-colonial-era Metropole Hotel at 6:30 p.m. (1130 GMT) and have a 20-minute one-on-one conversation before a dinner scheduled to last just over an hour and a half.

Meanwhile, the democrats are telegraphing that Trump is going to give up too much in order to get a deal with North Korea. How do they know? Further, the mainstream media is also broadcasting that Trump will not get anything accomplished during this second summit. Which is it exactly?

Well, it is worth looking at archived documents going back to at least 1991-1992. Remember the U.S. had a different president and military leaders, while North Korea did not have lil Kim. The issue with North Korea and the nuclear program goes back at least 25-30 years. At least under the Trump administration, there are direct talks, summits that did not happen with the top leaders of the two countries…..has the mainstream media explained any of this or for context, the previous action plans and why?

So….skim through documents 6 and 7.

 Document 06

1991-12-13
Source: Freedom of Information Act release
This briefing book provides an invaluable and detailed look at how the Bush I administration deliberated over the critical next steps in confronting the North Korea nuclear program, as well as concerns held by the Pentagon about the approach recommended by the State Department. This briefing book was prepared for a NSC/Deputies’ Committee meeting to be held on December 17. The Deputies’ Committee was composed of high-ranking representatives below the Cabinet level from the State Department, the Secretary of Defense and JCS, the CIA and ACDA, as well as other agencies as required, and met to discuss policy issues that cut across the agencies’ briefs. The level of detail found in this briefing book regarding the various negotiating goals and approaches defies easy summarization, and the materials should be read closely to capture all the nuances and factors entering into the U.S. diplomatic efforts aimed at halting Pyongyang’s nuclear program. The contents of the briefing book, with comments on significant points, include: (page numbers refer to the PDF copy):

A) Cover memo, table of contents and agenda (pages 1-3)

B) Meeting objectives memorandum (page 4)

The purpose of the meeting was to consider a “gameplan” to bring North Korea’s nuclear weapons program under control. Specific steps to be considered included preliminary contact with North Korea at the deputy assistant secretary level. This would be accompanied by an approach by Ambassador J. Stapleton Roy in Beijing to invite North Korea to send a high-level official to meet with a U.S. counterpart in New York before President Bush visited Seoul in early January. Also under consideration were talking points for these meetings and demarches to countries with relations or potential influence in Pyongyang informing them of the U.S. concerns about the DPRK nuclear program.

C) Memorandum for ASD/ISA James R. Lilley, Subject DC Meeting on North Korea Nuclear Program, ca. December 12, 1991 (pages 5-6)

This memorandum summarizes the key points in the gameplan and lays out the Pentagon’s concerns that the talking points are too “forward-leaning” with respect to offering the prospect of normalized relations with North Korea at this early point in the process. The Pentagon was already concerned that South Korea had rushed ahead in talks with North Korea about a non-aggression agreement while putting the nuclear issue off to the side. ACDA Director Ronald Lehman in his recent visit to Seoul (see 5 and 6 below) had sought to bolster South Korea’s determination to press Pyongyang on this issue by agreeing to the idea of a North-South inspection regime. The Pentagon agreed with the key point of the gameplan, which was a high-level meeting to make sure Kim Il Sung knew directly about U.S. concerns regarding North Korea’s nuclear program and that, for real progress, signing the IAEA safeguards agreement was not sufficient but the DPRK should reciprocate Roh Tae Woo’s November 8 non-nuclear declaration foreswearing the development, including reprocessing and enrichment, of nuclear weapons. But the Pentagon strongly held that the U.S. side should not offer too much by way of a possible normalization of relations in these early contacts. In its view, the mere fact that these two meetings might take place were carrot enough, and the U.S. should make any second meeting conditional on North Korea signing and implementing safeguards, and agreeing to a reciprocal non-nuclear policy with Seoul and to at least trial inspections.

This memorandum has the following attachments:

1) Suggested Talking Points for Mr. Lilley (page 7) – This paper summarizes the main points Lilley should make in the Deputies’ Committee meeting to drive home the Pentagon’s concerns: keep the pressure on South Korea to push North Korea on the nuclear issue in its bilateral talks and to avoid prematurely raising the prospect of normalized relations in the initial meetings with North Korea, which should focus on making clear the U.S. concerns and benchmarks for progress on the nuclear issue.

2) Strategy for Dealing with North Korean Nuclear Issue (Gameplan paper) (pages 8-15) – This is the State Department paper laying out the diplomatic, political, and economic steps the U.S. should adopt as it works to resolve the North Korea nuclear problem, along with a timeline. The basic components of the plan were: continued international efforts to press North Korea; ensuring that Seoul press Pyongyang at the North-South talks on the nuclear issue; and clearly stating the U.S. position on a peninsula-wide ban on reprocessing and enrichment, both to the world and especially to the DPRK in proposed initial and follow-up, high-level meetings. While there were current signs of movement and success in building international pressures on the DPRK, the paper also sounded a number of warnings, noting that “there is a well-established history of Pyongyang raising expectations . . . only to back off at the last minute with additional demands,”

The paper acknowledges that the odds may be against the U.S. in pursuing the gameplan. It was entirely possible that North Korea had no intention of changing course, and would aim to “delay, diffuse international pressure, and use any opportunity to seem forthcoming, without making meaningful concessions.” Adding to the uncertainties were the gaps in intelligence regarding North Korea’s processing of nuclear material at Yongbyon. There were also signs that North Korea might try to move and hide its processing facilities before agreeing to inspections. The proposed plan for the next few months was to combine increased international pressure with concrete incentives for North Korea to take the steps needed to rein in its nuclear program. The international campaign would be waged on a number of fronts, including with Japan, China, Russia, the IAEA, and the UN. The latter posed particular issues, such as possibly inviting “invidious comparisons” to other unsafeguarded nuclear programs, such as Israel’s. China also posed its own set of possibilities and concerns. The U.S. hoped Beijing would provide more reliable information about the North Korean nuclear program as well as exert its influence. But the U.S. could not be “absolutely certain of PRC motives … and it is unlikely they would be prepared to take any measures they perceived as putting the survival of the Pyonguang regime in question.”

