Angry Planet - How (Not) To Plan Coup in Venezuela

Episode Date: May 18, 2020

Bellingcat’s Giancarlo Fiorella is here to walk us through what may go down in history as the dumbest attempted coup of all time. On May 3, American mercenaries and Venezuelan exiles attempted to enter the country with the goal of overthrowing the Maduro regime. It didn’t go well.The Associated Press busted your coup but you went ahead anyway?What the hell is Silvercorp USA?A contract is great, but it’s not the same as paycheck.Who brings an Airsoft rifle to a warzone?Rember Óscar Alberto Pérez?How does Maduro stay in power? Why Venezuela became one of America’s favorite political footballs.With us today Giancarlo Fiorella. Fiorella is an investigator and journalist who’s been covering the story at Bellingcat. His May 5th and May 7th articles at Bellingcat demand to be read if you want to understand the weird comedy of errors playing out in Venezuela right now.You can listen to War College on iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play or follow our RSS directly. Our website is warcollegepodcast.com. You can reach us on our Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/warcollegepodcast/; and on Twitter: @War_College.Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/warcollege. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Love this podcast. Support this show through the ACAST supporter feature. It's up to you how much you give, and there's no regular commitment. Just click the link in the show description to support now. In the Associated Press article, there's an interview with somebody who went to one of these training camps to train the soldiers there. And their description of the camps are like very dire. You know, there's like no running water. The soldiers like didn't have any food or equipment. And it just doesn't. I mean, it paints a picture of like a really, you know, terrible place to be these camps, right? And not the sort of place where you're training a force and elite force that will topple a government. You're listening to War College, a weekly podcast that brings you the stories from behind the front lines. Hello and welcome to War College. I am your host, Matthew Galt. This week, listeners, How Not to Plan a Coup in Venezuela.

On May 3rd, American mercenaries and Venezuelan expatriates attempted to enter the country with a goal of overthrowing the Maduro regime. It didn't go well. With us today is Giancarlo Fiorela. Fiorela is an investigator and journalist who's been covering the story at Bellingcat. His May 5th and 7th articles at Bellingcat demand to be read if you want to understand the weird comedy of errors that is currently playing out in Venezuela right now. Jean-Carlo, thank you so much for joining us. All right. for having me. Okay, let's, I mean, I don't even know where to start, really.

I'll just, okay, what is Operation Gideon? Sure, yeah. So Operation Gideon is an attempt by a group of expatriate, Venezuelan soldiers, as well as members of a U.S. company called Silver Corps USA to, as far as we can tell, capture President Majura of Venezuela and other high-ranking members of the Venezuelan government and take them out of Venezuela, so fly them to the United States, and to effectively, in doing that tophole, the Venezuelan government. And how did that work out for them? How far did they get? Well, yeah, I mean, I guess the short answer is that not very far.

I should say, though, that we don't know that there is any direct involvement from the U.S. government on this. So the research that we've done so far doesn't point in that direction. We know for sure that there is a private company called Silver Core USA that had provider security at some Trump rallies, which in itself isn't suspicious or indication of any sort of call. collaboration beyond just a financial one of certain rallies because we know that Trump employs different and lots of different security companies. And so we know that that organization was involved in a plot by people, Venezuela, people who live in Colombia, to infiltrate Venezuela, as I said, and an attempt to remove Maduro

from power. So that operation played out starting, as far as we can tell, starting. starting on Sunday, May 3rd. And there was two waves that came into boats. And both of them were located by the Venezuelan authorities at sea. They were intercepted. And eight people were killed. And now over two dozen people have been arrested in connection to this operation.

No, that's a good point. I do want to make that clear up at the top and maybe change my framing in the recording later. we don't know to what extent, if any extent at all, America has played a part in this. On the surface, just my surface read of it is it does just feel like this absurd set of circumstances that are just playing out in public and are very embarrassing all around for Silver Core USA in particular. Yeah, there has been reporting that, so, Dick Murphy is an individual who, wrote an article shortly after this all came to light, and it's been reporting other media at least that it's possible that the CIA knew about this plot, at least on the Silvercore USA side.

I also read a report, I believe it was in the Washington Post that said that the CIA had sat in on a couple of meetings leading up to this, presumably between Silver Corps USA and sectors of the Venezuelan opposition. And as Jack Murphy reported, the CIA supposedly attempted to talk the people involved in this at Silvercore from doing it. And apparently that didn't work. Jack Murphy is he the AP reporter that's been hitting this? No, I know. So that's Joshua Goodman.

So, yeah, Joshua Goodman has done exceptional reporting on this. In fact, he wrote an article on May 1st that kind of brought it all to light even before it started. He sort of introduced Jordan Goodro, who's the... the head of Silvercore USA to this to this whole story. And he's writing for the Associated Press. So, yeah, if you also want to read up on some really good reporting on this, even prior to the attempt on May 3rd, Joshua Goodman's work on the Associated Press is really good. Okay. This begs a question.

