Venezuela, the country of opposition leader María Corina Machado, is one of the international reactionary movement's favorite toys when it comes to poisoning public discourse. Actors from both sides of the Atlantic manipulate Venezuelan politics to adapt it to their narratives. In Spain, for example, it played a key role in the smear campaign against Podemos: from the fabrication of hoaxes at the media level to false judicial cases, including the extortion of people linked to institutions in the Latin American country. Machado’s prominent role in the United States’ interventionist policies toward Caracas leads directly to one of the most powerful hubs of funding, ideas, and operational muscle within the disinformation industry: Atlas Network.
Founded in 1981 by Antony Fisher, observing the evolution of Atlas Network into the transnational giant it is today and understanding its influence on the anti-democratic offensive means revealing the last of the layers behind which those who feed Trump, Orbán, Abascal or Ayuso are hidden. In the end, "the truth", "the homeland", "the family" or, par excellence, "the freedom" that these political figures claim to defend are nothing more than empty signifiers with which the great owners of capital that finance Atlas Network justify the barbarities committed in defense of their growing privileges.
Fisher, who had founded the Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA) in London in the 1950s, was a key figure in the establishment of neoliberal ideology in the United Kingdom. With Margaret Thatcher’s 1979 electoral victory, neoliberalism moved from an economic school of thought to a hegemonic worldview imposed with dogmatic force. "There is no alternative," the then British prime minister would proclaim. It was the era of the “end of history”: capitalism, having freed itself from state oversight, had evidently reached its final evolutionary stage. From then on, society’s destiny was simply to watch the market absorb everything. It was the ideal system, our supposed future as a human community.
Atlas Network was born in this context with a clear objective: to inject the neoliberal doctrine not merely as one socio-economic model among others, but as a rationality unto itself, one capable of shaping how people perceive and interpret the world. Achieving this required depoliticizing concepts such as the free market, privatization, or deregulation, detaching them from the concrete interests they in fact serve, and presenting them instead as irrefutable truths. The chosen instrument for this purpose was what researchers Marie-Laure Djelic and Reza Mousavi call as the "neoliberal think tank".
With the support of neoliberalism’s intellectual progenitors Friedrich von Hayek and Milton Friedman (founders of the Mont Pelerin Society and figureheads of the Austrian and Chicago schools), together with Thatcher and substantial private donations, Atlas Network (originally “Atlas Economic Research Foundation”) launched operations in San Francisco. Its annual budget hovered around $150,000, with the mission of serving as an incubator for neoliberal think tanks worldwide. The arrival of Ronald Reagan to the government in January 1981, as well as the participation of huge American ultraconservative foundations such as Heritage in the implementation of Atlas, made the United States the perfect place for its establishment. After all, it is the cradle of capitalist imperialism. In 2023, and according to the organization's own annual report, Atlas Network already had a budget of 28 million dollars and its network of think tanks totaled 589 entities in 103 different countries.
The methods used by these institutions of indoctrination range from the organization of events, in which the network is reinforced and expanded, to the creation of educational centers to inoculate the younger generations with ultraliberal ideology, through more heterodox strategies such as the formation of the International Atlas Freedom Corps in 2003, whose task is to scour the world for candidates for think labs leaders. To put it simply, the objective has always been to pour neoliberal doctrine from as many places as possible, passing it off as independent expertise or even as scientific-looking hypotheses, thanks to the efforts deposited in the academic field.
The political origins of the aforementioned María Corina Machado are perfect for understanding the feedback dynamics between the Atlas Network and the US, and how the tentacles of the network of think tanks impact those places that intend to leave the radius of US imperialist action.
The 2000s began in Venezuela with the re-election of Hugo Chávez. In his political itinerary, of a socialist nature, he highlighted the intention to put an end to the flight of capital that, coming from the vast wealth of the national territory, benefited foreign private corporations more than Venezuelan society itself. One of the companies with the greatest presence in this colonial bleeding was the oil company Exxon, based in the US and with a prominent role in the financing of Atlas Network.
This is where the wheel begins to turn.