These efforts needed to be coordinated with two other key arenas of discussion: the North-South dialogue and bilateral U.S.-DPRK contacts. The North-South channel was crucial to solution of the nuclear issue and other Korean problems. A meeting to discuss a ROK/DPRK non-nuclear agreement that incorporated a ban on reprocessing and enrichment as well as a bilateral inspection regime was planned for December 20. In support of this initiative, Secretary of Defense Cheney had told Seoul that the U.S. could consider inspections of U.S. bases in South Korea under the right circumstances; i.e., inspections must be reciprocal, simultaneous and involve both civil and military facilities, and should come after the public commitment from both Koreas to a non-nuclear policy. ACDA Director Lehman had elaborated on this position during his visit to Seoul. The North/South talks also carried the risk that South Korea might not be willing to pay the political price of taking tougher steps towards North Korea if needed.

The bilateral U.S.-DPRK dialogue raised the points at issue in the NSC/Deputies’ Committee meeting regarding what should be said at these sessions. They would provide a venue for sending a critical message to the top North Korean leadership: should the U.S., at any point, “learn the DPRK is developing nuclear weapons or producing weapons-usable nuclear material, we would be unable to proceed further in the direction of dialogue and normalization.” This stick would be paired with the carrot of a possible easing of tensions and moves towards normalization of relations in a step-by-step fashion as North Korea met specific benchmarks in bringing its nuclear program under international safeguards and inspections. Another potential stick was explicitly taken off the table, however: Cheney had told South Korean and Japanese leaders that the U.S. should not consider “military measures” as such discussion could jeopardize the current diplomatic strategy.

3) State Department Talking Points – Preliminary Contact with DPRK (pages 16-17) – This and the following document provide talking points that address U.S. concerns about the North Korean nuclear program and the necessary steps to address them, as discussed in the document above. Notable are the marginal notes, assumed to be by a Pentagon official, that would underscore the need to discuss the nuclear issue, and that called for deleting the talking point about possible normalization of relations between the U.S. and North Korea.

4) State Department Talking Points for High-Level Meeting (pages 18-23) – Again, these talking points elaborate on the U.S. concerns and position regarding North Korea’s nuclear program, to be presented at a high-level gathering following the initial meeting. The points are familiar, taken from the gameplan document; of particular interest are the Pentagon marginal notes. The Pentagon remained focused on making it clear to North Korea that its nuclear program was unacceptable and on laying out the steps North Korea must take to bring this program under international review and inspection.

5) Memorandum, Col. Eden Y. Woon (OSD/ISA) for Undersecretary of Defense for Policy, Subject: ACDEA Director Lehman Visit to Korea on Nuclear Issue, ca. December 30, 1991 (pages 24-26) – This memorandum reports on the interagency team that ACDA Director Lehman took to Seoul on December 6-9. The team consisted of representatives from ACDA, the State Department, the Joint Chiefs, and the office of the Secretary of Defense. After stressing to the South Koreans that the North Korea nuclear issue should be “front and center” in the upcoming North/South ministerial meetings, the U.S. delegation then focused on revising serious problems with a draft joint declaration Seoul planned to propose to Pyongyang at these meetings. Key among these concerns was keeping North Korea’s international obligation regarding IAEA safeguards separate from bilateral nuclear agreements; insuring that a North/South inspection regime included both military and civilian sites, as IAEA inspections alone might not be able to detect a covert weapons program at Yongbyon and other suspected sites; and avoiding any statement that the purpose of a bilateral inspection regime was “to check on the presence of nuclear weapons.” The U.S. feared this would come too close to sounding like checking for U.S. weapons, whereas the purpose of the inspections should be to verify both Koreas are abiding by any joint nuclear declaration.

The U.S. team had to counter serious South Korean resistance to making changes to address these concerns, fearing it would make the joint declaration too tough for North Korea to accept. More worrisome for Seoul was that it would be hard to pressure North Korea on inspecting reprocessing facilities since reprocessing was legal. Fighting back against what the Americans saw as a reversion to old thinking, which the U.S. thought had disappeared with Roh’s November 8 announcement of non-nuclear principles, the U.S. delegation spent the better part of the meeting explaining the inadequacies of IAEA inspections alone, the need to press North Korea to stop reprocessing and the requirement for persuading North Korea to reciprocate Roh Tae Woo’s powerful non-nuclear policy.

In the end, the U.S. delegation persuaded the South Koreans to make the necessary changes in the draft joint declaration. Looking ahead, it was clear Washington needed to do more to reassure South Korea that international pressure on North Korea would not ease once the DPRK signed the IAEA safeguards agreement. To this end, the U.S. would have to send out a “core demarche” cable to its friends and allies stating the American goal of persuading North Korea to reciprocate Roh’s non-nuclear policy and stop reprocessing, and declaring its position that merely signing the IAEA safeguards agreement was insufficient to address international concerns. Sending this cable would also serve to shield the United States from criticism that it was “moving the goalposts” in its demands on North Korea. And again, Washington needed to engage with China, possibly through high-level talks in the near future, to secure its role in putting pressure on North Korea, a role that would increase if the issue had to move to the U.N. Finally, the U.S. and South Korea needed to make a decision on whether to hold the 1992 Team Spirit joint military exercises, a matter on which South Korean views were divided.