And I think we don't have the timeline confused to your audience. This is what happened. AP publishes this very long, extensive, well-reported story on the first about this, about so. Silver Corps and about Jordan in particular. I think it's just this amazing character that we'll get into in a minute. And then they still go forward with everything on the third? That's part of what makes it so confusing. So, as you said, on May 1st, Joshua Goodman publishes this really thorough piece

on the Associated Press. And he basically says, look, there is a group of Venezuelan expatriate soldiers in Colombia, and they're headed by this guy called Cleaver Alcalat. He's a well-known figure in Venezuela. It was reported previously that he was in Colombia. We knew last year that he was attempting to organize something like a mercenary force in Colombia that would potentially carry out some kind of military operation in Venezuela. So those rumors have been around for a while, that reporting has been around for a while.

And then Joshua Goodman's piece introduced, as he said, Jordan Goodrow to this. So if you read, and I recommend that you do read Joshua Goodman's piece from May 1st, he says, okay, so there's this sort of fmenting mercenary kind of army that's growing in Colombia under the auspices of this Cleveland guy, and then now there's this other guy, his name is

Jordan Gudrow, and he talks about, he introduces Silver Corps of USA, and he's a former Green Beret, and he had this agreement with Alcalan, the Venezuelan opposition, to train these soldiers that would eventually lead this mission into Venezuela. And what's fascinating about the article, I mean, aside for everything, like all of the details,

in it is that you get the impression as you're reading it that nobody really believed that this could go ahead so like nobody involved thought it was a good idea you know beyond whatever gudra was trying to sell because he was trying to make money um it you get the impression step by step that uh the opposition kind of gets the sense that gudrow maybe is not all there that this isn't really a good idea how are you going to infiltrate the country and so when you get to the end of the article uh you're left making as certainly as i was i was i was was left thinking, you know, thank goodness has never happened, because this would have been the worst idea ever. And sure enough, two days later, we wake up on Sunday morning and we're hearing

reports from Venezuela, an invasion from the sea, that there's a boat that's been intercepted. And it was the plan. They got kicked off two days after the publication of this article, which is one of the many weird turns that this has taken is the fact that the operation went ahead at all after that publication. And that they tweeted about it. Silver Core USA tweeted about it on the third. Yeah. So what happened was on the third, we wake up.

And I see very early on in the morning, probably about 8, 9 o'clock in the morning, there's been a press conference by the minister of the interior of Venezuelan. He says, we've intercepted a ship of terrorist mercenaries that they were coming over to invade Venezuela, and to topple the government. And we've kept, you know, we've killed.

I don't think he announced that anybody had died, but I think they eventually came out throughout the data. Some of them had been killed and that others had been arrested. And I remember thinking when that came out, that's really weird. It sounds like that's what the article from today's ago was talking about, but surely it couldn't be that because, you know, like why would you launch the, the invasion or whatever you want to call this, this incursion, when you have maximum invisibility, when literally,

the entire world now knows of your plans. So I thought that the Venezuelan government maybe had, you know, maybe they had arrested a drug trafficking network or, you know, they intercepted a drug shipment and there'd been a firefight and they were trying to paint this as like this invasion force that you read about two days ago. But then what happened later that day on Sunday was that Jordan Gujarro appeared on video alongside a Venezuelan cohort. And he said, this was us.

So that thing that you read about this morning, about the government intercepting that ship, that was us. That was the incursion that we had been planning that you read about. It's called Operation Gideon. And it's going to, and he very clearly sort of says, like, we're going to capture Majero. It's ongoing. You know, one ship was intercepted, but there's more coming. And it just seemed completely bizarre, completely surreal. And as you said earlier, on Sunday night, the Silver Core USA account tweets.

it says there's a strike force on its way to Venezuela. It's got 60 people on a boat. And two of them are former Green Berets. And that's the entire message. So I went to sleep on Sunday thinking, okay, this has been the weirdest day, I think, that I can remember of covering Venezuela and events. And surely, this isn't, like, there is no boat. Like, this tweet is a mistake. Like, there's something else going on here.

Like, this is a joke or something. But no, the next day, we found out that, yeah, two. the U.S. citizens had been arrested aboard it, and the tweet was real. It was, it was, it was, it was, it was, it was alerting the world. It was telling everybody that, that this was ongoing. So we know that he was a green beret in the U.S. military and that he served in Afghanistan and Iraq. And again, based on the reporting that we've heard from, uh, the Associated Press and other publications, he was like, well regarded by his, by people who served with him. Um, um, so he had a pretty, um, you know, he had a military career that ended with, uh, He was awarded the Bronze Star a few times. And then in 2018, he set up this company, this private security company called Silver Corps USA. And he was known back when this company started, he had this idea to place undercover special forces soldiers, like former veterans in schools with weapons. So that the idea was that if you had like highly trained soldiers in schools, like pretending to be teachers, you know, nobody would attack schools. like there would be no more school shootings.

