Armed incursion into Venezuela flops
Two-boat, poorly resourced bid to raid capital looked like a B-movie.
Adisenchanted band of Venezuelan politicians and military deserters gathered in secret last year to plot the overthrow of Venezuela’s authoritarian leader, Nicolas Maduro. They determined they would need four tools to succeed: men, money, a plan and guts. Jordan G Goudreau, a United States citizen and former Green Beret, would be the guts. At least, that’s one version of the story.
Last weekend, a group of self-declared freedom fighters set sail from Colombia to Venezuela on an apparent mission hatched by Mr Goudreau to overthrow the Venezuelan government. The operation failed miserably, and the men were apprehended by authorities. Eight of the rebels were killed. Two Americans, former members of the US Army special forces, have been arrested.
But the figure who has emerged as the central character in what one official described as something out of a Hollywood script, is Mr Goudreau, 43, who was not on the mission. The Maduro administration has blamed the attack on the US government, which has denied a connection to Mr Goudreau or his Florida-based security company SilverCorp. The company claims it had entered into a US$220 million (7 billion baht) agreement with the Venezuelan opposition to help oust Mr Maduro.
Mr Goudreau, who bragged about his involvement in the attack on Twitter and YouTube, has turned into an international curiosity, with observers around the world wondering what a decorated soldier who served multiple tours in Iraq and Afghanistan was doing leading a foreign insurrection.
“We always understood that he was a strong man who had won many awards,” said Hernan Aleman, a Venezuelan legislator who said he helped raise money for the plot. “We needed somebody who had that kind of courage.”
Over the last year, Mr Goudreau, who was born in Canada but has American citizenship, helped craft an audacious scheme to oust Mr Maduro, a leader known widely for overseeing his country’s economic downfall, and for jailing and torturing those who cross him.
The plan was called “Operation Gideon”. In the end, there were just two boats with 60 men who were to storm the capital and capture Mr Maduro. Mr Goudreau later said his men vomited the entire way and nearly ran out of petrol as they headed toward Venezuela.
Thirteen of the men were taken into custody, including the two US citizens, both former Green Berets said to have been recruited by Mr Goudreau. State television ran photographs of the alleged prisoners, face down on the pavement. “They were playing Rambo,” said Mr Maduro.
In an interrogation video released by the Venezuelan government, Luke Denman, one of the captured Green Berets, said he “was helping Venezuelans take back control of their country”, and expected to be paid $50,000 to $100,000 for his efforts.
Mr Aleman, the Venezuelan legislator, said Mr Goudreau did not participate in the raid because he was prevented by coronavirus-related border closures from travelling to Colombia to join his men. Instead, Mr Goudreau, who lives in Florida, remained in the US.
In Venezuela, Mr Goudreau is seen as a huckster selling a suicide mission to desperate Venezuelans, as well as a hero committed to liberating the nation. He has claimed that the attack grew out of a multimillion-dollar deal he made with the Venezuelan opposition, a group backed politically by the US. In recent weeks, the State Department offered $15 million for information leading to Mr Maduro’s detention.
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo declined to discuss who might have funded the plot and said the US government was not “directly involved”.
Opposition leader Juan Guaido has also denied any relationship with Mr Goudreau. But one of his advisers, JJ Rendon, told The New York Times that Mr Guaido had in fact made an agreement with Mr Goudreau last October. The agreement was short-lived, said Mr Rendon, and the opposition terminated it days after it was signed. Mr Rendon said it was unclear why Mr
Goudreau went ahead with his own operation.
Mr Goudreau’s interest in Venezuela began in 2019, while working security at a concert on the Venezuelan-Colombian border in support of Mr Guaido. Soon, Mr Goudreau began working with Cliver Alcala, a former Venezuelan general who had turned against Mr Maduro, to train a small group of military defectors based at camps in Colombia, according another military trainer who was there.
At one point the group included about 150 men and women, Mr Aleman said. But they had very little in the way of resources.
Ephraim Mattos, a former Navy SEAL who runs a non-profit company that employs former Venezuelan police and military personnel, said he visited the camp for about 10 days in autumn 2019, thinking he was providing medical training to refugee Venezuelan soldiers. He was surprised to hear from the fighters that “there’s a specific plan to take out Maduro”, coordinated by Mr Goudreau, he said.
The group was convinced that the US government was backing the operation, Mr Mattos said. But right away, the details did not add up for him. He took one look at Mr Goudreau’s Instagram account and thought, “This guy is not the real deal, this is not a US government,
US-sanctioned thing.”
“I was highly suspicious of this being backed by the US government,” he said. “The men I was with, they did not have enough food.”
But the group was convinced, and so Mr Mattos gave them tourniquets and bandages and left, he said. By the time the fighters were preparing to launch their attack, the situation had deteriorated even further.
In mid-March, Colombian authorities seized a cache of weapons destined for their operation. Then the group lost one of its leaders when Mr Alcala, the former general, was indicted by the US government, accused of colluding with others “to flood the United States with cocaine”.
There were also signs the group had been infiltrated by Mr Maduro’s allies. On Sunday, Venezuelan authorities said they had captured a first boat, followed by a second. Mr Aleman said he understood that the attack looked like a suicide mission, but urged people to understand the level of desperation shared by many Venezuelans.
He said he often visited the training camps and sometimes spoke to Mr Goudreau about his reason for working with group. “It pained him,” he said, “to see how Venezuelans were suffering.”