6) Cable, Amembassy Seoul 13075 to SecState, Subject: Lehman Visit:

ROKG Proposal for a N/S Non-Nuclear Joint Declaration, December 9, 1991 (pages 27-30) – This cable summarizes the results of the U.S.-ROK meeting on nuclear issues that is the focus of the preceding memorandum. As noted above, these issues were distinguishing between IAEA inspections and any bilateral North/South inspection agreement, the need to include civil sites in any bilateral agreement, the U.S. opposition to having the stated purpose of bilateral inspections include checking for the presence of U.S. nuclear weapons, as well as the need to include trial inspections as a goal of the North/ South talks. The South Koreans accepted the U.S. changes, which would be incorporated into the draft Seoul would present to the DPRK at the ministerial discussions beginning on December 10. The cable reiterates the South Korean agreement that the nuclear issue should be “front and center” at these talks and that the draft joint declaration will be used to “attack” North Korea’s position on nuclear weapons. The South Koreans expected this strategy to lead to a “major confrontation” on the nuclear issue, with Seoul determined to come out of the fight this round as “top dog.” The rest of the cable gives the text of the revised draft joint declaration.

7) Cable, Amembassy Seoul 13322 to SecState, Subject: Prime Ministers Sign Joint Agreement on Reconciliation and Nonaggression: “The Most Comprehensive North-South Document Since the Division of the Peninsula, December 13, 1991 (pages 31-33) – This cable reports that on December 13, North and South Korea’s prime ministers signed the “Joint Agreement on Reconciliation, Nonaggression, Cooperation and Exchanges,” and provides details on a briefing that Assistant Foreign Minister Lee See Young gave the diplomatic corps on the agreement and the negotiations leading to it. Lee said that Seoul had put strong emphasis on the nuclear issue throughout the negotiations, pressing the DPRK to accept nuclear inspections and halt nuclear weapons development, and calling for agreement to end all reprocessing and enrichment to insure nuclear weapons would not be produced on the peninsula. South Korea had also pushed for North Korea to accept that trial inspections of military and civilian facilities, one of the confidence-building measures, be carried out within the month. Regarding the ROK draft declaration on a non-nuclear Korean peninsula, North Korea had initially responded by repeating its call for a nuclear-free zone, but Seoul had pushed to have further talks on a joint nuclear declaration work from the South Korean draft. Lee also noted the “unexpectedly flexible” North Korean stance at the talks, but felt that Pyongyang may need more concrete proof of progress in the North/South dialogue as a step towards improving its international standing and ending its political and economic isolation. For its part, Seoul held that further moves towards normalizing relations with North Korea should wait to ensure the DPRK followed through on implementing the agreement and its continued stand on the nuclear issue. Summing up, Lee asserted that the joint agreement was the most comprehensive North-South document since the division of the peninsula,” which could bring about “a major change in North-South relations.”

 

Document 07
1992-03-12
Source: Freedom of Information Act release
“Our basic policy remains that nuclear weapons in North Korean hands are intolerable.” The state of play in avoiding this outcome is the focus of this memorandum, prepared for a meeting of the North Korea Deputies’ Committee. It was a “testing period” for the DPRK, in which the U.S. and its allies waited for Pyongyang to carry out its promise to ratify the IAEA safeguards agreement reached in January, having already failed to meet a commitment to do this in February. While there were promising signs that North Korea might still ratify the IAEA agreement in April, and talks were underway to establish a Joint Nuclear Control Commission (JNCC) to monitor the North-South non-nuclear agreement, the North’s intentions remained unclear. There were signs of an internal debate possibly slowing decisions, as the DPRK might see some political advantage in delay, or it might be playing for time so that it could “destroy, dismantle, or convert sensitive facilities,” even to hide its nuclear weapons program or produce and then hide “significant amounts of plutonium before allowing inspections. Or perhaps it might plan not to accept meaningful inspections at all.

South Korea and Japan agreed with the U.S. that improved political relations with North Korea were off the table until the nuclear issue was resolved. Seoul had made progress on this issue a prerequisite for movement in other North-South talks, going so far as to postpone a summit meeting and would likely postpone the next round of prime ministerial talks in May absent real progress. Even if the DPRK did ratify the IAEA safeguards agreement and negotiated a bilateral inspection regime, the next test would be the completeness of North Korea’s declarations to the IAEA. A further complicating factor was the willingness of some countries, especially China and Russia, to give the DPRK the benefit of the doubt for “plausible delay.” Absent undeniable proof that the DPRK did not intend to carry out its promises, it would be difficult to mobilize international pressure in the near term. A “worst case” scenario in which North Korea delayed action on its IAEA commitments until October was attached to the memorandum.

