The Venezuelan opposition leader Juan Guaidó keeps trying distancing itself from the amateurish invasion of U.S.-based mercenaries that the Venezuelan security forces crushed last but his denials are undercut by emerging evidence.
In a meeting last October with Jordan Goudreau, a 43-year-old Special Forces veteran who organized the invasion force, Guaidó “was saying all options were on the table, and under the table,” said J.J. Rendon, a Venezuelan political strategist. “We were fulfilling that purpose.”
After the Washington Post published a contract with Goudreau’s private security firm, signed by Guaidó, Rendon and another aide resigned.
The incident, notes Reuters, “has raised doubts about [Guaidó’s] leadership some 16 months since he first declared a rival presidency and denounced Maduro as a usurper who had overseen a six-year economic collapse.”
Last April, Guaidó announced an uprising to overthrow the Maduro government, which fizzled badly. In an effort to stay relevant, Guaidó and his advisers then turned to Goudreau’s Silvercorps for assistance in toppling Maduro.
From The Washington Post.
By October, the plan had advanced to the point of a signed agreement, contingent on funding and other conditions. Rendón calls it a trial balloon, a test of what Goudreau could do that was never officially greenlighted. But the language of the agreement left no ambiguity on the objective: “An operation to capture/detain/remove Nicolás Maduro . . . remove the current Regime and install the recognized Venezuelan President Juan Guaidó.”
Whether the American firm planned to kidnap, arrest, or assassinate Maduro, they had Guaidó’s support.
The result was another defeat for Guaidó. The mercenaries he enlisted were intercepted in the seaside town of Chuao. Eight men were killed and more than fifty captured.
From the Guardian
One of the captured American attackers, Airan Berry, last week claimed, possibly under duress, that the group had been tasked with raiding Maduro’s presidential palace and seizing a local airport in order to spirit him out of the country. Many of the group are reportedly being held in El Helicoide, Venezuela’s most notorious political prison.
Read the kidnapping/assassination contract here;