Chávez’s government sought not only to reduce the profits of an Atlas patron but to challenge the neoliberal consensus itself. For the destabilization operation, the network relied on Cedice, a Venezuelan think tank listed in the ranks of the Atlas Network. Well watered with U.S. funding through the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), Cedice led initiatives of all kinds in opposition to Chávez, and even Rocío Guijarro, its president, signed the decree with which the coup d'état of April 2002 was intended to be consolidated. The name of María Corina Machado appears among those attending the swearing-in of the governing board on April 12, 2002, as a result of the coup. She attended as a member of Cedice, but she would soon begin to stand out on her own.
In July of that same year, she founded the civil organization Súmate, whose anti-Chávez activities received US backing from its beginning, again via NED. A document from the agency itself shows that Súmate received at least $53,400 directly from the NED in 2003.
From that moment on, Machado has been an important figure within the enormous network of Atlas Network. Her name appears in virtually every disinformation campaign aimed at destabilizing Venezuela’s political situation, and Atlas, in turn, has fervently promoted her in its events and publications. The connection is explicit and undeniable: in 2014, Machado publicly thanked Atlas Network for its “support and inspiration.” More recently, on October 10, 2025, Atlas Network’s official account on X celebrated her Nobel Peace Prize win, highlighting its “long professional relationship with Machado, who delivered a speech at the organization’s annual Freedom Dinner in 2009.”
From the beginning, disinformation has played a central role in Atlas Network's operations. For an organization so closely related to the large fossil fuel corporations, the decades of the eighties and nineties were a convulsive period, given the consolidation of the environmental movement. In addition to Exxon, the business empire of the Koch brothers – the second richest family in the US and another of the closest financiers of the Atlas Network – had huge investments in projects that were being questioned for their environmental impact. And they weren't the only corporations feeding the accounts of the think tanks network.
It had only been in operation for a few years, but Atlas Network managed at that time to establish itself as the nucleus of a group of organizations dedicated to spreading climate denialism around the world. The research outlet DeSmog describes this network as an "anti-science industrial complex", as Atlas Network was constructing a kind of disinformation proto-industry.
It is possible to find cases of lies spread worldwide years before platforms such as Twitter existed, with the Atlas network involved. Surely the most paradigmatic is that of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. During the commission of inquiry into 9/11, one of the people who launched the theory that linked the attack to Iraq was Laurie Mylroie, a member of the Atlas Network's think tank AEI. From there, numerous members of AEI, such as Lynne Cheney, John Bolton, or Michael Ledeen, joined a disinformation campaign that would travel the world and end up resulting in the invasion of Iraq. George Bush went so far as to declare: "I admire AEI a lot (...) After all, I have been consistently borrowing some of your best people."
The social media revolution only offered a myriad of new possibilities, and contemporary examples abound showing how Atlas Network has integrated the potential of new communication technologies into its anti-democratic activities. In November 2021, just days before the general elections in Nicaragua, the three networks with the greatest impact on public opinion – Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter – suspended hundreds of accounts of prominent media outlets, journalists ,and activists of the Sandinista left. The explanation – at least for Instagram and Facebook – was laid out in a report by parent company Meta headed by Ben Nimmo, in which these profiles were accused without evidence of being fake. Like María Corina Machado and practically any leader of these dirty war campaigns, Nimmo combines in his figure the influence of the US Administration and Atlas Network. He was head of research at Graphika, an initiative funded by the US Department of Defense, and is part of the Atlantic Council, a neoliberal think tank that, between 2022 and 2023 alone, donated $537,750 to Atlas Network.
In the European Union, the influence of Atlas Network is also enormous. A study by the Observatoire des multinationales illustrates the extent to which this swarm of organizations has infiltrated the places from which the public policies that govern the world are designed. ECIPE, one of the more than half a thousand think tanks that make up the network, acts in Europe as an instrument for perpetuating the neoliberal order, harshly criticizing any initiative that minimally contests deregulation in favor of values such as equality or redistribution. Despite its clear ideological slant, Politico, a reference media outlet in the EU's decision-making sphere, routinely echoes its narratives, presenting them as coming from an "independent" source. Even more serious is that the European Parliament itself considers that the currents of opinion arising from ECIPE are "expertise independent", as the same article states.