For the moment, the U.S. had to walk a fine line between accepting that North Korea would meet its obligations and maintaining international concern, while at the same time laying the basis for action that could enable it to narrow North Korea’s freedom of action and tighten international pressure. The key challenge was “to minimize DPRK “wiggle room,” by building international support for a reasonable deadline for initial IAEA inspections at all the DPRK’s nuclear facilities, which would in turn lay the basis for international action if it became necessary to coerce Pyongyang. A best case scenario (also attached) would find the DPRK submitting its nuclear inventory in late May, laying the basis for initial inspections in early June. Future U,S. diplomacy needed to focus on bolstering support for the best-case scenario, while not giving North Korea grounds to charge the U.S. was “pressuring” it. A critical target of this diplomacy would be China, which had the most influence with North Korea. Washington was to stress with Beijing that the U.S. timetable was “critical” and urge the Chinese to “make it happen,” emphasizing China’s national interest and the U.S. determination to pursue tough international steps, which Beijing should support, if Pyongyang “fails to perform.” Other venues at which the U.S. should press its case were the IAEA, the UN and in U.S.-DPRK counselors talks in Beijing. Should coercive steps be needed, these could be pursued through economic sanctions under the UN aegis, in concert with like-minded nations, or unilaterally if need be.

Iranian Revolution at 40 Years Old

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Jimmy Carter unavailable for comment…..

DUBAI (Reuters) – Hundreds of thousands of Iranians marched and some burned U.S. flags to mark the revolution’s 40th anniversary on Monday as Tehran showed off ballistic missiles in defiance of U.S. efforts to curb its military power.

Soldiers, students, clerics and black-clad women holding small children thronged streets across Iran, many with portraits of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the Shi’ite cleric who toppled the Shah in an Islamic uprising that still haunts the West.

On Feb. 11, 1979 Iran’s army declared its neutrality, paving the way for the fall of U.S.-backed Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi.

Iran warns it would ‘raze Tel Aviv to the ground’ if attacked by U.S.: IRNA

State television showed crowds defying cold rainy weather and carrying Iranian flags while shouting “Death to Israel, Death to America” – trademark chants of the revolution.

After decades of hostility with the United States, the Islamic Republic vowed to increase its military strength despite mounting pressure from Western countries.

Ballistic missile capabilities were on display during the main march, including the Qadr F, a ground-to-ground missile with a 1,950-km (1,220-mile) range, Tasnim news agency said.

“We have not asked and will not ask for permission to develop different types of … missiles and will continue our path and our military power,” President Hassan Rouhani said in a speech at Tehran’s Azadi (Freedom) square.

ECONOMIC “HARDSHIPS AND GRIEVANCES”

U.S. President Donald Trump tweeted on Monday that the Iranian government had let down its people.

“40 years of corruption. 40 years of repression. 40 years of terror. The regime in Iran has produced only #40YearsofFailure. The long-suffering Iranian people deserve a much brighter future,” he posted in both English and Farsi.

The large turnout in state-sponsored rallies, in which U.S. and Israeli flags were burned, came as Iranians face mounting economic hardships many blame on the country’s clerical leaders.

Pictures on social media showed some people also demonstrating against corruption, unemployment and high prices.

“Our presence in the 40th anniversary of the revolution is to show our support for the Islamic Republic,” said one sign held by a protester. “But it does not mean we support corruption of some officials and their betrayal of the oppressed people.”

Reuters could not independently verify the pictures. Photo collection found here.

Last year, Iran cracked down on protests over poor living standards that posed the most serious challenge to its clerical elite since a 2009 uprising over disputed elections.

Prices of basic foodstuffs have soared since President Donald Trump withdrew Washington from world powers’ 2015 nuclear deal with Iran last year and reimposed sanctions on Tehran.

“I bow in admiration to Iran’s resilient people who – despite hardships and grievances – today poured into streets by the millions to mark 40th anniv of their Islamic Revolution, which some in the US wished would never come,” Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif tweeted.

“US should take note: REAL Iranians never succumb to diktats.”

In January, Rouhani said Iran was dealing with its worst economic crisis since the Shah was toppled.

But he remained defiant on Monday as Iranians recalled the end of a monarch who catered to the rich. “The Iranian people have and will have some economic difficulties but we will overcome the problems by helping each other,” he said.

U.S. AND ISRAELI THREATS

Yadollah Javani, the Iranian Revolutionary Guards’ deputy head for political affairs, said Iran would demolish cities in Israel if the United States attacked.

“The United States does not have the courage to fire a single bullet at us despite all its defensive and military assets. But if they attack us, we will raze Tel Aviv and Haifa to the ground,” Javani told the state news agency IRNA.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu dismissed the threat. “I am not ignoring the threats of the Iranian regime, but nor I am impressed by them,” he said.

“Were this regime to make the terrible mistake of trying to destroy Tel Aviv and Haifa, it would not succeed, but it would mean that they had celebrated their last Revolution Day. They would do well to take that into account.”

Washington and the Arab world have viewed Iran with great suspicion since the Islamic Revolution, fearing Khomeini’s radical ideology would inspire militants across the Middle East.

Today, the United States, its Arab allies and Israel are trying to counter Tehran’s growing influence in the Middle East, where it has proxies in Syria, Lebanon and Yemen.

Iran also has vast clout in Iraq, where Major-General Qassem Soleimani, head of the overseas arm of the Revolutionary Guards, was frequently photographed guiding Shi’ite militias in the war against Sunni Islamic State militants.

ECONOMIC “HARDSHIPS AND GRIEVANCES”

U.S. President Donald Trump tweeted on Monday that the Iranian government had let down its people.

“40 years of corruption. 40 years of repression. 40 years of terror. The regime in Iran has produced only #40YearsofFailure. The long-suffering Iranian people deserve a much brighter future,” he posted in both English and Farsi.

