LATIN AMERICA
Grayzone reveals: US organized coup in Venezuela in 2020
Portal exposes the whole plot through documents, emails and confessions
Documents recently released by the US Department of Justice reinforce that the failed Operation Gedeón, the attempted invasion of Venezuela in May 2020, was far from an isolated adventure by a mindless mercenary. The files indicate that central figures in Donald Trump’s administration had prior knowledge and helped mount a third-party coup, planned to capture President Nicolás Maduro.
At the center of the coup plot is Jordan Goudreau, a former military officer who created the security company Silvercorp USA and was identified as the “head” of the armed incursion that left Colombia for the Venezuelan coast on May 3, 2020. But according to the material obtained by Goudreau’s defense, he acted from the beginning as part of a broader arrangement that united Juan Guaidó’s Venezuelan opposition, Washington lobbyists, CIA operatives and senior Trump administration officials. Goudreau himself presented the press with a contract worth more than 200 million dollars signed with Guaidó’s “interim government” to “capture/deter/remove” Maduro, with a million-dollar bonus linked to the eventual success of the coup
Operation Gedeón was conceived as a continuation of an escalation that had been going on before: the recognition of Guaidó as “president” in order to take control of assets such as Citgo and Venezuelan gold at the Bank of England, the “humanitarian” farce in Cúcuta in 2019 and the attempted military uprising on April 30 of that year. Each failure deepened the opposition’s crisis of legitimacy and pushed imperialism towards ever more open solutions of war, mixing infrastructure sabotage, sanctions and the use of mercenaries
The new files include statements to the FBI, internal emails and records of meetings that place names such as Elliot Abrams, John Bolton, advisors to the National Security Council and senior CIA officials in Trump’s direct environment as connoisseurs and, at times, guarantors of the coup’s preparation. A consortium of capitalists called the “Global Governments” worked together in Washington to turn the fall of Maduro into a festival of reconstruction contracts, the privatization of strategic sectors and the exploitation of Venezuelan oil.
Between meetings in exclusive clubs in the US capital, luxury hotels in Florida and shared offices in Miami, Guaidó’s emissaries sold the plot as a “historic window” for US allies to “grab companies and collect”, while discussing the logistics of a military action with CIA and Southern Command intermediaries. Testimonies even report grotesque proposals for “false flag” operations and even the spread of diseases in social circles linked to the Venezuelan government, as well as plans to train hundreds of combatants in facilities run by Academi, Blackwater’s successor
The same operators who spoke in the name of “freedom” appear in the files organizing blackouts, sabotage and disinformation campaigns, in coordination with propaganda companies associated with US intelligence, such as the Rendon Group. In this broth of cynicism, the opposition trained militiamen in Colombia, negotiated with drug traffickers and asked Álvaro Uribe and other representatives of the Latin American far right for their blessing, all under the cover of NGOs, “solidarity concerts” and speeches against the phantasmagorical Venezuelan “dictatorship”
In the early hours of May 3, 2020, two boats with former US and Venezuelan soldiers trained in the Colombian jungle tried to reach the coast of La Guaira hoping to be welcomed as “liberators”. Instead, they were repelled and captured by security forces and the region’s own fishermen, in an outcome so disastrous that the operation was dubbed the “Venezuelan Bay of Pigs”. At least eight exiles were killed, dozens arrested, and two ex-military men were shown on Venezuelan television confessing their participation in the plot.
While Mike Pompeo rushed to deny any “direct involvement” by the US, the official propaganda went on to blame Goudreau exclusively, presented as an out-of-control mercenary who had acted on his own in search of a reward. But the contract with Guaidó, the exchanges of messages with Pence’s advisers and State Department officials, plus the “plausible deniability” clause that authorized the “interim government” to wash its hands of the failure, dismantle this convenient version
In the end, the archives reveal that Operation Gedeón was, in practice, an experiment in a “privatized coup”, in which imperialist headquarters used security companies and intermediaries to do the dirty work.