And if there were, you had these highly trained soldiers who would be able to respond at the drop of a hat. So there were some reports early on, you know, back in 2018, 2019 that mentioned that initiative that he had launched. And we also know that he, again, provided security at some Trump events. So in the first article that we published in Bellingcat, we found some footage of him in the background of Trump rallies, sort of, you know, working security. So as far as we can tell, you know, he's a person who, who's a person who, who's, served in the military and who came out of the military and, you know, he must have sat down and thought, what can I do now that I'm out of the army? You know, what am I good at? What could I do? And he decided he was going to try to set up a company. And eventually that led him to signing a

contract with the Venezuelan opposition to, you know, carry out this operation. Not all special operations forces members, former or otherwise, are cut from the same cloth. It's why, you know, just like any other group, there's a wide variety. Do we have any sense of what this gentleman was like from people that worked with him, that people was served with him? What do they say about him? Also, where is he right now? Do we have any idea? So he's still communicating with the media because every once in a while you'll see something published in the Washington Post or the Wall Street Journal and Ellie will cite him.

say like we were on the phone with him and he said this right um he the company was founded in florida so i believe he lives in florida as far as i'm aware he's still there um the associated press reported a few days ago that um that he might be under investigation for weapon smuggling you know i think that's uh maybe one of the many charges that he could potentially be facing right um but as far as as i'm aware he's he's in florida and uh you know again this is based on reporting that i've read about him, and in particular the one, the report from May 1st, from Joshua Woodman. You know, people say he's the kind of guy, I'm paraphrasing somebody's commentary on him, he's heard of the guy that you wanted to be with in combat, like the kind of guy you want to have

in a foxhole with you, he was a really good shot, apparently, he was just a really motivated soldier. But then there's also testimony from people who say that he was, you know, he sort of got in way over his head with this whole idea about the mercenary force. You know, maybe he was an overzealous entrepreneur who like dreamt way too big, right? And he just kind of bit off more than he could chew.

But from everything that I've read, from people who said that they knew him, he was somebody who was a good soldier, you know, by the standards of a soldier. Okay. Earlier you'd said that there was a sense from people on the ground that, like, he couldn't pull this off and this thing was not going forward. What are you based, like, where are you getting that from?

So we know, so there's a couple of things there. So the first one is, is, again, reporting from the Associated Press that says that people, so this agreement that Goodrow allegedly had with the opposition was that he would train Venezuelan expatriate soldiers in camps in Venezuela. And these camps had already been hinted at in previous reporting from 2018 and 2019 related to this figure, Cleaver Alcala. He was a major general in the Venezuelan Army, and he was a lifelong Chavez supporter. He served with Chavez and the 1992 coup, and he was in the military during the Chavez era. When Majuro came to power, he kind of fell out with grace from the government, and he eventually moved to Colombia, and he became a very vocal detractor of the government, a very vocal dissident. So Alcalah had been working on setting up something like a mercenary army or an expatriate army that was built on the soldiers who were essentially disserting from Venezuela in droves, right? So you have to remember also the backdrop for this is the Venezuelan Exodus, which is, you know, the largest migration wave out of the country in the nation's history, right?

We're talking about, you know, millions of Venezuelans fleeing the country due to poor socioeconomic conditions there. So there were lots and lots of soldiers. There are lots of soldiers in Colombia who Al-Qala was trying to tap into this force that they could then use to fight their way back into Venezuela and overthrow the government, right? Like a really big dream. So in the Associated Press article, there's an interview with somebody who went to one of these training camps to train the soldiers there. And their description of the camps that are like very dire. You know, there's like no running water. the soldiers didn't have any food or equipment.

And it just doesn't, I mean, it paints a picture of like a really, you know, terrible place to be, these camps, right? And not the sort of place where you're training a force and elite force that will topple a government. So that's one, that's one factor that that leads us to think that this thing wasn't really going to work out and that these camps and that this training program really wasn't going to be effective. The other is the fact.

that we've heard both from Gujarro and from the opposition, that despite the fact that they signed a contract that was worth $213 million, the opposition never really paid Gujarro any money. So Gujaro said, look, I can do this for you. Like, I can train your soldiers to launch this operation, but I'm going to need all this money. And we know that at least two opposition figures signed a contract with Silver Corps USA saying, yes, let's do it. But they immediately, like, they never paid him. They didn't even pay their retainer, the $1.5 billion retainer that Goudreau had asked for. And so almost immediately after the ink wasn't drawing the contract, Gujarro wasn't getting any support from the opposition, like any money, any monetary support. And so this is back in October, November of last year.

