The National Endowment for Democracy was never going to be shut down. Not only was it not going to happen, but the new administration has found a way to make things worse, by transitioning back to the style of covert funding used by the CIA before some of its functions were transferred to NED during the 1980s.
The NED, which claims to be an independent NGO yet receives 93% of its funding from the US Government, has financed subversion, infiltration and sabotage across the world since its founding by former Trotskyists in 1983, under the guise of ‘foreign assistance’.
With the NED erasing all information on recipients in Brazil, its recent history here and the US government and extended state’s meddling in Brazilian politics will need to be reconstructed. CIA involvement in the 1964 coup and the support for the dictatorship which followed was first revealed by Jan Knippers Black in “United States Penetration of Brazil”.
While duly noting the NSA spying scandal against Dilma Rousseff, the primary US state force behind the long coup process of 2013-2020 which saw Dilma’s illegal impeachment and Lula da Siva’s political imprisonment was the US Department of Justice and FBI (an organization which, as Philip Agee lays out in his CIA Diaries, has a long rivalry with the CIA in Latin America).
The CIA proxy organization NED appears to have taken a more muted role in the long coup process but one still worth following given the kinds of operations being carried out in Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela. In 2020, according to the only financial information I could pull about NED spending in Brazil on the Wayback Machine, its total official program budget here was $1,496,800.
$850,000 of this funding went to the AFL-CIO affiliated Solidarity Center. NED’s description of this grant was “to protect the human and labor rights of vulnerable workers in Brazil and Paraguay, the center will develop the capacity of its partners to better represent and advocate for historically marginalized groups, to construct and implement human rights and security plans, and to build partnerships to assist Venezuelan migrant workers in constructing sustainable livelihoods. In addition, the center will support efforts to increase the membership bases of Brazilian unions, thus enhancing their advocacy capacity, and financial and institutional sustainability.”
Another standout from that year is the $77,300 for the Fernando Henrique Cardoso Foundation. Like a US presidential library, the official purpose of the foundation is to preserve archives and records related to the most pro-US Democratic National Committee-aligned Brazilian president of all time and a historic enemy of the Brazilian Workers’ Party, Fernando Henrique Cardoso.
In looking over the kinds of organizations that NED supported officially in the past (relying on information from when it still practiced some level of institutional transparency), it’s clear that it has worked in Brazil as one member of a network of extended US state actors and NATO allies. The way that funding is distributed, one gets the feeling that even if Trump were to shut down the NED, the organizations it finances in Brazil would be able continue anyway through support from this network.
The following is an example of this process.
Transparency International is another institution frequently associated with meddling in the affairs of democratically elected governments around the world. This self-proclaimed “anti-corruption” organization has murky funding and produces an annual “corruption index” based on opinion polls of multinational corporate executives about governments, while rarely ever looking at corporate corruption or the corrupt US electoral system.
During the lead up to the US-backed coup against President Dilma Rousseff, both the director of TI Latin America and the director of its Brazil program, Bruno Brandão, gave interviews, tweeted and wrote op-ed pieces supporting her illegitimate removal. In 2017, TI opened an affiliate in Brazil, headed up by Brandão and began running publicity for the US DOJ backed Car Wash investigation, fully supporting Lula da Silva’s arbitrary, election season arrest, before his appeals process had run out, and not raising a peep when investigation and trial judge, Sergio Moro, was nominated Justice Minister by rival candidate Jair Bolsonaro in a clear example of corrupt, conflict of interest.
Despite its claim of not getting involved in Brazilian politics, Transparency International Brazil applauded Lula’s arrest. In 2019 the Brazilian Supreme Court blocked an attempt by the US DOJ to provide the Lava Jato taskforce, led by Deltan Dallagnol, with a US$687 million kickback from fines levied against Brazilian companies to create a private “anti-corruption” foundation based in Curitiba. Federal Prosecutors say that Dallagnol tried to negotiate a deal with J&F, through the Brasilia District Public Prosecutors Office, to secure R$2.3 billion in funds for Transparency International’s Brazil office to promote “social control over corruption” and “education campaigns”.
