By John Perry

(John Perry is based in Masaya, Nicaragua, and writes for the Council on Hemispheric Affairs, London Review of Books, FAIR, Covert Action Magazine and others.)

[This article was first published in Covert Action Magazine.] 

Politicians in the small Caucasian state of Georgia have been sanctioned by Washington for “undermining democracy” and depriving Georgian people of “fundamental freedoms”, simply because its parliament has passed a law to control foreign influence over Georgian politics.

Politicians in another small country, Nicaragua, were subjected to U.S. sanctions after doing the same. Although the two countries are very different, there are striking similarities in the ways that Washington and its allies have striven to undermine their sovereignty.

In both cases, legislation to limit foreign influence followed coup attempts against popularly elected governments. The governing Georgian Dream party, having won three elections since 2012, has survived two, U.S.-orchestrated coup attempts since 2020.

Nicaragua’s ruling Sandinista Party had also won three elections in 12 years when a coup was thwarted in 2018 (it has since won another election, in 2021). Both countries’ governments found that non-governmental organizations (NGOs) financed from abroad were heavily involved in these insurrections and moved to control them. And both modelled their legislation—not on Russia as is claimed—but on longstanding U.S. federal law.

The Foreign Agents Registration Act (“FARA”) came into force in the U.S. in 1938. It requires NGOs, other organizations, and individuals who receive funding from abroad to register as “foreign agents”. FARA-style legislation now exists in many other countries.

In recent years the U.S. has used FARA to crack down on what the New York Times called “prominent Washington research groups [receiving] tens of millions of dollars from foreign governments,” creating a “muscular arm of foreign governments’ lobbying in Washington.”

The Times article is replete with arguments for taming the influence of foreign governments on U.S. politics. Indeed, Washington’s most recent concern has been to expose what have been dubbed “Trojan horse” charities, those NGOs that have political objectives behind their charitable work.

However, neither Washington nor its allies abroad or in the corporate media approve of countries outside the West adopting similar powers. The reason is of course that they might expose the very Trojan horses created by Washington or by European capitals to interfere in those countries’ politics or even to provoke regime change.

Both Georgia and Nicaragua want to protect their sovereignty and try to limit foreign influence over their national affairs—aims that are uncontroversial in western countries.

Before implementing its equivalent of FARA, Nicaragua’s population of under seven million sustained no less than 7,000 NGOs, most of which were likely to have been dependent on foreign funding. Georgia’s current position is far more extreme: a country of just 3.8 million people hosts around 26,000 NGOs, the vast majority funded from abroad.

Of course, in both countries these nonprofits have often been involved in worthwhile humanitarian work. But, again in both cases, Washington and its allies have also been financing bodies that can legitimately be called Trojan horses.

And as Kit Klarenburg points out in The Grayzone, NGOs in Georgia have until now benefitted from lax rules about foreign funding – as indeed did those in Nicaragua before its 2020 legislation took effect.

What does a Trojan horse NGO actually do? Their websites typically have mission statements and programs aimed at “promoting democratic values,” “capacity building,” “strengthening civil society,” advocating “good governance,” “raising civic awareness” and finding “a new generation of democratic youth leaders.”

These are essentially labels for what is really pro-Western propaganda, often directed at young people who are simultaneously encouraged to adopt “modern,” “liberal” values and lifestyles and be critical of their governments for failing to toe Washington’s line.

There are prizes: salaried jobs, training courses (perhaps overseas) for NGO recruits, opportunities to learn English, and more. As Jacobin puts it, “working in an NGO is a fast track to high incomes, perks like foreign travel and embassy receptions, and being part of the elite.”

Unmentioned in public documents might be training in organizing “non-violent” anti-government protests and exploiting social media to foster discontent. In the Georgian context, this is called a “color revolution” which, as The Nation puts it, “has become a byword for pro-Western, protest-driven regime change”. In Nicaragua, Yorlis Luna talked to young people who explained how Trojan horse NGOs schooled them to prepare for the “peaceful protests” that quickly became a violent coup attempt in 2018.

When well-funded NGOs join forces with local “human rights” bodies and with local media that are also foreign-funded, the combined effects can be powerful. In Georgia, The Nation quotes labor activist Sopo Japaridze as saying that there does not appear to be a single major foreign-funded civil society or media organization that is not fervently opposed to the elected government. “The entire ecosystem is against them,” he says, “and the NGOs have more power and influence than the government does internationally.” Similar words could have been used to describe Nicaragua in 2018.

While regime change was the U.S. objective in both countries, the motivation differed. Nicaragua was targeted because it poses the “threat of a good example”—a socialist-oriented country in a region which the US views as its “backyard.”