So right off the bat, this operation lacks any kind of logistics, any kind of support. And it's just doomed to fail from the very beginning. And in fact, as the Venezuelan opposition claims, it was that. never even supposed to go ahead. Like, they never even gave it the go ahead. Because, again, it was clear to a lot of people that it was not going to work. Do we know if he was, if Gujarro was ever on the ground in Venezuela, like actually there in person for any... In Venezuela? In Venezuela? In Colombia, rather. I'm sorry. Yes. In Colombia, yes. So, again, this is based on the AP report,

reporting that he was in Colombia to have meetings with both Alcala and members of the Venezuelan opposition, other members of the Venezuelan opposition. And he went there, I mean, it was essentially a business trip where he would just go and, you know, like he was selling a service, right? He's like, you know, who needs somebody to train soldiers? Because I could do that. All right, and he's not the only Green Beret involved.

Right. That's correct. So we know also that there are two other individuals. So their name is Luke Denman and Aaron Berry. And they're both also former Green Berets who are currently under custody. They're in detention in Venezuela. And there's been two, you know, confession videos, confession, you know, quote unquote, because they're obviously propaganda pieces.

They're heavily edited. Like they jump forward and backwards in time. You can tell they're sort of being coerced into reading statements, right? And they're currently in Venezuela right now. Like they're prisoners of the Majura government accused of being. mercenaries trying to overthrow the government. All right, let's back up a little bit.

Can you give me kind of the blow-by-blow timeline of what we know of the actual operation? Yeah, so we know that there was that the Venezuelan authorities detected a ship,

a boat off the coast of Venezuela, north of a place called Makuto. In the early morning hours, of Sunday before the sun had come up. We know that there are videos on Twitter showing police helicopter activity or military helicopter activity out at sea and vessel activity out at sea. And you can hear shooting in these videos.

So we know that that's the time when this boat was intercepted. Again, that was very early in the morning. At about 7.30 on Sunday, the minister of the interior makes his press conference and he says we've arrested these people who were trying to invade Venezuela. As the morning passes, we start to get images shared by Venezuelan journalists of the equipment and the weapons that the authorities claim to have seized as part of this operation. And they included things like assault rifles. There was two vehicles that were waiting for them allegedly onshore, that had machine goods on them. You know, just the sort of equipment, I guess, if you were an armed group, like you would use those sort of things, right?

By Sunday afternoon, we got confirmation from Gudrow and his Venezuelan cohort that this incursion really was a part of Operation Gideon and that there is more. So they keep hinting at more. Like there's more people coming. We have more people being deployed. Goodro in his very first video says, I'm paraphrasing, he says something like we have men in the west and the east and the south and they're sort of converging on Caracas. So he's painting this picture of like this larger operation that's going on and that only this small force was intercepted. Sunday night, we get the tweet from Silver Corps USA saying, you know, like stay tuned.

If you're at the Venezuelan government, there's more people coming. There's a strike force underway. I think he says 60 Venezuelans and two former Green Berets. On Monday, early afternoon, we get. confirmation via images of a second boat that has been intercepted. And this one was intercepted near north of a place called Chihu, which is just a little bit west of Makuto. And it was a very similar story. The boat was intercepted at sea. There's footage of people on this boat from a helicopter, racing their arms in the air, surrendering to the authorities. And they were brought ashore by the

Venezuelan authorities. There's images of them with their hands behind their back, after they were detained. And this is the group to which Luke and Aaron belonged. And so they were taken to Caracas, where they, I believe they're selling Caracas right now in custody. And then after Monday, we're occasionally hearing news of more people getting arrested in connection to this. Now, I should say that whenever the Venezuelan government has said, like, oh, we arrested

two more people related to this, we've arrested three more people related to this. we don't know for sure. I mean, we have to take the Venezuelan government at their word, and I would advise against doing that just based on the track record of the Venezuelan government. And the images that they present of people that they've arrested supposedly in connection to Operation Gedeon don't really seem to indicate that that would be the case necessarily. And I'm saying specifically that, you know, in these images we see people like wearing, you know, shorts and like T-shirts who have been arrested. Like they're indistinguishable from any.

other sort of person who might be arrested for like a drug crime or something. So what I'm saying is that we don't see anything in the images that the Venezuelan government has been releasing since these two boats were intercepted that would suggest that these individuals are involved with Operation Gideon, but since Monday, over two dozen have been implicated and arrested. Right. That's one of the things that's hard to track about this story is that, you know, It's hard. How do you report on something like this when you can't trust the Venezuelan government? You can't trust Silver Corps USA. How do you put this story together? How do you track all of it?

Yeah. So one of the things I think that Bellingcat is known for is for sticking to the facts, right? So whenever we're reporting on something, we need to be careful that we talk only about what we know based on the facts. So, you know, we're not sort of, you know, we could speculate whether or not the people that have been arrested allegedly by the government are related to a Beresan Giron or not. But, you know, if we were reporting that, you would caveat that by saying, like, you know, this is an allegation that the Venezuelan government has made, right? And this is the allegation, right? but as far as putting the stories together the first two you know we're looking at what does what can we see in the images what is obvious from the pictures what can we sort of take from the from the from from not just what the Venezuelan government saying but what from other sources are saying right so that eventually you're hopefully able to like triangulate something that approximates a truth

that isn't just based on one side's description of it right so a really good example of that is Again, when the Venezuelan government said on Sunday morning, if we've arrested terrorist mercenaries, right? You know, you ask yourself, like, where's the evidence, right? Like, show me, like, why do you say that they're Venezuelan, that they're terrorist mercenaries, right? Later on that day, we started to see pictures of weapons, of other military equipment coming from Venezuelan journalists, right?