Epicenter, another of Atlas' organizations in Europe, publishes a ranking of what it calls "nanny states" aimed at denouncing restrictions on citizens' freedoms. This classification criminalizes regulations on alcohol or tobacco, a criterion that makes it clear what these think tanks mean by "freedom": the possibility of extracting economic benefits without limits, even when public health is at risk. Once again, it is the Atlas Network network misinforming at the service of the owners of big capital, who refuse to give up a tiny part of their privileges in pursuit of a less unequal world. This is demonstrated by one piece of data: Philip Morris, the world’s largest tobacco corporation, has been linked to Atlas since its inception; René Scull, a former vice president of the company, served on Atlas Network’s board, and a nearly half-million-dollar donation from Philip Morris in 1995 is documented.
In 2023, Epicenter boasted of having reached 250 million people thanks to its information being mentioned more than 300 times in European media.
In short, Atlas Network today possesses the capacity to impose practically any narrative on the political agenda, and even to shape that intangible yet malleable terrain in which most of the cultural battle known as "common sense" is fought.
In the Spanish State, it is Vox that best embodies the reactionary offensive that the neoliberal elites have launched as a defensive mechanism against the breakdown of the capitalist system, and at this point, it should not surprise anyone to find the imprint of Atlas Network in the path of the ultra party. The connections can be found even before its formal entry into the political landscape.
The germ of Vox was forged in the DENAES Foundation, created and chaired by Santiago Abascal – where he shared space with Javier Ortega-Smith or Iván Espinosa de los Monteros – until 2014. During those years, Esperanza Aguirre kept the current leader of Vox generously showered with financing; for example, the Community of Madrid granted it almost €300,000 between 2008 and 2012. Here, the link with Atlas is twofold: Aguirre was a member of the FAES board of trustees, in addition to having relationship with the Civismo Foundation, both belonging to the network of think tanks of Atlas Network.
FAES, founded by José María Aznar (himself closely tied to Atlas), played a major role in launching Vox. From among its ranks came the one who would come to preside over Vox in its first steps, Alejo Vidal-Quadras. Also from FAES came Rafael Bardají, responsible for Vox's successful turn in recent years towards the disinformation strategies designed by Steve Bannon that today have "filled with shit" the Spanish political sphere. One of the party's main weapons is the Disenso Foundation, created in 2020 and directed by Jorge Martín Frías, linked to the FAES itself and founder of the Floridablanca Network, included in the list of think tanks of Atlas Network. And there is more: the director of the aforementioned Civismo Foundation, Juan Ángel Soto, also worked at Disenso as head of International Relations.
The launch – with Disenso as a front organisation – of the portal La Gaceta de la Iberosfera, a constant source of hoaxes and hate speech, places Vox's strategy very much in line with the dynamics of Atlas Network around the world.
From the Vox-Disenso binomial also emerges the Madrid Forum, an international summit of the extreme right whose founding document, the Madrid Charter, testifies with chilling clarity to the existence of an organized network that forms the core of the fascist offensive. Among his signatures is that of Alejandro Chafuen, former CEO and former president of Atlas Network; Roger Noriega, the U.S. government's liaison to the disinformation industry; and professional coup plotters such as María Corina Machado or the Bolivian Arturo Murillo.
To give a more concrete idea of the Atlas Network's capacity to influence the Spanish population, it is enough to look at the relationship between the Atlantic Institute of Government, another organization founded by Aznar and belonging to the Atlas network, and the Francisco de Vitoria University, owned by the Legionaries of Christ. Their collaboration exemplifies the success of Antony Fisher’s 1981 initiative: more than 20,000 young people—according to the university’s own data—will, this academic year, be exposed to neoliberal doctrine presented as academic knowledge. Communicators such as Vicente Vallés, a pawn in the disinformation industry and presenter of the most watched news program in Spain, are often invited by the Atlantic Institute to visit the students of the university linked to the Mexican founder of the Legionaries, the serial pedophile Marcial Maciel.
Translated by and Christian Velilla
