Ex Green Beret claims Maduro foe is avoiding Miami lawsuit

[Judi Lynn]

JOSHUA GOODMAN,
Associated Press
March 28, 2022

MIAMI (AP) — A Venezuelan political strategist allegedly threatened to shoot a gun through the door of his luxury Miami condo to avoid being served a lawsuit by a former U.S. Green Beret he hired as part of a plan to oust President Nicolas Maduro, according to a court hearing Monday.

Jordan Goudreau in October 2020 sued JJ Rendón for $1.4 million, alleging breach of contract, after Rendon walked away from a plan he briefly pushed on behalf of the Venezuelan opposition to depose Maduro with the help of the three-time Bronze Star recipient and Iraq war veteran.

Goudreau nonetheless plowed ahead, traveling to Colombia to help train a ragtag army of volunteers at secret camps set up by deserters from Venezuela's military. Operation Gideon — or the Bay of Piglets, as the bloody fiasco came to be known — ended with six insurgents dead and two of Goudreau’s former Special Forces buddies behind bars in Caracas.

Rendón denied making any such threats to avoid being served the complaint, saying that his door to his apartment is bulletproofed and he doesn’t possess any guns.

More:
https://www.chron.com/news/article/Maduro-foe-accused-of-evading-lawsuit-by-ex-Green-17034103.php



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J.J. Rendon is Latin America's Karl Rove
TIM ELFRINK JULY 1, 2010 4:00AM

A little before noon on a spring day, J.J. Rendón wakes up and dresses as usual in a Jedi-like black frock. He takes a drag on a cigarette and rubs sleep from his dark eyes. Golden statues line his shelves, and water burbles over a Buddhist shrine that's a centerpiece of his bayside condo in Brickell's Jade Residences, a 48-story tower with private elevators activated by thumbprint readers.

"My entire career, I've fought for democracy, equality, and civil rights," he says in a quiet, sandpaper voice. "That's made me unpopular in some circles."

Rendón is virtually unknown in Miami, where he lives in exile from his native Caracas, but he's become one of Latin America's most important political figures, a Karl Rove-esque gun-for-hire for right-leaning candidates from Mexico to Honduras, Venezuela, the Dominican Republic, and Aruba.

. . .

It was then when he went from backstage to center stage. The press began vigorously attacking his style, calling him, for instance, a "neo-Nazi Venezuelan." One report claimed he had started rumors in a Michoacan election that a candidate was gay and had a "network of Cuban horsemen" at the ready to pleasure him.

More:
https://www.miaminewtimes.com/news/jj-rendon-is-latin-americas-karl-rove-6380975

[Judi Lynn]

1. BBC News: 'Bay of Piglets': A 'bizarre' plot to capture a president

'Bay of Piglets': A 'bizarre' plot to capture a president
By Linda Pressly

Published 30 July 2020
BBC News

On Sunday 3 May, the government of Nicolas Maduro announced Venezuela's armed forces had repelled an armed incursion. Operation Gideon was a deeply flawed coup attempt. But what would compel exiled Venezuelans and former US Special Forces soldiers to join a plan that, from the outset, looked like a suicide mission?

It is a story that leaps straight out of a 20th Century playbook of Latin American conspiracies.

"It made the Bay of Pigs look like D-Day," quipped one commentator, referring to the failed US-financed invasion of Fidel Castro's Cuba in 1961. Operation Gideon is a staggering tale of hubris, incompetence and treachery. Eight men were killed by Venezuela's armed forces off the coastal town of Macuto. Dozens of others were captured and remain in jail in Caracas. Less than a handful escaped. And coinciding with the height of the coronavirus pandemic, it has attracted less attention outside the Americas than it otherwise might have done.

At the heart of the failed mission was a former US Special Forces soldier, Jordan Goudreau.

More:
https://www.bbc.com/news/stories-53557235

[Judi Lynn]

2. MAGA, the CIA, and Silvercorp: The Bizarre Backstory of the World's Most Disastrous Coup

Last year, an invasion of Venezuela led by U.S. mercenaries played out as farce and ended in disaster. New interviews reveal the backstory was even more bizarre than previously thought.

By Ben Makuch
October 26, 2021, 11:34am

The red minivan sped down the highway, baking under the Caribbean sun. In the middle row, gazing out onto a sandy field blemished with thick patches of yellowed grass and puddles filled with trash, sat Roberto. He had traveled down this familiar road many times on the way to the compound.