Completely illegal, the deal was blocked by the Superior Justice Court and the funds were routed to the public education system. Nevertheless, in 2021, Brazil’s DA Office opened an investigation into alleged collusion between Transparency International Brazil and the now-disgraced Car Wash public prosecutor’s task force, whose leader, Deltan Dallagnol, would later expelled from Congress for the corrupt practice of skimming money from his travel expenses. A second corruption investigation opened up against TI Brazil in February 2024 by the National Justice Council for allegedly taking an illegal role in a leniency agreement made between the Brazilian government and meat producing company J&F.
With both Lula and Dilma Rousseff’s innocence now facts of public record, Transparency International Brazil’s role in supporting crimes that led to the rise of right wing extremist Jair Bolsonaro and an attempted military coup appear to have led to a drop in funding, at which point, in 2023, NED stepped in to fill the gap.
According to TI Brazil’s annual financial reports its two biggest donors for its first years of operation were Open Society Foundation and the Norwegian Government. Starting in 2018, Ford Foundation became its third largest donor, followed by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation and other donors like the Governments of France, Canada and the EU. As Ford funding began to trickle off, coincidentally or not, around the same period corruption allegations against Transparency International Brazil hit the press, NED stepped in with US$145,000 for “Improving transparency, accountability and public governance at the sub-national level.”
The history of funding for the pro-coup Transparency International Brazil Office shows that the days in which the CIA and its front agencies worked solely with US corporations to meddle in political affairs in Latin America are long over. Starting as a kind of CIA outsourcing operation itself, NED and the US government in general now work with a coalition of NGOs, Foundations and NATO-friendly governments. If funding from any one group drops another steps in to fill the gap.
Applying Gramsci’s logic to this group of actors, one could label them as a kind of transnational extended state, which works to maintain democracies weak in the global south, in order to facilitate western business interests, such as Norway’s state oil company and Exxon-Mobile, which both benefited from the removal of Dilma Rousseff and subsequent auctioning off of offshore oil fields which had previously belonged to Brazil’s state petroleum company, Petrobras.
This transnational extended state also becomes apparent with the kind of full spectrum narrative dominance that NED and its partners have tried to maintain in Brazil’s media through the International Fund for Public Interest Media.
Started in 2022 after the Biden Administration announced $236 million in funding for “independent” media organizations around the world, the International Fund for Public Interest Media seems to have been born out of negative publicity for so-called independent media sites which received NED funding, with a desire to outsource and expand its operations to include the same types of partners who have been funding organizations like Transparency International. Donors to the Fund include NED, USAID, the governments of France, Switzerland, New Zealand, Denmark and Estonia, the Ford, Luminate and Rockefeller Foundations, Microsoft and Google.
Recipients of this fund in Brazil include news organizations ranging from center right Nexo, to the Intercept Brasil and the progressive-leaning Agencia Publica, which was primarily sustained by NED during its first two years in operation.
Although actors on the far right like to twist NED support for progressive and leftist publications into an oversimplified argument that the organization is “liberal”, as Florence Stoner Saunders documented in The Cultural Cold War, there is a long history of US intelligence support for the “anti-communist left”.
Based on analysis of content, the primary use of US interests financing progressive leaning publications in Latin America is to allow them to report progressively locally and on the environment, while working to align leftists with US regime change and military goals in other parts of the world.
A clear example of this is the 6-part, NATO propaganda podcast Agencia Publica editor Nathalia Viana recorded from Ukraine in 2024 in the context of the Workers’ Party’s neutral stance on the war and the open support for Russia by some sectors of the Brazilian left.
The NED and the transnational extended state network it belongs to is unlikely to change much under Trump, except to consolidate more control over ‘foreign assistance’ funding into the hands of Secretary of State Marco Rubio.
Brian Mier is a journalist and geographer, former co-editor of Brasilwire and correspondent for teleSUR English’s news program, From the South. Originally hailing from Chicago, he has lived in Brazil for 30 years.