***

Back. during post revolution:

Source: Documents of the U.S. Espionage Den (Tehran: Muslim Students Following the Line of the Imam, c. 1981)
This fascinating analysis of the political and social force that would come to dominate the revolution is one indication that line officers in Iran were well aware of the Shiite phenomenon in the country at an earlier time than is sometimes assumed.  Ayatollah Khomeini is specifically named as the “symbolic leader” of the revolution.  The Embassy’s staff admits they have been “laboring” to get a better understanding of the “renascent Shi’ite religious movement” and they make plain that part of the problem is that Iranians within and outside of the government have consistently “peddled” the view that “Khomeini’s followers are for the most part crypto Communists or leftists of Marxist stripe.”  The telegram goes on to give a brief survey of Shiism and Iranian monarchical mistreatment of the “Islamic establishment,” presumably in an attempt to educate non-specialists higher up in the Department.  The telegram specifically advises that “it has become obvious that Islam is deeply imbedded in the lives of the vast majority of the Iranian people.”
***
Source: “The Carter Administration and the Arc of Crisis: Iran, Afghanistan and the Cold War in Southern Asia, 1977-1981,” briefing book for conference prepared by the National Security Archive
The Defense Intelligence Agency, whose primary audience consisted of the secretary of defense, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and military commanders, produced this unclassified primer on Shiism in Iran.  The DIA had its own HUMINT sources overseas but this document clearly derives its information from open sources and indeed contains nothing that an interested citizen could not easily have found in a public library.  But the topic indicates at least a basic recognition of the importance of one of the key dynamics at work in Iranian society. The extract posted here, all that appears to exist (and one of the few available DIA documents from the period), does not attempt to forecast the course of events in the country.
Iran Vaunts Military, Exults at US 'Dismay' as Revolution ...
***
Source: Freedom of Information Act request
As late as October 1978, there is still little sense in Washington or other Western capitals that things are heading in a dangerous direction in Iran.  In a meeting with British counterparts earlier in the month, State Department Iran specialist Henry Precht gave a lugubrious forecast for the Shah and for Western interests but according to records of the session (click here) the British – and even Precht’s superiors – thought he was well off target.  In this telegram from the U.S. Embassy in Tehran, an equally dire report directs the State Department’s attention to a visible change in attitudes across many sectors of public opinion.  Pro-Shah and anti-Shah elements alike reportedly agree that his apparent lack of firm action is making the situation worse and he is in danger of losing control of events.
***
Just a few days after the previous cable expressing a general sense of a worsening atmosphere in the capital, the Embassy in Tehran focuses this report on the specific question of a “military option.” The general sense seems to be that a military takeover is inevitable and many Embassy contacts – especially senior military officers – are actively supporting the idea. Many Iranians evidently believed later that the Carter administration eventually backed a military coup, which never took place. Noting that the Shah told Ambassador Sullivan personally that he was considering a military government, the telegram assesses that such a move could succeed but stops short of supporting it, concluding “the long-term costs would be heavy.” Go here for the full menu of documents.

More to the Venezuela Revolution, Carnet de la Patria

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SOCIAL CONTROL

Let lil miss Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in please on a few of these details:

Sorta president Nicolas Maduro blames the United States for leading the mission to remove him from office. He has cut off diplomatic relations with the United States, while calling for the expulsion of our diplomatic staff. Only non-essential personnel of the United States has been told to leave Venezuela.

Presently, a self declared president is in hiding for his own safety it seems, Juan Guaido. Guaido has been approved and recognized not only by the United States, but Europe and Canada as other countries in the region have done the same.

On January 10, 2019, the Organization of American States, a Latin American council have all agreed to not recognize the legitimacy of Nicolas Maduro’s new term, hence any political action he has taken since the beginning of 2019 has also been deemed as illegitimate.

Maduro put simply is a killer, criminal and globally corrupt.

It is also important to note Maduro’s #2 man in country, Tareck Zaidan El Aissami Maddah. He was born in Venezuela to a Lebanese mother and Syrian father. He is just as corrupt as noted by the United States.

According to PanAm Post, US prosecutors have alleged that El Aissami was Venezuela’s “liaison” with Hezbollah and has provided passports to “terrorist organizations.” A report by the Center for a Secure Free Society released in 2014 alleged that El Aissami has “developed a sophisticated financial network and multi-level networks as a criminal-terrorist pipeline to bring Islamic militants to Venezuela and neighboring countries, and to send illicit funds from Latin America to the Middle East.” The alleged “pipeline” consists of 40 shell companies which have bank accounts in Venezuela, Panama, Curacao, St. Lucia, Miami and Lebanon and is also involved in drug smuggling.

Most all of the El Aissami family worked for Saddam Hussein and the Baathist Party including in Iraq and in Venezuela.

Meanwhile, with the previous Venezuelan president Chavez and through Maduro, Venezuela has been under the multi track influence of China, Russia, Syria, Cuba and Iran.

While much political and national security debate in the United States has included Huawei, other other telecom threat is ZTE. ZTE along with Huawei have both been banned from any government use by legislation signed by President Trump.

ZTE is important to understand as millions of U.S. cell phones in use are manufactured by ZTE. There is spy intrusion technology inside these phones. But there is something much more nefarious about China, ZTE and Venezuela and that is the ‘carnet de la patria’ otherwise known as the ‘fatherland card’.

This application was created and is in use today in China so Venezuela is doing the same. Read on for the nastiness and here is what lil Ms. Ocasio-Cortez along with the rest of the socialists in Congress are subscribing to.

