Death Squad Supporter Ana Navarro Blames ‘Socialism’ for Poor Democratic Showing

Democratic Party leaders and their Republican allies like Ana Navarro are already blaming the Democratic Party’s loss of seats in the House of Representatives and less-than-stellar showing in the Senate on socialism, Medicare for All and the Black Lives Matter movement’s demand to defund the police. This is in spite of the fact that every Democrat who ran on Medicare for All actually won their races, and none of those who lost supported these progressive policies. The candidate who led the Democratic ticket, former Vice President Joe Biden, and his running mate Kamala Harris do not support replacing the private health insurance industry. Both of them want to give more money to the police instead of reallocating their obscene budgets. The Democrats for the most part ran away from popular policies like marijuana legalization, health care for all, reallocating police funds and a so-called Green New Deal to address climate change.

This did not work out in their favor. Voters in Arizona, New Jersey, South Dakota and Montana voted to legalize recreational use of marijuana. Exit polls showed that 72% of Americans are now in favor of a government-run health care system. A Fox News poll showed that 72% of Americans are now in favor of a pathway to citizenship for undocumented immigrants. Floridians, despite voting to give their 29 electoral votes to Donald Trump, voted overwhelmingly to raise Florida’s minimum wage to $15 an hour. The notion that Democrats, by running a pro-fracking, pro-police, pro-health insurance industry campaign, veered too far left is utter nonsense.

House Majority Whip Jim Clyburn and other right-wing Democrats are the main ones pushing the narrative that “Medicare for All, defund the police [and] socialized medicine” are what hurt Democrats down-ballot. Even though this is demonstrably false, they are not alone in pushing this narrative. Former GOP strategist and The View host Ana Navarro, though a Republican, has been a fervent supporter of Joe Biden since before he even announced his run for the presidency last year. This year she was chosen to serve as director of Latino outreach for the Biden campaign. Since Election Day, Navarro has been going on seemingly every corporate news network helping to push the narrative that Democrats didn’t do as well as previous nominees with Latino voters do to fear of “socialism”. (This, in spite of the fact that Joe Biden is an arch anti-socialist who lost the Latino vote in the Democratic primaries earlier this year to a self-proclaimed “democratic socialist”). Not one of these networks have disclosed that Navarro may have ulterior motives for pushing this narrative. An investigation by The Gray Zone earlier this year revealed that Navarro and her husband Al Cárdenas, a GOP lobbyist, have worked hand-in-hand with some of the most corrupt right-wing governments in Latin America.

From The Gray Zone:

“One of the politicians whose government Navarro was contracted to lobby for, former El Salvadoran President Tony Saca, is currently serving a 10-year prison sentence for stealing more than $300 million in taxpayer money.

In 1997, Navarro went to work for another right-wing government in Central America, this one led by corrupt Nicaraguan President Arnoldo Alemán. In 2003, he too was imprisoned on graft charges stemming from his embezzlement of $100 million in public funds.”

None of this should come as a surprise, as Navarro has publicly praised the Contras and bragged about how her father was one of them.

The Contras of course were the U.S.-backed death squads who were trained by the CIA to overthrow the socialist government of the Sandinistas in Nicaragua. The Contras, in their campaign to destroy Nicaragua, mutilated people, cut the breasts off women and cut the tongues out of men. Ana Navarro helped raise funds for these Contra death squads during her first year in law school despite their brutal human rights abuses. She would undoubtedly be accused of being an aider and abetter of terrorism were it not for the fact that she was supporting the agenda of the U.S. government.

The Gray Zone also revealed that Al Cardenas was a partner in a law firm that lobbied for a President whose hands were drenched in the blood of innocents.

“FARA records reviewed by The Grayzone show that the lobbying firm of Navarro’s husband, Cardenas Partners, lobbied the US government on behalf of a Salvadorean family company called Funes y Asociados, which was used by the Tony Saca administration to embezzle millions of dollars of public money. The son of the rich businessman who runs Funes y Asociados, César Funes, is a former secretary and close ally of President Saca, and was himself imprisoned for five years for his role in the corruption scandal.

What’s more, a law firm where Cárdenas is a partner, Squire Patton Boggs, once lobbied for the Guatemalan General-turned-President Romeo Lucas García, who killed thousands of people and carried out more than 300 massacres in a scorched-earth counterinsurgency campaign.”

Ana Navarro has lobbied for sanctions on all left-wing governments in Latin America, including her home country of Nicaragua, along with Cuba and Venezuela. The sanctions on Venezuela killed tens of thousands of people in 2018. In a world where Facebook and Twitter slap labels like “Russia state-controlled media” on independent media outlets such as Redfish, is it too much to ask that “trusted” corporate news outlets like CNN and ABC disclose that one of their panelists has ties to literal death squads and human rights abuses across Latin America?