[“We cannot take any of their threats lightly,” said senior
Venezuelan politician Diosdado Cabello. “What happened today,” he
said, “is an example of the desperation” of the United States and
its allies.] [[link removed]]

DEFEAT OF A DIRTY MILITARY INCURSION INTO VENEZUELA ON A SUNDAY
MORNING  
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Vijay Prashad, Paola Estrada, Ana Maldonado, and Zoe PC
May 5, 2020
Counterpunch
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_ “We cannot take any of their threats lightly,” said senior
Venezuelan politician Diosdado Cabello. “What happened today,” he
said, “is an example of the desperation” of the United States and
its allies. _

, Drawing by Nathaniel St. Clair

 

In the early morning hours of Sunday, May 3, speedboats left the
Colombian coastlines and headed toward Venezuela. These boats had no
authorization to cross the maritime border. They landed on the
Venezuelan coastline at La Guaira. This was clearly a hostile action,
since the boats carried heavy weaponry, including assault rifles and
ammunition; the people on the boats possessed satellite phones as well
as uniforms and helmets with the flag of the United States of America.

The incursion was intercepted by Venezuelan authorities, who fought
them off; eight of the belligerents were killed, while two were
intercepted. One of those who was arrested says that he is an agent of
the U.S. government’s Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA). The DEA has not
responded to calls for confirmation.

Néstor Reverol, the minister of internal affairs of Venezuela, told
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Venezuelan television stations hours after the thwarted incursion that
the government received information about the attack from sources in
Colombia and by its own regular patrols of the Venezuelan coastline.
“We cannot take any of their threats lightly,” said senior
Venezuelan politician Diosdado Cabello. “What happened today,” he
said, “is an example of the desperation” of the United States and
its allies.

LIMA GROUP AND REGIME CHANGE

The United States government has been entirely candid about its goal
to overthrow the government in Venezuela led by Nicolás Maduro and to
reverse the Bolivarian Revolution. In August 2017, U.S. President
Donald Trump spoke
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openly about the “military option” at the same time as the United
States, Canada, Colombia, and a list of other countries governed by
the far-right and subordinated to Washington formed the Lima Group.
The Lima Group tried to maintain a liberal patina around their
objective, stating in their declaration
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that they wished to “contribute to the restoration of democracy in
[Venezuela] through a peaceful and negotiated settlement.” Trump
ripped aside the fig leaf of this kind of liberal language; he
interpreted the phrase “restoration of democracy” quite rightly as
a military coup or an armed intervention to overthrow the government.

In January 2019, the United States government deepened its hybrid war
with a clever diplomatic maneuver. It declared that Juan Guaidó, an
insignificant politician, was the president of Venezuela and turned
over substantial Venezuelan assets outside the country to him. An
attempted uprising in Venezuela failed to materialize, and Guaidó
found himself with more friends in Washington, D.C., and amongst
Colombia’s oligarchy than at home in Venezuela. This failed attempt
to overthrow the Venezuelan government did not deter the United
States. In fact, the failure deepened U.S. conspiracies in the region.

In May 2019, Senator Lindsey Graham took to the pages
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of the _Wall Street Journal_ to make the case that the “U.S. must be
willing to intervene in Venezuela the way we did in Grenada.” In
1983, the U.S. marines landed in Grenada to overthrow the legitimate
government and to uproot the New Jewel Movement. The United States,
Senator Graham wrote, “should move military assets to the region.”
The United States attempted to create a phalanx of allies in the
Brazilian and Colombian military to prepare for an invasion of
Venezuela. Fortunately, at the Lima Group meeting in February 2019,
Brazil’s vice president Hamilton Mourão told
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the press that Brazil would not allow the U.S. to use its territory
for a military intervention into Venezuela. The plans of a full-scale
invasion had to be put on hold.