And so as that information begins to trickle in, you can start to sort of corroborate what were at first independent data points and build a more complete picture that you can say, okay, this is probably something that happened, right? So it's a pretty lengthy process. And one that is, I think, difficult to navigate, but it takes,

it takes, it's the sort of thing that takes, like, slow thinking and, and, like, double checking always, like, your assumptions,

like, what am I assuming here? Yeah. Right. You don't want to be the publication that rushes out. I mean, God bless the, associated press and the amazing story they published on the first, but you don't want to be

the first to press with the headline that ends up being completely wrong, right? Especially if you're... Bellincat does things a little bit differently than most mainstream outlets, I think, in that in a positive way. Thanks, yeah. And I think that we actually were pretty quick with these stories. So, you know, there's the two different kinds of, you know, there's, I think you could, if you had to divide Bellencat stories into two, you know, You know, there would be like the long form. Like, we've spent two years analyzing these pictures and this is what we can, you know,

we can tell from them. And then there is a shorter sort of like, this sort of stuff that you see, for example, from Robert Evans after there's a mass shooting that's connected to like 4chan or 8chan, for example. And those are more like pieces that are like, look, this is what we know. And this is what it's on the, this is what we, it's on the internet. What we can verify is true. And, you know, there's lots of questions that we don't know the answer to. There's lots of questions that we haven't asked yet because it's so early on, but this is what we do know and here's the evidence, right?

So even the pieces that come out pretty quickly after something has happened, tend to stick to that, right? Like, this is what we know from the evidence and here's the evidence. You can sort of look at it yourself. All right. Do we know anything else about who these green berets are? Yeah, the ones that are in captivity at the moment. So both of them had social media profiles. And, you know, as investigators, not just Bellingcat, but lots of people who are, you know, you don't have to be an investigator at an organization to do this.

You can just, you know, look their names up on Facebook and see what they were up to. We know that at least Barry served in Germany at some point. And I think he was actually arrested with his German driver's license, if not mistaken, which was one of the pieces of identification that he had with him. And we also know, again, that they, the information that they provided via these videotaped confessions that you can see on Venezuelan media. Now, again, a huge caveat there because these are, you know, this isn't a confession that you would see in a courtroom that was carried out with, like, the person's lawyer at hand, right? These are these are meant to be propaganda pieces. So when you watch these confessions, you know, Luke and Aaron are providing answers to these questions, but you can, you know, some of the questions. are very clearly like propaganda-based, right?

So they're asked a lot like, why, you know, what, what, how would you feel if somebody invaded the United States? Like, what will you do, right? And so if you, you know, if you watch those interviews carefully, you might be able to gleam some information about like what kind of people they are. But again, I would advise against taking the information in those interviews at face value because they've been heavily edited. I'm sure they were coerced.

And again, their propaganda pieces above anything else. Yeah, it's something I think that's important to keep in mind whenever we talk about stuff like this. And I think we do a good job of this on this show is that sometimes a story can have more than one asshole. Yeah. Right? Like, both sides of a thing can be bad in different nuanced ways.

right no okay sure I mean I was asked this yeah recently and yeah

I think this is one of the situations where you know there is no necessarily a good guy in this one of the things that I'm afraid of

is that this is not just related to this event but so I'm from Venezuela I grew up there and I have a lot of family there and the Venezuelan situation has shaped

my life. I haven't lived there in 25 years, but my entire professional career, like from being a graduate student 10 years ago to being a doctoral kind of date now, to work in Belencah, has really been shaped by Venezuela. I care deeply about it. Partially because some of my family still lives there, and not a day goes by that. I don't think about Venezuela, and I don't feel terrible for what's happening there. So I'm afraid that people will, people who are not very familiar with the Venezuela, who maybe never heard of it or who just don't know anything about what's happening there, will read what happened. They'll see what happened there and they'll say, oh, wow, clearly these U.S. guys are terrible

and bad. And so that means, like, by definition, if those are the bad guys, then by definition, the Venezuelan government is a good guy. And I should cheer for the Venezuelan government. You know, I should like vocally defend it in social media and stuff, right? And I don't think that's the case. I think, as you're saying, like, this is the case. where both sides are bad.

And, you know, they both have done things that they should be condemned for. But it's much more complicated than, like, who's the good guy and who's the bad guy. Right. And can you tell us a little bit more about the opposition? And especially what the reaction to all of this has been? And, like, has there been any kind of political fallout for them because of it? Yeah. Yeah, like speaking of, like, all the bad actors involved in this, right?