Georgia is being targeted because of its balanced political position, moving towards future membership of the European Union while maintaining peaceful relations with its next-door neighbor, Russia. As its prime minister points out, both Washington and its EU allies want Georgia firmly in the anti-Russia camp, a new “frontline against Russia.”

Where does a Trojan horse NGO get its funding for its regime-change work? Apart from the findings of Nicaragua Network election interference delegations in 2006 and 2011, the foreign funding of Nicaraguan NGOs was little known-about before the coup attempt in April 2018. However, within a month of the initiation of the coup attempt, an article in Global Americans, “Laying the groundwork for insurrection”, highlighted Washington’s role.

Then on June 14, Kenneth Wollack, now chairman of the state-funded National Endowment for Democracy (NED), bragged to the U..S Congress that they had trained 8,000 young Nicaraguans to take part in the uprising. USAID later launched a specific program aimed at influencing the outcome of the 2021 elections. I have documented the role of US-funded NGOs in the coup attempt and in subsequent regime-change efforts in Nicaragua.

In Georgia, foreign funding of NGOs is out in the open. Jacobin says that 90 per cent of NGOs are financed from abroad, and prominent ones such as the Economic Policy Research Center, the Europe Georgia Institute and the Institute for Development of Freedom of Information make no secret of having funding sources such as the NED, European Union and even NATO. One that receives NED funding, the Shame Movement, is explicit about its aim of drawing Georgia into the European Union.

Klarenburg reports that in 2023, when Georgian Dream made a previous attempt to bring in a FARA-style law, it had to capitulate when vast, violent crowds, with the Shame Movement “in the vanguard”, threatened to overrun parliament and bring about a color revolution.

The “outsized role” played by foreign-funded bodies has, according to Jacobin, “led the country into a chronic democratic crisis.” It is therefore hardly surprising that the government continues to push ahead with legislation to control them.

What is such a law and what happens when it is implemented? FARA-style laws generally do not prohibit foreign funding, they simply require it to be declared, so that the way it is used can be documented and made transparent. NGOs that are really Trojan horses can then be identified. Closures of NGOs inevitably result—but usually only a small minority are identified as Trojan horses.

Most closures come about because NGOs cannot or will not comply with more stringent accounting requirements, or the change brings to light redundant NGOs that exist in name only.

In Australia, over 10,000 nonprofits were closed when its FARA-style law was implemented. The equivalent authorities in the U.S. and UK close thousands of NGOs each year for non-compliance or because they cease to operate.

Nicaragua has closed about half of the NGOs it had before its FARA-style law took effect, and while the initial closures were Trojan horses the vast majority have lost their NGO status through non-compliance or because they are effectively defunct.

The Trojan horse role of NGOs was perhaps most obvious in Russia, a developed country which nevertheless had many foreign-funded charities before it introduced a FARA-style law in 2012. Scott Ritter reports that the law “proved to be the death knell for U.S., UK, and EU-funded non-governmental organizations (NGOs) that had spent more than two decades trying to, according to their leaders, shape Russian civil society along western lines.”

In 2015, Russia blacklisted the National Endowment for Democracy but nevertheless, in 2021, the NED still had more than 60 Russia-oriented projects, valued in millions of dollars, but presumably now based outside the country.

When the foreign funding of NGOs comes under threat from an equivalent to FARA, it is hardly surprising that the NGOs protest.

This happened in the U.S. when it toughened foreign agent rules in 2022, provoking a response from NGOs across the political spectrum.

It happened in Australia in 2018 and in the UK in 2023 when they announced similar laws. Protests from NGOs in Georgia were to be expected, just as they were in Nicaragua, because the NGO sectors are heavily dependent on foreign funding and fear its loss, job cuts and possible closures.

What characterizes the protests in Georgia and Nicaragua, and indeed other non-Western countries such as Thailand where controls on NGOs have been tightened, is that the threat of FARA-style legislation is used to create a sort of moral panic by human rights bodies, the corporate media and the spokespeople of Western governments.

According to this narrative, such a law will not just bring over-zealous regulation of one sector of society, but threaten the whole society’s freedom of expression and its democratic values. This claim is used to justify the mobilization of well-publicized anti-government protests, ostensibly non-violent, but which can rapidly provoke a response from police that can justify violence in return.

As political scientist Glenn Diesen points out, “the media shows some pictures of protests and we are ready to redefine democracy as the rule of a loud Western-backed minority to support intimidations, sanctions and a coup.”