Almost two years earlier, he had been only a few miles away on the beach in Riohacha, a main town in the department of La Guajira, the northernmost and one of the remotest parts of Colombia, doing paramilitary training at ungodly morning hours with several other ex-Venezuelan soldiers. They were preparing for one thing: a coup d’etat against the Nicolas Maduro government in nearby Venezuela.

. . .

Since the conquistadors began ransacking parts of Latin America in the 15th century, the region has been well acquainted with roving bands of foreign mercenaries: mostly white men sent to squeeze the land of any and all valuables, then install local leaders willing to facilitate the plunder of resources on the cheap. That process was essential to the merciless colonization of the Americas, and in 2020, mercenary schemers from the global north were at it again in Venezuela.

The U.S. government has made no secret of its designs on Venezuela in the years since Hugo Chávez came to power, and his taste for socialism made the country a pariah to American lawmakers. President George W. Bush and Chávez infamously hated each other, which partly played into why Venezuela became less friendly to Western oil conglomerates looking for cheaper petroleum goods closer than the Middle East. There was also the matter of a coup attempt on Chávez in 2002; suspected American involvement caused the Venezuelan leader to cry foul over U.S. meddling. (It did come out two years later that the CIA knew about the plot.) With President Trump's election in 2016 and a return to hard-line Republican diplomacy, it became obvious that the most powerful war machine in history, the American military, was being considered for action in Venezuela.

More:
https://www.vice.com/en/article/pkpex7/maga-the-cia-and-silvercorp-the-bizarre-backstory-of-the-worlds-most-disastrous-coup

[Judi Lynn]

3. US mercenary exposes Trump administration links to abortive Venezuela invasion

Bill Van Auken
2 November 2020

Senior Trump administration officials were in on the planning of and offered assistance to the abortive May 3, 2020, invasion of Venezuela carried out by a mercenary band that included at least two former US special forces operatives, according to a lawsuit filed in Miami, Florida, last Friday.

The conspiracy to carry out the illegal invasion was hatched, at least in part, at the Trump Hotel in Washington D.C. and at a Trump golf course in Florida, and was facilitated by individuals with close ties to the US president and Vice President Mike Pence.

The invasion, referred to as the “Bay of Piglets” due to its resemblance to the debacle suffered by the 1961 CIA-organized invasion of Cuba—albeit on a far smaller scale—ended with the capture of the two American ex-soldiers, Luke Denman and Airan Berry, along with 45 Venezuelan mercenaries. At least six others were killed in a separate landing on Venezuela’s northern Caribbean coast. Denman and Berry were sentenced by Venezuelan authorities to 20 years in prison on conspiracy and terrorism charges.

The $1.4 million breach of contract lawsuit has been brought by Jordan Goudreau, a former Green Beret who heads the Florida-based security contractor Silvercorp USA that organized the failed landing, against J.J. Rendón. A multi-millionaire political consultant who has assisted right-wing campaigns across Latin America, Rendón had been tapped by the US-backed puppet, self-proclaimed “interim president” Juan Guaidó, to form a “strategic committee” to develop plans for the overthrow of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro.

More:
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/11/03/merc-n03.html

[Judi Lynn]

4. Trump's Failed Policy Set The Stage For The Botched Venezuela Coup Attempt

The U.S. denies links to a disastrous attempt to topple Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro. But Trump did call him illegitimate and put a bounty on his head.

By Travis Waldron
May. 13, 2020, 05:45 AM EDT

It reads like a plot ripped straight from a bad Hollywood script, or an agitprop network television show gone wrong: In the morning hours of Sunday, May 3, a ragtag crew of supposed mercenaries, backed by a small-time security consulting firm in the United States, attempted to raid Venezuela and take down socialist President Nicolás Maduro.

The plan failed miserably, the mercenaries’ first speedboat thwarted immediately by the Venezuelan military and their second by offshore fishermen, in no small part because its backers repeatedly telegraphed their plans to Venezuelan security forces and the world alike.

. . .

“There is no way that I can see any kind of U.S. involvement,” said Fernando Cutz, who served as a Latin America adviser on the National Security Council under both Obama and Trump, but left the White House in 2018. “There were no logistics, the numbers were a joke, they clearly didn’t have any intel. A group of high schoolers would have done a better job.”

But that doesn’t mean Trump and the United States bear no responsibility for the bizarre and ham-fisted coup attempt. The administration’s strategy helped create the atmosphere in which a rogue mission like Goudreau’s could take place by fostering the belief that such a slapdash attempt to topple Maduro could actually succeed.

More:
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/venezuela-coup-goudreau-trump-maduro_n_5ebb1024c5b6ca4db96b03b0