It's not just Silver Corby USA. It's also the Venezuelan opposition because they, in a way, helped to precipitate this by engaging Goudreau. So you might be familiar with Juan Guaido, who is the leader of the opposition at the moment. And so this is another part of the story that's kind of really confusing. Jordan Goudreau released a document on Sunday that had his signature and the signature of two opposition politicians. last name's Rendon and Vergara, and it also had Juan Guido's signature. And this was,

he said it was a contract. It's like, this is the contract that we signed for this incursion, right? And as you can see, and he held that up, this is Juan Guido's signature

and Vergada signature and Rendon's signature and my signature. And this is the subject of your May 7th story, correct? Yes, yes. Is this document?

Okay. And then, but here's where it gets tricky, because on, on, a few days later, the Washington, Post published a 41-page document that appears to be the attachments, it appears to be sort of like an amended, a longer version of that original document or an attachment to that original document.

And that attachment, the 41-page attachment has very clearly spells out, like, this is, you know, these are the rules of engagement. This is what a protected building is. This is what happens when we detain Venezuelan citizens. These are the weapons that we can use. It's like a document that you would draft if you're like, you know, going to. to invade a country, right? As a private military company. And that document does not have Guido's signature on it.

But it has the signatures of the other two opposition representatives. So the messaging from the opposition on this has been really confused. Because you have Guido and the opposition saying, look, you know, alternative, like they'll alternate, sort of. They'll say, look, both documents are falsified by the government because they're supposed to, like, they want a trick is. trick everybody into thinking I sign this, but then you have both Vergara and Rendon saying, no, we signed that document, but we don't know how Guaido's signature got on the other one. So it's a super, it's like a soup of like super confused narratives that can boil down to, you know, we did sign one document with the, with Gujarreau and Silver Core USA.

But that was an exploratory document is what the opposition is saying. And we stopped talking to Gudrow in November of 2019. And we told him, forget about it. We're not going to do this anymore. Like, this is over, right? That's as coherent as an explanation as I can give you about the opposition stands on this. Now, why would they sign the document and then tell them, you know what, forget it? Because, you know, by signing it, you're sort of like, you know, you signed a contract.

with somebody, right? So, like, why would you, like, why didn't they not say, let me read the document, and then I'll tell you if we can go ahead with it or not, and if we can go ahead, I'll sign it, you know? So far, Guaido has survived this. He has not been arrested, which is something that a lot of people were expecting, I think, because this is the closest that he's been connected to, like, a legitimate coup to overthrow Maduro. But he's still free. He's still the head of the opposition, although he's taking a huge hit, I think, in people's confidence in him. So I don't know what the next few weeks looked like,

but I would be surprised if he is still the leader of the opposition by this time next year. Well, in a bunch of his advisors have resigned, his aides and advisors have resigned, right? Yeah, including the two who signed the document. So Vergara and Rendon resigned yesterday. Like, you know, they're saying, like, yeah, we signed this document. Clearly it was a mistake. So, you know, it's like, sorry, we're leaving, right? And then the official opposition news portal, sorry, press portal,

released the statement saying, like, yes, you know, they've resigned. We thank them for the service and we, you know, accept their resignation, like, just like the most generic statement. But I think this is, you know, people have been looking to Guaido for leadership, obviously as a leader of the opposition. And whatever popularity he had at the start of his tenure as a leader, and he was very popular at first, I think has really diminished over the years, largely part of, because he hasn't been able to deliver a victory over the Maduro government. And I don't know, I mean, I think this will, I don't think he'll be able to recover for this. Like, as low as his popularity was and the level of confeder was with, with, among Venezuelan people before this, I think this is going to leave a really dark mark in his record.

And again, I don't know if you'll survive it. All right, we're going to pause there for a break. You're listening to War College. We are talking about the coup that went wrong in Venezuela. All right, listeners, welcome back to War College. We are on talking about Venezuela and the coup that went wrong. Let me ask you a tangent question. Do people like Maduro?

Like, Chavez, I get it. Like, I understood him. You know, he was very charismatic. figure, but Maduro is not, like, how does he maintain support? Yeah, so the short answer is that no. He's a deeply unpopular figure, and it's, there's a lot of factors for that. Chief amongst him is the fact that Chavez was charismatic, and he was a leader. Like, he had leadership ability, right?

And he had the characteristics of a leader. Like, he had a commanding presence, you know, he had a long military record. And just people listen to him, right? I was talking to a Venezuelan friend once and it was, you know, asking him, this is early on in the Majura presidency, what he thought about Maduro and, like, how he compared to Chavez. And he told me, he said, you know, if there was, if we, if one day we went to the supermarket and there wasn't milk, you know, if there was a milk shortage, you would watch TV that night and Chavez would be on TV and he would be angry. He would say, why is there no milk in the country? where's the minister of milk? Like who's who's responsible for this?