While the cases of Georgia and Nicaragua differ somewhat, because in Georgia “non-violent” protests responded to the impending legal changes while in Nicaragua they were ostensibly about minor changes in state-funded pensions, in both cases the regime-change motivation of the protesters quickly became apparent.

Diesen notes that the same occurred in Ukraine in 2014: Western governments and NGOs “backed an unconstitutional coup against a democratically elected government and the coup was only supported by a minority of Ukrainians. Yet, it was sold to us as ‘pro-Ukrainian’ and a ‘democratic revolution’ so we supported it without any critical debate.”

The unconstitutional coup in Ukraine was, from Washington’s viewpoint, a success. But similar actions in Georgia and Nicaragua have – so far – been counterproductive. To alleviate the damage being done by US sanctions, Nicaragua is developing close relations with both China and Russia. Meanwhile, after passing the legislation to control NGOs this month, the Georgian Dream party is reported to be “actively working” to restore the country’s diplomatic relations with Russia.

One final intriguing connection between Georgia and Nicaragua is the presence of a global NGO called the Center for Applied Nonviolent Actions and Strategies (CANVAS), headed by Slobodan Djinovic, who claim to have trained regime-change activists in 52 countries. CANVAS, supported by USAID, had been training activists in Georgia at the end of 2023 when the “color revolution” appeared to be imminent.

Whether CANVAS had a role in Nicaragua’s 2018 insurrection is unclear, but the NGO has certainly been active in Venezuela and a CANVAS official visited Nicaragua in the aftermath of the coup attempt. Djinovic uses Nicaragua’s failed coup as a case study in a course on “non-violence” that he teaches at Harvard.

Sanctions imposed by the White House on Georgian officials who are promoting FARA-style legislation mirror the steps taken against the Nicaraguan government when it did the same in 2020. Instead of admitting that laws to oversee the foreign funding of non-government organizations have been adopted by many Western-aligned countries, Georgia’s plan has been dubbed “Russian Law,” just as—at the time—Nicaragua’s equivalent was labelled “Putin Law”.

Corporate media such as the BBC have repeated Washington’s line and quote Secretary of State Blinken at length, without pointing out his hypocrisy in criticizing a country for adopting legislation that is, in reality, based on U.S. law, not Russia’s.

The irony is that FARA was originally sold as a means of defending democracy when it was introduced in the U.S. But if FARA is used in a country which Washington or its allies regard as disobedient, it is painted as an attack on democracy and as a step on the road to authoritarian government.

Dubbing the legislation as “Russian law” or “Putin law” makes the message clear.

* * * * *

Briefs
By Nan McCurdy 

Multi-Million Dollar Investment to Build and Modernize Hospitals
In the last 17 years, the Sandinista government has negotiated 18 international loan contracts to build and modernize hospital infrastructure for a total of US$653 million. Along with that, US$193.3 million for health facilities has come from the nation’s general budget, US$69.3 million from foreign donations, and US$390 million through agreements with different international financial organizations, according to an announcement by the vice-chair of the National Assembly Economy Committee, Deputy José Santos Figueroa. For example, the primary hospital infrastructure in the region of Las Minas (the towns of Bonanza, Siuna and Rosita), currently consists of four departmental hospitals, 53 health centers, 11 maternity homes and two homes for people with special needs. (La Primerisima, 2 July 2024)

6,000 Medical Services at Mega Health Fair in Nueva Guinea
On July 6 the Ministry of Health held a Mega Health Fair in Internal Medicine at the Jacinto Hernández Hospital in Nueva Guinea, in the South Caribbean Autonomous Region. During the activity, 6,230 health care services were provided to families from the municipalities of El Rama, Muelle de Los Bueyes, El Coral and Nueva Guinea. At the Mega Health Fair, doctors provided care in infectious diseases, neurology, and gastroenterology. There were 58 specialists from different health units of the country, as well as nurses. Intercultural nursing students from the Caribbean Coast Regional University (URACCAN) in Nueva Guinea also participated. The activity was carried out in salute to the 45th anniversary of the triumph of the Sandinista Popular Revolution. See photos: https://radiolaprimerisima.com/mas-de-6-mil-atenciones-en-mega-feria-de-salud-en-nueva-guinea/ (La Primerisima, 7 July 2024)