***  Venezuela’s Nicolas Maduro wins reelection, officials say ...

Caracas (Reuters) – In April 2008, former Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez dispatched Justice Ministry officials to visit counterparts in the Chinese technology hub of Shenzhen. Their mission, according to a member of the Venezuela delegation, was to learn the workings of China’s national identity card program.

Chavez, a decade into his self-styled socialist revolution, wanted help to provide ID credentials to the millions of Venezuelans who still lacked basic documentation needed for tasks like voting or opening a bank account. Once in Shenzhen, though, the Venezuelans realized a card could do far more than just identify the recipient.

There, at the headquarters of Chinese telecom giant ZTE Corp, they learned how China, using smart cards, was developing a system that would help Beijing track social, political and economic behavior. Using vast databases to store information gathered with the card’s use, a government could monitor everything from a citizen’s personal finances to medical history and voting activity.

“What we saw in China changed everything,” said the member of the Venezuelan delegation, technical advisor Anthony Daquin. His initial amazement, he said, gradually turned to fear that such a system could lead to abuses of privacy by Venezuela’s government. “They were looking to have citizen control.”

The following year, when he raised concerns with Venezuelan officials, Daquin told Reuters, he was detained, beaten and extorted by intelligence agents. They knocked several teeth out with a handgun and accused him of treasonous behavior, Daquin said, prompting him to flee the country.

Government spokespeople had no comment on Daquin’s account.

The project languished.

But 10 years after the Shenzhen trip, Venezuela is rolling out a new, smart-card ID known as the “carnet de la patria,” or “fatherland card.” The ID transmits data about cardholders to computer servers. The card is increasingly linked by the government to subsidized food, health and other social programs most Venezuelans rely on to survive.

And ZTE, whose role in the fatherland project is detailed here for the first time, is at the heart of the program.

As part of a $70 million government effort to bolster “national security,” Venezuela last year hired ZTE to build a fatherland database and create a mobile payment system for use with the card, according to contracts reviewed by Reuters.

A team of ZTE employees is now embedded in a special unit within Cantv, the Venezuelan state telecommunications company that manages the database, according to four current and former Cantv employees.

The fatherland card is troubling some citizens and human-rights groups who believe it is a tool for Chavez’s successor, President Nicolas Maduro, to monitor the populace and allocate scarce resources to his loyalists.

Opposition and drivers reject vehicle census in Venezuela ...

“It’s blackmail,” Hector Navarro, one of the founders of the ruling Socialist Party and a former minister under Chavez, said of the fatherland program. “Venezuelans with the cards now have more rights than those without.”

In a phone interview, Su Qingfeng, the head of ZTE’s Venezuela unit, confirmed ZTE sold Caracas servers for the database and is developing the mobile payment application. The company, he said, violated no Chinese or local laws and has no role in how Venezuela collects or uses cardholder data.

“We don’t support the government,” he said. “We are just developing our market.”

An economic meltdown in Venezuela is causing hyperinflation, widespread shortages of food and medicines, and a growing exodus of desperate citizens. Maduro has been sanctioned by the United States and is criticized by governments from France to Canada as increasingly autocratic.

In that, critics say, Maduro has an ally. The fatherland card, they argue, illustrates how China, through state-linked companies like ZTE, exports technological know-how that can help like-minded governments track, reward and punish citizens.

The database, according to employees of the card system and screenshots of user data reviewed by Reuters, stores such details as birthdays, family information, employment and income, property owned, medical history, state benefits received, presence on social media, membership of a political party and whether a person voted.

So far, the government’s disclosure of ZTE’s involvement in the fatherland project has been limited to a passing reference in a February 2017 press release that credited the company with helping to “fortify” the underlying database.

Venezuela’s government didn’t respond to requests for comment for this article. Nadia Perez, a spokeswoman for Cantv, the state-run telecoms firm, declined to comment and Manuel Fernandez, the company’s president, didn’t respond to emails or text messages from Reuters. China’s Justice Ministry and its embassy in Caracas didn’t respond to requests for comment.

Although ZTE is publicly traded, a Chinese state company is its largest shareholder and the government is a key client. ZTE has run afoul of Washington before for dealings with authoritarian governments.

The company this year paid $1 billion to settle with the U.S. Commerce Department, one of various penalties after ZTE shipped telecommunications equipment to Iran and North Korea, violating U.S. sanctions and export laws. The Commerce action was sparked by a 2012 Reuters report that ZTE sold Iran a surveillance system, which included U.S. components, to spy on telecommunications by its citizens.

Legal experts in the United States said it is unclear whether ZTE and other companies that supply the fatherland system are violating U.S. sanctions on Venezuelan leaders by providing tools that critics believe strengthen the government’s grip on power.

Fernandez, the Cantv president, is one of the targets of those sanctions because of the telecom company’s censorship of the internet in Venezuela, according to a U.S. Treasury Department statement. But the prohibitions thus far are meant primarily to thwart business with Maduro and other top officials themselves, not regular commerce in Venezuela.

Still, U.S. lawmakers and other critics of Maduro’s rule are concerned about ZTE’s role in Venezuela. “China is in the business of exporting its authoritarianism,” U.S. Senator Marco Rubio told Reuters in an email. “The Maduro regime’s increasing reliance on ZTE in Venezuela is just the latest example of the threat that Chinese state-directed firms pose to U.S. national security interests.”

To understand how the fatherland card works and how it came to be, Reuters reviewed confidential contracts and internal government documents related to its development. Reporters also interviewed dozens of current and former employees of ZTE, Venezuela’s government and Cantv, or Compania Anonima Nacional Telefonos de Venezuela, as the company is formally known.