And he would call them up and the next day they would be milk in the supermarket. Like Chavez would say, I order that there would be milk in the supermarket tomorrow. And he says with Maduro, the same thing happens and you go back to the supermarket. And there's like fewer milk. There's less milk than there was yesterday, right? So he's sort of a bumbling, you know, this is, he's not, as you said, he's not Chavez. Why is he in power? Why does he continue to be in power?

largely because he has a support of the military and in particular the sort of from the mid-level up of the army military support is is everything to Maduro the Minister of Defense is an incredibly powerful figure in the country there are generals active duty generals who are in important positions in the country up until just a few weeks ago a National Guard military officer was the head of like the minister of oil and the head of the pedivessa which is a state on oil firm right so there's tons of money coming in to the military the military benefits directly from having Majero in power and so they have an interest in keeping him in power if the military decided that they didn't want to keep him in power

anymore or that they didn't support him he would he would not have any support is there is there any kind of military opposition to him within the officers like this is not the same thing because he worked for CICPC but I think about Oscar Perez in 2017

yeah so these sort of like insurrections that have taken including the Oscar Perez one and there's been a couple of other ones throughout the years they've tended to involve relatively small numbers of individuals and relatively like low ranking, right? So we're talking about, you know, we're not talking about people in positions of power

in the military. They tend to be lower level soldiers, right? And it makes sense because they're the ones who, like the crumbs from the top don't make it all the way to the bottom, right? So while you, you know, the generals and the admirals and all the high-ranking people, they're like directly lining their pockets with, you know, money from from having majoran power through corruption schemes, drug trafficking, et cetera. You know, your sort of rank and file private isn't benefiting from that necessarily, right? And so those are the kinds of people that will every once in a while get together with a couple of other like-minded individuals and they'll make the news, like Oscar Paris or like Operation Aurora from last year, from December of last year, where a small group of soldiers raided a couple of military bases in Bolivar State.

But those insurrections are, they've always been small. They've always been isolated. And so they've never really amounted to anything beyond making headlines for a day or two. You know, the only exception is probably Oscar Perez because he made it a point to sort of like always be in the news cycle, right? He was a former actor, correct? If I remember correctly. Yeah. He had like very striking features and was good in front of the camera.

We're obviously trying to play that up. Yes, exactly. So he knew, right, I think he understood the importance of the media. Yeah, so he was a fascinating figure, including because he was a former actor. He had an Instagram account that had like really photogenic shots of him like doing trick shots with his pistol and just like he was in a movie at some point as well. And he, I think he understood the, the importance of message. and of being in the media and and I'm sort of like looking good on camera. And so he's an exception to these like small insurrections that take place every once in a while and then sort of fizzle out, right? But even his insurrection ended, right? About six months after it began. So again, I think that's indication that that look, they're probably, I'm sure there's

discontent in the military because there's discontent in Venezuela, right? Like soldiers don't live independent of the rest of society, right? Like they go home at night, you know, they also, they also have family members who don't have access to medicine, who don't have access to food, right? So there's discontent, but the issue is that there's not discontent necessarily at the levels where you can actually affect some kind of change, right? Which sent, you know, like the middle to higher ranks of the military. Right, because you have to make sure, it's in, there's a great book called The Dictator's, handbook. The author's names Escape Me. But it was basically

these classically trained economists kind of looking at how a dictator stays in power. Who do you have to please? And up at the top of the list is keep the military well-funded and well-fed. And you'll be in power for a very long time.

And that seems to be what's going on here, right? Yeah. As I said, the higher ranks are benefiting directly from Maduro, right? And I mean, this is, we talk about hours about this, but one of the central pillars of, I would argue, the Majuro government, the Majuro era, is something called the Civil Military Union, Civil Military Union, Union Civico Militar.

This is a, I guess it's a tenet of Chavismo, of the political philosophy, that calls for an erasing of the boundary between the civilian and the military sphere, right? So, you know, I live in Canada now, if you live in the United States, like you probably have a, in your head, when you think about the state government, you have an understanding understanding or you have an image of a government that has divisions, right? And there's like the military side of government. And that's very separate from the civilian side of government, right? But in Venezuela, Majura has really been pushing to remove that imaginary boundary and to give the military much more power over the civil sphere, right?

I think, you know, it's sort of a utopian idea, I guess, because what's supposed to happen is that the civilian sphere is supposed to also. have power over the military, but what's happening in Venezuela is very much a one-sided relationship. So you have the military, have an increasingly increasing influence over the civil sphere by being members of cabinet positions, right, for example. And so that, that erasure of that boundary also makes it really hard to separate. It makes it harder to address the issue that is the military supporting Majuro, because the military is a lot in Venezuela. military is everything.

