goudreau silvercorp
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am prosp 1 26
...OPERATION GIDEON IN THE SPRING OF 2020 was the Trump administration’s last-ditch attempt to oust Maduro. It began when a clique of Trump insiders, principally longtime personal bodyguard Keith Schiller, approached a Florida ex-Green Beret named Jordan Goudreau to organize a military coup. After meeting with a dizzying string of intermediaries in the professional Venezuelan exile community of South Florida along with Trump administration bigwigs (including Elliott Abrams and John Bolton), Goudreau secured a contract signed by Juan Guaidó himself, promising some $212.9 million to execute a coordinated defection of the top military brass alongside Cliver Alcalá, a Venezuelan general who had defected to Colombia in 2018.
But just a week before the operation was slated to launch, the DOJ indicted Alcalá on charges of conspiracy to commit narco-terrorism. The indictment contained no specifics other than a single mention of Alcalá’s supposed presence at a 2008 meeting of various alleged bosses in the alleged Cartel de los Soles, and one of the prosecutors working on it had informed his attorney two years earlier that the office had decided not to charge him for lack of evidence. Team Gideon should have taken the hint, but went ahead with the operation anyway, by which point the plot had reportedly been infiltrated by intelligence operatives on both poles of the ideological spectrum. The Biden administration indicted Goudreau on arms trafficking charges a few months before a documentary on him called Men of War premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival.
In a recent interview with Max Blumenthal, Goudreau accused the CIA and its menagerie of assets in the Venezuelan perma-exile community of sabotage, but many of the amateurish details of Operation Gideon suggested that the sabotage call was coming from inside the house. Goudreau’s explanation for whythe intelligence community would pull the plug on its last hope of ousting Maduro before the 2020 elections, however, struck me as potentially … perceptive. “I just think … they were making a lot of money,” he told Blumenthal.
:{:{Without a doubt, many of “them” certainly were. The expatriate perma-opposition had long been flush with fellowships, stipends, and subcontracts supplied by USAID, which spent nearly $2.3 billion on democracy promotion and humanitarian assistance earmarked for Venezuela between 2017 and 2021; and corporate-funded think tanks like Hausmann’s Growth Lab, whose Venezuela research is endowed by a handful of Latin American oligarchs in the timber, banking, and petrochemical industries.}:
But by mid-2019, Guaidó, who reportedly received $98 million from USAID to sustain his shadow government, was facing an apparent liquidity crisis; in June, the Panama Postreported that his ambassador to Colombia had bounced a $7,000 check written to help settle a $20,000 outstanding tab at a hotel where the shadow government, USAID, and the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees were housing former Venezuelan military officials in advance of an anticipated coup. Even more lucratively, the Treasury Department’s increasing fondness for financial sanctions had spawned a $30 billion cottage industry of OFAC lobbyists and sanctions compliance specialists who charge retainers as high as a million dollars to help them navigate the Kafkaesque hell of excommunication from the global financial system—and whose livelihoods were threatened by the possibility of normalized relations.}:
A godfather of that industry happened to be a former Venezuelan embassy worker named Martin Rodil, who is currently wanted in Spain on charges of running a global extortion ring in cahoots with an Israeli special forces veteran and bot farmer accused of meddling in 33 elections. But in Washington, where he has been based for most of his career, Rodil is a classic policy entrepreneur: “consulting” rich Venezuelans hoping to “relocate” abroad by coughing up intel on the “illicit” financial activities of Venezuelan government linked companies, then “consulting” those same companies’ business partners on how to avoid running afoul of the punishing economic sanctions the Treasury Department imposes on countries it doesn’t like. Spanish law enforcement claims Rodil exploited the effective criminalization of Venezuelan commerce to extort no less than 20 million euros out of rich Venezuelans in recent years. Getting rid of Maduro and the sanctions regime that accompanied him would have shut down that gravy train.
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https://theintercept.com/2020/05/09/venezuela-coup-regime-change/
PICTURE THE FOLLOWING SCENE: Two former Venezuelan special forces soldiers are captured while trying to land on a beach in the United States. They confess on camera to being part of a wider plot to capture and kidnap the American president.
That same day, back in Venezuela, another ex-special forces soldier with connections to the longtime bodyguard of Venezuela’s president, Nicolás Maduro, releases a video announcing the two men were working for his private security company, on a mission to detain and extract President Donald Trump and bring down the government in Washington, D.C.
Two days later, the Venezuelan foreign minister, who also happens to be the former head of the country’s feared intelligence agency, gives a press conference at which he chooses to deny only “direct” involvement in the operation. “If we had been involved, it would have gone differently,” he added, with a smirk.
What do you think the reaction would be here in the United States? Among political and media elites? In national security circles? Wouldn’t the U.S. press be running endless pieces denouncing and berating Maduro? Wouldn’t cable news be rolling on it? Does anyone doubt that the U.S. military would be preparing to attack targets across Venezuela in retaliation?