They confirmed details of the project and the outlines of Daquin’s account of its origins.

“AN ATTEMPT TO CONTROL ME”

Maduro for the past year has urged citizens to sign up for the new card, calling it essential to “build the new Venezuela.” As many as 18 million people, over half the population, already have, according to government figures.

“With this card, we are going to do everything from now on,” Maduro said on state television last December.

To encourage its adoption, the government has granted cash prizes to cardholders for performing civic duties, like rallying voters. It has also given one-time payouts, such as awarding moms enrolled in the card a Mother’s Day bonus of about $2. The payment, last May, was nearly a monthly minimum wage – enough to buy a carton of eggs, given the current pace of inflation.

Maduro is also taking steps to force the card’s adoption. The government now says Venezuelans need it to receive public benefits including medicine, pensions, food baskets and subsidized fuel. In August, retirees protested outside social security offices and complained the fatherland rule limits access to hard-won pensions.

Benito Urrea, a 76-year-old diabetic, told Reuters a state doctor recently denied him an insulin prescription and called him “right wing” because he hasn’t enrolled. Like some other Venezuelan citizens, especially those who oppose the Maduro administration, Urrea sees the card with suspicion.

“It was an attempt to control me via my needs,” Urrea said in his Caracas apartment. Reuters was unable to contact the doctor.

Using the servers purchased from ZTE, the government is creating a database some citizens fear is identifying Venezuelans who support the government and those who don’t.

Some of the information, such as health data, is gathered with card usage. Some is obtained when citizens enroll. Cardholders and local human rights groups told Reuters that administrators ask questions about income, political activities and social media profiles before issuing the card.

Civil servants are facing particular pressure to enroll, according to more than a dozen state workers.

When scanning their cards during a presidential election last May, employees at several government offices were told by bosses to message photos of themselves at polls back to managers, they said. A Justice Ministry document reviewed by Reuters featured a list of state employees who didn’t vote.

After Chavez became president in 1999, he sought to empower “invisible” Venezuelans who couldn’t access basic services. In the following years, more citizens received documentation, but the cards were fragile and easily forged, according to a 2007 Justice Ministry report.

The report, reviewed by Reuters, recommended a new, microchip-enabled card that would be harder to counterfeit. No such effort got underway.

That December, after nearly a decade of soaring popularity, Chavez suffered his first electoral defeat, losing a referendum to scrap term limits. Oil prices plummeted shortly thereafter, hammering the economy.

Chavez worked to appease his working-class base, including throngs still lacking identity credentials. He sent Daquin, the top information security advisor at the Justice Ministry, to China.

The technology Daquin and colleagues learned about in Shenzhen underpinned what would become China’s “Social Credit System.”

The still-evolving system, part of which uses “smart citizen cards” developed by ZTE, grades citizens based on behavior including financial solvency and political activity. Good behavior can earn citizens discounts on utilities or loans. Bad marks can get them banned from public transport or their kids blocked from top schools.

ZTE executives showed the Venezuelans smart cards embedded with radio-frequency identification, or RFID, a technology that enables monitors through radio waves to track location and data. Other cards used so-called Quick Response, or QR, codes, the matrix barcodes now commonly used to store and process information.

After the trip, Venezuela turned to Cuba, its closest ally, and asked for help creating its own version of RFID cards. “The new goal was Big Data,” Daquin said.

In June 2008, Venezuela agreed to pay a Cuban state company $172 million to develop six million of the cards, according to a copy of the contract. Cuban government officials didn’t respond to questions about the agreement.

By 2009, Daquin grew uneasy about the potential for abuses of citizens’ privacy.

He expressed those concerns to officials including Vladimir Padrino, a general at the time and now Venezuela’s defense minister. The Defense Ministry didn’t respond to phone calls, emails or a letter presented by Reuters for comment.

On the morning of Nov. 12, at his local Caracas bakery, six armed officials in uniforms of Venezuela’s national intelligence agency awaited Daquin, he told Reuters.

They showed him photos of his daughter and forced him to drive east toward the town of Guatire. Off a back road, Daquin said, they beat him with pistols, forced a handgun into his mouth and dislodged several teeth, still missing.

“Why are you betraying the revolution?” one asked.

They demanded $100,000 for his release, Daquin said.

Daquin, who says he had been saving for years to buy property, went home, pulled cash from a safe and delivered it to the men. That evening, he booked a flight for himself, his wife and their three children to the United States, where he has lived since, working as an information security consultant.

His brother, Guy, who also lives in the United States, confirmed Daquin’s account. Documentation reviewed by Reuters corroborates his role at the ministry, and people familiar with Daquin’s work confirmed his involvement in the card project.

After Daquin fled, the Cuban contract went nowhere, according to another former advisor.

In March 2013, Chavez died. Maduro, his heir as Socialist Party candidate, was elected president the next month. The lingering oil crash dragged Venezuela into recession.

“WE’LL FIND OUT”

With hunger increasing, the government in 2016 launched a program to distribute subsidized food packages. It hired Soltein SA de CV, a company based in Mexico, to design an online platform to track them, according to documents reviewed by Reuters. The platform was the beginning of the database now used for the fatherland system.

Soltein’s directors, according to LinkedIn profiles, are mostly former Cuban state employees. A person who answered a telephone listed for Soltein denied the firm worked on the fatherland system. A woman at the company’s registered address in the resort city of Cancun told Reuters she had never heard of Soltein.

