CASLA also participated in the Oslo Freedom Forum in New York, organised by the Human Rights Foundation (HRF). Despite its apparently innocuous title, HRF's founder is the disgraced Thor Halvorssen, who also happens to be the first cousin of VP founder Le'opoldo Lopez another recipient of NED funds.
It thus comes as little surprise that Suju has long agitated for regime change in Venezuela. In her acceptance speech for the NED 'democracy' award in 2015, Suju unsubtly pled for foreign intervention, saying: "The Venezuelan people cannot take on the irrational army and dangerous government alone".
At the NED-funded Solidaridad Democra'tica en Ame'rica Latina conference in Colombia in 2018, Suju told a packed audience that Venezuela needed "more sanctions... because this government won't go with votes". CASLA's website, meanwhile, describes Venezuela as "a large open-air concentrate camp" a provocative charge for an NGO based in the Czech Republic.
With her privileged status as a human rights lawyer, Suju has become an important strand in a spider's web of US-funded public support factories for regime change. Indeed, as the CASLA Institute bragged on Twitter: "The US press is echoing the work of the CASLA Institute on Venezuela. Yesterday, the Washington Post, Fox News, NBC News published pieces on our denunciation of torture presented by the International Penal Court". Her US funders, it seems, are getting decent value for their money.
Vanessa Neumann is Guaidà ³'s 'ambassador' to the UK. She is the founder and owner of Asymmetrica, a company which specialises in corporate risk assessment for Fortune 500 oil and gas companies in Latin America.
Alongside Henriy Kissinger quotes and dense corporate euphuism, Asymmetrica's website hosts a blog written by Neumann. On 25 February, two days after the USAID 'humanitarian aid' debacle (and three weeks before Guaidà ³ would appoint her ambassador), Neumann frothed how USAID trucks were "burned by the criminal regime", and explained how a "Guaidà ³ government needs to be strategic and project its power". In a self-endorsing article masquerading as friendly advice, she claimed Guaidà ³ must:
Hire the private sector team with a long track record in aggressive asset recovery: if they nailed Hezbollah and ISIS, they can nail the Maduro regime.
Appoint ambassadors to the world's financial centers who have serious diplomatic and anti-illicit finance credibility.
Asymmetrica, whose staff also includes Guaidà ³'s 'ambassador' to Brazil Maria Teresa Belandria, has not responded to questions regarding its financing at the time of writing.
Neumann's LinkedIn page, meanwhile, adds that she is a former senior fellow at the neoconservative thinktank Foreign Policy Research Institute (FPRI), and that she has:
Lobbied [the] US government for oil industry interests under Venezuela's Minister Counselor for Petroleum Affairs [during the 1990s].
In 2017, Neumann appeared to lobby then-CIA director Mike Pompeo for regime change directly. At an Aspen Institute think-tank Q&A, Neumann told Pompeo she was "interested in your open assessment on American interests in or threats from Venezuela". She punctuated her question by saying: "regime change looks to be we hope imminent or spiralling down". Pompeo responded by suggesting that plans were already underway to topple the Maduro government a crucial detail on both counts given the Venezuelan opposition's main indignation centres around the 2018 presidential election.
Speaking to the House Foreign Affairs Committee of the US congress in March, Neumann claimed "Venezuela... has a legitimate interim government that is loved by the people", and suggested possible "military cooperation" with the US. Notably, Neumann also cited Foro Penal to the House, demonstrating in remarkable fashion how information laundered through the US government can come full circle presented back to its originators as evidence for regime change
Since her appointment as ambassador later the same month, Neumann has attended the Middle East Institute's (MEI) 'Venezuela, Hezbollah and Iran' event in London. The most recently published donor list for the MEI includes Chevron, ExxonMobil, Shell, Raytheon, and numerous Saudi government institutions. She has also frequented various 'security' events including the Rockefeller brothers-funded Aspen Security conference (where she met "teenage idol" Madeleine Albright), and the defence industry-sponsored CABSEC/SAMSEC forum.
While gunning for regime change, Neumann barely conceals a nostalgia for the pre-Hugo Cha'vez days a period marked by unfettered neoliberalism and burgeoning racial inequality in Venezuela. In an interview with CNN's John Fredericks in 2018, Neumann said:
Oh my god... please, we want the return of the Americans... I grew up in a country that" loved the US, saw it as a model of the region. And now the people are starving, you have 30 million who have basically been, like, kidnapped.
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