By Rodrigo Acuña
12 May 2020
Reports coming out of Venezuela and Miami, Florida in the United States are bordering on the hilarious. If you thought you had seen it all with Venezuela’s hard right-wing opposition and their allies in the U.S. with their actions to overthrow the socialist government of Nicolas Maduro, well, think again. In recent days, images of two captured North American mercenaries have been flooding the air waves in the South American country of Venezuela where Maduro remains the president, despite harsh U.S. economic sanctions.
According to the testimonies of Luke Denman and Erin Berry to Venezuelan authorities, they were in the oil rich country to get Maduro, either through kidnapping or assassination. Both men are former Green Beret special forces soldiers who served in Iraq and Afghanistan while working for the U.S. private-security company Silvercorp USA. In 2018, this company provided security for president Donald Trump at some of his rallies. Headed by CEO Jordan Goudreau, aged 43 and also an ex-U.S. special forces soldier, according to one report: “the website for his Florida-based private security firm Silvercorp claims it has planned and led international security teams for the president as well as the secretary of defense.”
Silvercorp USA apparently first became involved with Venezuelan politics in February 2019 after it worked security at a concert in support of hard-right opposition leader Juan Guaidó organized by British billionaire Richard Branson on the Venezuelan-Colombian border.
Earlier this month, leading a force of some 62 soldiers of fortune, Silvercorp USA’s mercenary expedition left for Venezuela from neighboring Colombia. By May 4, however, a group that tried to disembark in La Gaira, north of Caracas, were captured by Venezuelan authorities with a second group surrendering in the cacao-commune beach town of Chuao in central Aragua State.
The details of Silvercorp USA’s enterprise in Venezuela make for comical reading. For a start, after drawing up a $212 million contract in October 2019 with Guaidó to remove president Maduro under the name of ‘Operation Resolution,’ Goudreau recently claimed Guaidó refused to pay a $1.5 million retainer fee hence why he made the contract available to the media. Despite this, Goudreau decided to go ahead with the original mission anyway. He should have done more research on his business partner Guaidó, as well as the actual political reality on the ground in the country his company was going to invade.
A little known politician within Venezuela, Guaidó, following a rotational protocol at the National Assembly in 2019, became president of that body. But being controlled by the political hard-right, who has long been committed to removing their Chavista opponents from office at any cost, the National Assembly declared Guaidó president of the republic since they did not accept the results of the last presidential elections. While Guaidó’s actions were supported by Washington and over fifty states, the United Nations continued to recognize Nicolas Maduro as the country’s legitimate head of state.
Back in Venezuela, Guaidó was confident that he could overthrow Maduro and, in April 2019, surrounded by television cameras and a few dozen defecting soldiers, declared that his actions were the start of a coup as he had substantial support within the armed forces. He did not and, although he achieved the release from house arrest of opposition leader Leopoldo López after bribing a few intelligence officers, Guaidó soon abandoned the mutineer soldiers that joined his coup d'état – an event that was primarily staged for the international media from the beginning.
By May that same year, one report noted that the defected soldiers were on the “brink of homelessness” in the border town of Cúcuta, Colombia. According to a detailed report in the PanAm Post, corruption within Guaidó’s ranks was in fact evident as early as February as:
“Guaidó’s small army created an awful impression in Cucuta: prostitutes, alcohol, and violence. They had many demands that the hotels could not fulfill. Of course, nothing was free. The government of Colombia was paying for some hotels, and UNHCR, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, was paying for others.”
All this information would have been available to Silvercorp USA.
By the time the contractors were on their way to Venezuela, intelligence agents of the Maduro government were aware of the mercenary invasion. And if they had not known, Silvercorp USA’s official Twitter account made sure they became informed. On May 4, during the actual covert operation, Silvercorp USA tweeted: “Strikeforce incursion into Venezuela. 60 Venezuelan, 2 American ex Green Beret @realDonaldTrump”.
In another blunder, Silvercorp USA’s mercenaries were caught with an air gun among their arsenal, which would have provided little help to the 62 mercenaries in fighting Venezuela’s standing army of 340,000 soldiers who are supplied with modern Russian weapons and aircraft.
While on May 10 more mercenaries were captured in Venezuela, and one of Guaidó’s top advisors has conceded that $50,000 was paid to Silvercorp USA who have now become a laughing stock among U.S. military veterans, there should be few doubts as to the severity of the U.S. economic blockade on Venezuela, or Washington’s commitment to toppling Maduro.
According to U.S. human rights lawyer Alfred-Maurice de Zayas earlier this year, U.S. sanctions against Venezuela have cost the lives of more than 100,000 civilians, in particular, due to restrictions on medications entering the country. A former secretary of the U.N. Human Rights Council (HRC), in late 2018 Mr. de Zayas submitted a report to the United Nations where he was highly critical of U.S. economic sanctions against Venezuela. Speaking to The Independent last year, Mr. de Zayas stated:
“When I come and I say the emigration is partly attributable to the economic war waged against Venezuela and is partly attributable to the sanctions, people don’t like to hear that. They just want the simple narrative that socialism failed and it failed the Venezuelan people.”
“When I came back [the U.N. and media were] not interested. Because I am not singing the song I’m supposed to sing so I don’t exist … And my report, as I said, was formally presented but there has been no debate on the report. It has been filed away.”
While the Maduro administration has undeniably made its own economic errors, the severe impact of sanctions on the Venezuelan population is precisely what the U.S. and the local opposition have been banking on to turn the military against the government. This strategy is similar to the one used by President Richard Nixon against the leftist Popular Unity administration of Dr. Salvador Allende in Chile in the early 1970s when he ordered the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to “make the economy scream.”
Currently, back in Washington, Trump officials have denied any involvement with the actions of Silvercorp USA.
In August 2018, the Venezuelan opposition also attempted to assassinate president Maduro – this time through the use of drones packed with military explosives. While the Trump administration also denied any involvement with this plot, a CNN report interviewed the organizer of the attack who claimed he met with U.S. officials on three occasions after the assassination attempt in order to obtain future backing.
In October last year at the United Nations, the Maduro administration gained the support of 105 countries out of 193 in its bid to acquire a position at the organization’s Human Rights Council. Despite this endorsement from the international community, economic sanctions and violent actions aimed at overthrowing the Maduro government should be expected to continue, if not intensify under the Trump administration.