What are the, what are the employment numbers for it out of curiosity? Like how many people does it employ, you know, that kind of thing? Oh, for the military? Oh, boy, I'd have to look them up. I'm not sure. I know that the militia, so the National Bolivari Militia, I think Majero has said that there's over 3 million members of the militia. These are civilian members of the National Bolivary Militia, which is a relatively new force.

but for the active duty or the reserve military, I'd have to look it up. Yeah, I'd have to check on that. Okay, swinging back into our tale of woe here, one of the things that really struck me, and I think you mentioned it in one of your, I'm pretty sure you mentioned it in your Mayfifth article, looking at this cache of equipment that they were supposedly going to be meeting and using for their coup,

there was an airsoft rifle. there? Yeah. Yeah. Which I feel just tells me so much about what was going on. Yeah. So that was really strange because there were also real weapons that were captured, right? So it's not like, you know, that was the only gun that was seen that day and it happened to be an airsoft rifle.

So that, you know, that makes it a little more confusing, right? I've heard people speculate online that somebody made a connection between, I think this is somebody who commented on the article in the Alinket who said you know in the AP article they talked about how the camps in Colombia where they were training these soldiers

they had like no resources like nobody there had no logistical resources no equipment and they were training with broomsticks that was reporting the AP so they thought well maybe this is like one of the guns that they were training with

and they brought it on along with them for some reason I read somewhere else that somebody was speculated that it might have been used to like take out like light bulbs you know, like silently. You know, I'm not a tactician. I've never been in the military.

I don't know how feasible that is. But it's like another one in a lot of like curveballs that we were all thrown since the story broke. You know, why was there an air rifle there? I don't know. It was pictured among the equipment that was captured on that day. And then now it's part of the story. Yeah, I think that's one of the fascinating things about the story

is that there's so many curveballs. the more you dig and the more you learn about it is just so odd, right? Yeah, yeah. I mean, there's more questions that, you know, we were all talking as we were following this. It seemed like every new revelation was like a moment where we all went like, wait, what? Like, wow. And what does that mean? And, you know, why would they do that, right?

So, yeah, you know, we don't have, we don't have answers to a lot of those questions right now, right? And that's why it's, you know, it's kind of difficult to talk about this in a certain way, Because even the facts, as we understand them, seem to be really absurd, right? So it's hard to cut what's real and what's not real, because what we know is real is also kind of really absurd. So it's just been a really surreal story to report on. I mean, we live in absurd times, though. Yeah, I guess so, yeah.

I feel like, yeah, like the simulation that the universe runs on is, like, collapsing. And it's, like, consistently, like, pumping out more and more absurd scenarios. Yeah. Why, just a couple more questions. I know you've got a heart out here soon. Why is America so obsessed with Venezuela? And I say that it's not just the political right. It is also the political left.

And it's become like a weird, it's become something to yell at each other about online. Why? Yeah, as if we needed more. more excuses to deal each other. Okay, well, you know, that's a really interesting question. I think Venezuela encapsulates a lot of what we see troubling in the world in terms of politics from a lot of different sides, right? So like if you're on the right or on the left, you know, if you're a right-wing pundit,

for example, which, you know, not a lot of people are, thankfully, but if you're like some right-wing pungent on like Fox News, you might like, you might like, you might. maybe really obsessed with Venezuela because, you know, it's socialism, right? And it's socialism, right? And it's spreading. And if we let socialist Venezuela, you know, if we elect so and so here in November, then we're going to become like socialist Venezuela, right? So to some people, Venezuela is something that you can point to and like score a point over someone online. You can say, look, your political philosophies and work and look at Venezuela, right? Look at how bad it is there. Look at the hospitals. Look at the food. Right. If you're on the other side of the aisle, I think Venezuela at some point

represented a really hopeful and a really encouraging model for a different way to govern, right? So this is the very early Chavez era. You know, Chavez came with a really nice message of inclusion of the working, of the poor Venezuela who had been neglected for so long from the political dialogue, really for decades, right? So Chavez was elected, as you sort of explicitly saying, like, I'm going to speak to the poor, like I'm going to rule for the poor. I'm going to govern for them. They've been neglected for so long.

That's a nice message, right? Like, that's, I want governments to do that. And so for a lot of people, I think Venezuela represented, yeah, like a vision of a better future in a certain way. And so everything that happens there that is negative, you can point to and say, well, you know, it was going well until you got involved, like the U.S. got involved, right? So I think there's almost like a cold war mentality, I think, about Venezuela where different interests are just fighting, in this case, virtually, over what it all means to score political points at home. So it's a bit of a perfect storm, unfortunately, for online debates.

Right. Everyone sees themselves reflected in it and projects their own ideology onto the conflict and has it reflected. have them, right? Yeah, yeah. Which is bad, and we should stop doing it, but we're not going to, unfortunately. Jean-Carlo, thank you so much for coming onto War College and walking us through this bizarre and complicated story. It was my pleasure. Thanks for having me. That's it for this week, War College listeners.

War College is me, Matthew Galt, and Kevin O'Dell. It was created by myself and Jason Fields. If you like the show, please follow us on Twitter. at War underscore College, at M.J. Galt, and at KJK. Nodell. We will be back next week with more stories from behind the front lines. Stay safe until then.