Nicaragua Has More than 3,000 Health Facilities
The Ministry of Health currently runs 3,100 medical units, including hospitals, health posts, health centers, and maternity homes to provide care to the population in the 153 municipalities of the country. There are 76 hospitals, of which 32 are national referral hospitals and 44 are primary care hospitals; 142 health centers; 2,700 health posts and 182 maternity wait homes. This year the Óscar Danilo Rosales Hospital, which will be the largest in Central America, will be inaugurated in Leon. It will have state-of-the-art technology. Hospitals in Nueva Segovia and Bilwi are also expected to be inaugurated in the coming months. During this second stage of the revolution, 28 national hospitals and 25 primary care hospitals have been built, improved, expanded or rehabilitated. Nicaragua is currently experiencing a revolution in public health, thanks to the will of the Sandinista government to improve the attention to Nicaraguans. There has been an investment of $US103 million for the construction of the Carlos Centeno Hospital in the municipality of Siuna. This hospital will have 310 beds for a population of some 300,000 inhabitants. It will be the second hospital in the North Caribbean, since the construction of the Nuevo Amanecer Hospital in Bilwi is already underway. (La Primerisima, 9 July 2024)

Government Has Built more than 40,000 New Roads
Authorities of the Nicaraguan Institute of Municipal Development (INIFOM) highlighted substantive advances in the construction of new streets, roads and recreational spaces in the last 17 years. According to engineer Iván Lacayo, during the second stage of the Revolution, more than 40,000 streets and more than 50,000 kilometers of roads have been built in the different municipalities. “Throughout the country, we have a road network of approximately 46,000 streets and 51,000 kilometers of roads that every year are maintained by the municipalities,” he said. The municipalities this year on average maintained some 3,500 streets, including new and improved streets, and about 5,000 kilometers of road with the national agencies, which work very closely with the municipalities, he said.  The head of INIFOM said that another advance is the construction of more recreational and sports spaces, which have increased by 50% in relation to 2007. The challenge now is to take this infrastructure to rural areas, he said. (La Primerisima 3 July 2024)

More than 500 Guests Confirmed for the 45/19 Celebration
Vice President Rosario Murillo announced the arrival of more than 550 delegates from various countries to commemorate the 45th anniversary of the Sandinista Popular. During her daily address on Channel 4 Television, Murillo said that these “brothers and sisters come from groups in solidarity with Nicaragua, with our people; brothers and sisters who come from Germany, Austria, Belgium, Italy, Denmark, Spain, France, United Kingdom, from our America, United States, from Chile come 100 brothers and sisters who are the fighters who were here in times of triumph, of victories, of struggle, in different historical moments.” She said that guests from Canada, Argentina, Colombia, Honduras, Mexico, El Salvador, Panama, Dominican Republic, Uruguay, Cuba, Venezuela and Palestine will also be participating. (La Primerisima, 4 July 2024)

Trade Schools in Siuna Certify over 100 Youths
The authorities of the National Technological Institute gave certificates to 124 young men and women of the municipality of Siuna, accrediting them as trained in cosmetology, pastry arts, sewing, home electricity, English and Excel. The training courses for these young people lasted three months and were supported by the municipal government and the Bernardino Díaz Ochoa Nacional Technological Institute.

Eighty percent of the graduates have started their own businesses and are thriving.

Ingrid Velásquez Mejía, who completed the sewing course, said that she learned to make her own costumes, which she wore last Friday, in addition to learning how to make different types of clothing, all free of charge. The director of the center, Dagoberto Sevilla, said that these young people are ready to prosper. (La Primerisima, 6 July 2024)

Corn Island Entrepreneurs Receive Production Packages
120 women seafood traders and four collection centers on Corn Island, South Caribbean Coast, received production packages from the Nicaraguan Institute of Fish and Agriculture, INPESCA, and the local mayor’s office. The entrepreneurs received essential utensils and equipment such as pans, chopping boards, folding tables, scales, gloves, stainless steel knives and coolers. The collection centers received stainless steel tables, rubber boots, gloves, baskets, coolers, stainless steel pans, and scales, thus strengthening their tools for efficient marketing. This is part of the Emergency Response Project to Hurricanes Eta and Iota [2020 category four hurricanes] which seek to assist in the recovery of livelihoods through the activation of artisanal fishing. See photos: https://radiolaprimerisima.com/emprendedoras-de-corn-island-reciben-bono-productivo/ (La Primerisima, 8 July 2024)

Jinotepe Remembers Four Youth Murdered 45 Years Ago
The Sandinista militancy of Jinotepe paid homage to the four students murdered on July 9, 1979, in an attack carried out by the Somocista National Guard. On that day four youth were murdered: Marlon Calderón, 17 years old; Hugo Santiago López González, 26 years old; Alberto Fanor Chévez Cuadra, 16 years old; and Mario José Álvarez, 20 years old. They were all leaders of high school and university student organizations. See photos: https://radiolaprimerisima.com/jinotepe-recuerda-a-los-cuatro-chavalos-asesinados-hace-45-anos/ (La Primerisima, 9 July 2024)