COVID-19 AND REGIME CHANGE

As COVID-19 moved toward South America, the U.S. government increased
pressure on the Venezuelan government. In February 2020, at the Munich
Security Conference, U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said
[[link removed]] that the U.S. seeks to
“oust Maduro.” In March, the U.S. tightened sanctions
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against Venezuela, and then the U.S. Treasury Department put pressure
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on the International Monetary Fund not to allow Venezuela access to
emergency finances to tackle the global pandemic. None of this worked.
The Venezuelan government mobilized the people to break the chain of
infection with international assistance from China, Cuba, and Russia
as well as the World Health Organization.

At this point, the U.S. government shifted its focus. It suggested
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that President Maduro and his senior leadership are involved in
narco-trafficking. No evidence was offered for this hallucinatory
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claim, although there is substantial evidence
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of the culpability of senior Colombian politicians in the drug trade.
Trump authorized
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a naval detachment to sit off the coast of Venezuela, threaten its
government, and intimidate its population. On April 30, to increase
pressure on Venezuela, the Trump administration activated
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parts of the Selected Reserve forces to assist the U.S. armed forces
in a mission named “Enhanced Department of Defense Counternarcotic
Operation in the Western Hemisphere.” All signs point to mischief by
the U.S. and its Colombian allies against the Venezuelan people.

PLOTS

Plots surround Venezuela, the plotters a cast of characters from the
seediest quarters of the military and the drug world as well as of
U.S. intelligence and Colombian paramilitaries. The plot for a small
invasion in 2019 that unraveled is now well-documented
[[link removed]] by Joshua
Goodman of the Associated Press. That plot was led by Jordan Goudreau,
who served in the U.S. Army as a medic in Iraq and Afghanistan and
then became a private security contractor; he worked with Cliver
Alcalá, a former Venezuelan military officer, who brought together a
few hundred Venezuelan military deserters to conduct the raid. Alcalá
is now in prison in the United States for his involvement in the drug
trade. Goudreau and Alcalá were backed by Trump’s bodyguard Keith
Schiller and Roen Kraft of Kraft Foods. The entire operation sniffs of
a madcap CIA adventure, akin to the 1961 CIA failed invasion of Cuba
at Playa Girón.

It is likely that the more recent invasion in May 2020 emerged out of
the military deserter camp set up by Alcalá in Colombia. One of the
men involved in the raid was Captain Robert Levid Colina, also known
as Pantera. Colina had been involved in the attempted coup on behalf
of Juan Guaidó on April 30, 2019, and is a close associate of
Alcalá’s.

Vladimir Padrino López, the minister of defense of Venezuela, said
that the government and the people had defeated this attack and would
remain vigilant against other such plots. One of the characteristic
features of the Bolivarian process has been the mobilization of the
population to defend itself; “We declare ourselves in rebellion,”
Padrino said, adding that Venezuela is now under a state of
“permanent vigilance.”

Despite the global pandemic, the old playbook of the CIA and the Trump
administration with their dirty coups remains operational. As at Playa
Girón in 1961, the Venezuelan people defeated this plot at La Guaira
in 2020.

_This article was produced by Globetrotter
[[link removed]], a project of
the Independent Media Institute._

VIJAY PRASHAD is an Indian historian, editor and journalist. He is a
writing fellow and chief correspondent at Globetrotter
[[link removed]],
a project of the Independent Media Institute. He is the chief editor
of LeftWord Books
[[link removed]]
and the director of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research
[[link removed]].
He has written more than twenty books, including _The Darker Nations_
[[link removed]] and _The
Poorer Nations_
[[link removed]].
His latest book is _Washington Bullets_, with an introduction by Evo
Morales Ayma.

PAOLA ESTRADA is in the Secretariat of the International Peoples
Assembly and is a member of the Brazilian chapter of ALBA Movements
(Continental Coordination of Social Movements toward the Bolivarian
Alliance for the Peoples of Our America).

ANA MALDONADO is in the Frente Francisco de Miranda (Venezuela).

ZOE PC is a journalist with Peoples Dispatch
[[link removed]]
and reports on people’s movements in Latin America.

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