The system worked. Nearly 90 percent of the country’s residents now receive the food packages, according to a study published in February by Andres Bello Catholic University and two other universities.

Now more satisfied with its ability to track handouts, the government sought to know more about the recipients, according to people involved in the project. So it turned back to ZTE.

The Chinese company, now in Venezuela for about a decade, has over 100 employees working in two floors of a Caracas skyscraper. It first worked with Cantv, the telecommunications company, to enable television programming online.

Like many state enterprises in Venezuela, Cantv has grown starved for investment. ZTE became a key partner, taking on many projects that once would have fallen to Cantv itself, people familiar with both companies said.

ZTE is helping the government build six emergency response centers monitoring Venezuela’s major cities, according to a 2015 press release. In 2016, ZTE began centralizing video surveillance for the government around the country, according to current and former employees.

In its final push for the fatherland cards, the government no longer considered RFID, according to people familiar with the effort. The location-tracking technology was too costly.

Instead, it asked ZTE for help with QR codes, the black-and-white squares smartphone users can scan to get directed to web sites. ZTE developed the codes, at a cost of less than $3 per account, and the government printed the cards, linking them to the Soltein database, these people said.

In a phone call with Reuters in September, Su, the head of ZTE’s Venezuela business, confirmed the company’s card deal with Cantv. He declined to answer follow-up questions.

Maduro introduced the cards in December 2016. In a televised address, he held one up, thanked China for lending unspecified support and said “everybody must get one.”

The ID system, still running on the Soltein platform, hadn’t yet migrated to ZTE servers. Disaster soon struck. In May 2017, hackers broke into the fatherland database.

The hack was carried out by anonymous anti-Maduro activists known as TeamHDP. The group’s leader, Twitter handle @YoSoyJustincito, said the hack was “extremely simple” and motivated by TeamHDP’s mission to expose Maduro secrets.

The hacker, who spoke to Reuters by text message, declined to be identified and said he is no longer in Venezuela. A Cantv manager who later helped migrate the database to ZTE servers confirmed details of the breach.

During the hack, TeamHDP took screenshots of user data and deleted the accounts of government officials, including Maduro. The president later appeared on television scanning his card and receiving an error message: “This person doesn’t exist.”

Screenshots of the information embedded in various card accounts, shared by TeamHDP with Reuters, included phone numbers, emails, home addresses, participation at Socialist Party events and even whether a person owns a pet. People familiar with the database said the screenshots appear authentic.

Shortly after the hack, Maduro signed a $70 million contract with Cantv and a state bank for “national security” projects. These included development of a “centralized fatherland database” and a mobile app to process payments, such as the discounted cost of a subsidized food box, associated with the card.

“Imperialist and unpatriotic factions have tried to harm the nation’s security,” the contract reads.

It says an undisclosed portion of the funding would come from the Venezuela China Joint Fund, a bilateral financing program. A related contract, also reviewed by Reuters, assigns the database and payment app projects to ZTE. The document doesn’t disclose how much of the $70 million would go to the Chinese company.

ZTE declined to comment on financial details of its business in Venezuela. Neither the Venezuelan nor the Chinese government responded to Reuters queries about the contracts.

In July 2017, Soltein transferred ownership of fatherland data to Cantv, project documents show. A team of a dozen ZTE developers began bolstering the database’s capacity and security, current and former Cantv employees said.

Among other measures, ZTE installed data storage units built by U.S.-based Dell Technologies Inc, according to one ZTE document. Dell spokeswoman Lauren Lee said ZTE is a client in China but that Dell doesn’t sell equipment to ZTE in Venezuela. She said Dell reviewed its transactions in Venezuela and wasn’t aware of any sale to Cantv, either.

“Dell is committed to compliance with all applicable laws where we do business,” Lee said in an email. “We expect our customers, partners and suppliers to follow these same laws.”

In May, Venezuela held elections that were widely discredited by foreign governments after Maduro banned several opposition parties.

Ahead of the vote, ruling party officials urged voters to be “grateful” for government largesse dispensed via the fatherland cards. They set up “red point” kiosks near voting booths, where voters could scan their cards and register, Maduro himself promised, for a “fatherland prize.”

Those who scanned their cards later received a text message thanking them for supporting Maduro, according to several cardholders and one text message reviewed by Reuters. The prizes for voting, however, were never issued, cardholders and people familiar with the system said.

Current and former Cantv employees say the database registers if, but not how, a person voted. Still, some voters were led to believe the government would know. The belief is having a chilling effect.

One organizer of a food handout committee in the west-central city of Barinas said government managers had instructed her and colleagues to tell recipients their votes could be tracked. “We’ll find out if you voted for or against,” she said she told them.

State workers say they are a target.

An internal Cantv presentation from last year said the system can feed information from the database to ministries to help “generate statistics and take decisions.” After the vote, government offices including Banco Bicentenario del Pueblo, a state bank, sent Cantv lists with employees’ names to determine whether they had voted, according to the manager who helped set up the servers.

Banco Bicentenario didn’t respond to a request for comment. Officials at the Economy Ministry, which the bank reports to, didn’t respond to requests, either.

With personal data now so available, some citizens fear they can lose more than just their jobs, said Mariela Magallanes, an opposition lawmaker who headed a commission that last year investigated how the fatherland card was being linked to the subsidized food program.

The government, the commission said in a report, is depriving some citizens of the food boxes because they don’t possess the card. “The government knows exactly who is most vulnerable to pressure,” she said.