Yet that is exactly what we have witnessed over the past week — but in reverse, and without any sense of shock or outrage in the United States.
[In this photo released by Venezuela’s Ministry of Communication, Jorge Rodriguez shows a video of American Airan Berry, a former U.S. special forces soldier associated with the Florida-based private security firm Silvercorp USA, during a televised statement in Caracas, Venezuela, on May 7, 2020.]
On Monday, it was Venezuela that captured two former U.S. special forces soldiers, Luke Denman and Airan Berry, after what authorities described as their “botched beach landing in the fishing village of Chuao.” A video was released of Denman telling his interrogators that he had been tasked with capturing the Venezuelan president. Meanwhile, Florida-based ex-Green Beret Jordan Goudreau, head of the private security firm Silvercorp USA, appeared in a video alongside a former Venezuelan military officer in combat fatigues, in which he confirmed that Denman and Berry were working for him. (Press reports have since revealed that Goudreau had meetings with former longtime Trump bodyguard Keith Schiller, had signed a multimillion-dollar contract with the U.S.-backed Venezuelan opposition, and also claims to have been in contact with the office of Vice President Mike Pence.)
On Wednesday, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, a former director of the CIA, spoke at a press conference where he issued his very carefully worded denial: “There was no U.S. government direct involvement in this.” He also couldn’t help but brag to reporters about how it “would have gone differently” if the United States had been behind it. (Memo to Pompeo: Google “Bay of Pigs.”)
Who knows? Perhaps Washington wasn’t involved this time. Perhaps Trump is correct to say that this particular fiasco, which sounds like the plot of a bad Hollywood movie, “has nothing to do with our government.”
Then again, this is an administration of liars, fabulists, and grifters. Dishonesty is the hallmark of the Trump White House. Their denials, therefore, are pretty worthless.
Plus, there is the recent history to consider: the demonization and strangulation of Venezuela has been a bipartisan project in Washington, D.C., since the rise of Hugo Chavez and the socialist “pink tide” in the late 1990s. In 2002, the Bush administration encouraged and supported a (failed) coup against Chavez. (As I later reminded former Bush official Otto Reich — who was accused of meeting with the plotters beforehand — the CIA had warned him and his colleagues that a coup attempt would be made five days before it occurred!).
In 2015, the Obama administration made the absurd decision to formally declare Venezuela an “unusual and extraordinary threat” to U.S. national security. At the time, the United States was 11 times bigger in terms of population, 600 times richer in terms of GDP, and with a military budget 1,800 times the size of Venezuela’s.
In 2019, the Trump administration called Maduro “illegitimate” and recognized opposition leader Juan Guaidó as the interim president of Venezuela. So far this year, Washington has indicted Maduro on charges of narco-terrorism; refused to suspend crippling sanctions on Caracas despite the spread of Covid-19; and deployed U.S. warships near Venezuela in what has been described as “one of the largest U.S. military operations in the region since the 1989 invasion of Panama to remove Gen. Manuel Noriega from power.”
Regime change is the explicit policy of the U.S. government.
To be clear: The regime in Caracas is brutal, autocratic, and corrupt. More than four million Venezuelans have fled the country in recent years; the president’s approval ratings hover around 10 percent.
But anyone who claims that U.S. opposition to Maduro is based on a concern for democracy or human rights in Venezuela is either dishonest or deluded. The United States has a long history of supporting strongmen around the world — and especially in Latin America. Think Gen. Efraín Ríos Montt in Guatemala. Or Gen. Augusto Pinochet in Chile. Or Gen. Jorge Rafael Videla in Argentina. The list goes on and on.
No, the real reason the United States is obsessed with toppling the government in Caracas is, of course, because Venezuela has the world’s largest oil reserves — but leaders opposed to both the United States and capitalism. In fact, Trump and his cronies have a habit of saying the quiet part loud. As former acting FBI director Andrew McCabe revealed in his book, “The Threat,” at a briefing with intelligence officials in 2017, Trump asked why the U.S. wasn’t at war with Venezuela, pointing out how “they have all that oil and they’re right on our back door.”
In January 2019, Trump’s national security adviser at the time, John Bolton, told Fox Business: “It will make a big difference to the United States economically if we could have American oil companies really invest in and produce the oil capabilities in Venezuela.”
We do not know whether Trump and Co. were involved in the Goudreau-inspired attempted attack on Maduro. What we do know, though, is that they continue to try and starve and bully Venezuela into submission. If the Trump administration gave a damn about the people of that country, it would heed calls from everyone from the pope, to the U.N. high commissioner for human rights, to a group of congressional Democrats, to suspend sanctions and help Caracas fight the spread of the novel coronavirus.
But it won’t — because it doesn’t.
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