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Election Interference? The U.S. Has Done It In 45 Countries Worldwide

AMERICA HAS A LONG HISTORY OF MEDDLING IN THE ELECTIONS OF FOREIGN COUNTRIES, NEW RESEARCH SHOWS





Dec 30, 2016 at 2:25 PM ET


Levin, a postdoctoral fellow at the Institute for Politics and Strategy at Carnegie-Mellon University, found that the U.S. attempted to influence the elections of foreign countries as many as 81 times between 1946 and 2000. Often covert in their execution, these efforts included everything from CIA operatives running successful presidential campaigns in the Philippines during the 1950s to leaking damaging information on Marxist Sandanistas in order to sway Nicaraguan voters in 1990. All told, the U.S. allegedly targeted the elections of 45 nations across the globe during this period, Levin’s research shows. In the case of some countries, such as Italy and Japan, the U.S. attempted to intervene in four or more separate elections.


Levin’s figures do not include military coups or regime change attempts following the election of a candidate the U.S. opposed, such as when the CIA helped overthrow Mohammad Mosaddeq, Iran’s democratically elected prime minister, in 1953. He defines an electoral intervention as “a costly act which is designed to determine the election results [in favor of] one of the two sides.” According to Levin’s research, that includes: peddling misinformation or propaganda; creating campaign material for preferred candidates or parties; providing or withdrawing foreign aid, and; making public announcements that threaten or favor certain candidates. Often, it also includes the U.S. covertly delivering large sums of cash, as was the case in elections in Japan, Lebanon, Italy, and other countries. 
To build his database, Levin says he relied on declassified U.S. intelligence as well as a number of Congressional reports on CIA activity. He also combed through what he considered reliable histories of the CIA and covert American activity, as well as academic research on U.S. intelligence, diplomatic histories of the Cold War, and memoirs of former CIA officials. Much of America’s meddling in foreign elections has been well-documented — Chile in the 1960sHaiti in the 1990s. But Malta in 1971? According to Levin’s study, the U.S. attempted to “goose” the tiny Mediterranean island’s economy in the months leading up to its election that year.
Much of the America’s electoral meddling occurred throughout the Cold War as a response to containing Soviet influence through the spread of supposed leftist proxies, the findings suggest. And to be clear, the U.S. wasn’t the only one trying to sway foreign elections. By Levin’s count, Russia attempted to interfere in other countries’ elections 36 times between the end of World War II and the end of the 20th century, bringing the total number of electoral interventions by the two countries to 117 during that period.
Yet even after the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, the U.S. continued its interventions abroad, including elections in Israel, former Czechoslovakia, and even Russia in 1996, Levin found. Since 2000, the U.S. has attempted to sway elections in Ukraine, Kenya, Lebanon, and Afghanistan, among others.
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UK trade minister lobbied Brazil on behalf of oil giants


A telegram obtained by Greenpeace shows that Greg Hands met a Brazilian minister to discuss relaxation of tax and environmental regulation


Britain successfully lobbied Brazil on behalf of BP and Shell to address the oil giants’ concerns over Brazilian taxation, environmental regulation and rules on using local firms, government documents reveal.
The UK’s trade minister travelled to Rio de Janeiro, Belo Horizonte and São Paulo in March for a visit with a “heavy focus” on hydrocarbons, to help British energy, mining and water companies win business in Brazil.

Greg Hands met with Paulo Pedrosa, Brazilian deputy minister for mines and energy, and “directly” raised the concerns of UK-based oil firms Shell, BP and Premier Oil over “taxation and environmental licensing”.
Pedrosa said he was pressing his counterparts in the Brazilian government on the issues, according to a British diplomatic telegram obtained by Greenpeace.
The Department for International Trade (DIT) initially released an unredacted version of the telegram under freedom of information rules to Greenpeace’s investigative unit, Unearthed, with sensitive passages highlighted. Shortly after, the department issued a second version of the document, with the same passages redacted.
Greenpeace accused the department of acting as a “lobbying arm of the fossil fuel industry”.
The UK government denies it was lobbying to weaken the environmental licensing regime, although the lobbying drive appears to have borne fruit. In August, Brazil proposed a multibillion-dollar tax relief plan for offshore drilling, and in October BP and Shell won the bulk of deep-water drilling licenses in a government auction.


Rebecca Newsom, senior political adviser at Greenpeace, said: “This is a double embarrassment for the UK government. Liam Fox’s trade minister has been lobbying the Brazilian government over a huge oil project that would undermine the climate efforts Britain made at the UN summit in Bonn.

“If that wasn’t bad enough, Fox’s department tried to cover it up and hide its actions from the public, but failed comically.”
The document also reveals that the UK pressured Brazil to relax its requirements for oil and gas operators to use a certain amount of Brazilian staff and supply chain companies.
British diplomats described the weakening of the so-called local content requirements as a “principal objective” because BP, Shell and Premier Oil would be “direct British beneficiaries” of the changes.
The UK’s drive to soften the requirements continued on the day after the meeting between Hands and Pedrosa, with a senior DIT official leading a seminar on the subject at the headquarters of Brazil’s oil and gas regulator.
The UK government has come under fire in the past for providing hundreds of millions of pounds of support for Brazil’s scandal-hit state oil firm Petrobras via the UK’s credit export agency.
The UK’s continued oil lobbying efforts in Brazil emerged days after British ministers were touting the UK’s leadership on cutting carbon emissions at international climate talks in Bonn.
Claire Perry, the climate change minister, told the summit: “we are taking our commitments under the Paris agreement very seriously and we are taking action.”
A DIT spokesman said: “DIT is responsible for encouraging international investment opportunities for UK businesses, whilst respecting fully local and international environmental standards. The UK oil and gas industry and supply chain supports thousands of jobs and provides £19bn in goods exports alone.
“However, it is absolutely not true that our ministers lobbied to loosen environmental restrictions in Brazil – the meeting was about improving the environmental licensing process, ensuring a level playing field for both domestic and foreign companies, and in particular helping to speed up the licensing process and make it more transparent, which in turn will protect environmental standards.”
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