VENEZUELAMay 10, 2020
Guaidó’s mercenary hit contract on Venezuela’s Maduro mirrors official US
bounty, authorizes death squad killings
The leaked contract between Juan Guaidó and the Silvercorp USA mercenary firm
closely resembles a DEA bounty placed on the head of President Nicolas Maduro
and members of his inner circle this March. The deal tacitly authorizes the
elimination of working class Venezuelans in proposed death squad activities by
Silvercorp.
By Alan MacLeod
Juan Guaidó was expecting to be in Venezuela’s Presidential Palace by now. But
the comically bungling May 3 invasion attempt by US mercenaries and opposition
members was the latest indication of the desperate measures he and his cronies
have resorted to. The fighters hired under his name were immediately
overpowered in the sleepy coastal village of Chuao by disgruntled members of
the House of Socialist Fishermen, and some of the highly trained mercenaries
appeared to literally wet themselves in terror when apprehended.
Now, a 41-page contract outlining the details and conditions of the coup
attempt has been leaked. It sheds new light on what the arrangement between
Guaidó and Silvercorp, the American private security firm he hired,. The
self-declared President of Venezuela promised to pay Jordan Goudreau, founder
of the Florida-based firm, $212.9 million to capture, detain or “remove”
President Nicolas Maduro and install him in his place.
The contract goes into detail about who the mercenaries were allowed to engage
in “kinetic strikes” (i.e. assassinate and kill). It first names a number of
paramilitary organizations like the Colombian FARC, and bizarrely, Hezbollah,
but also on the list are a number of “illegitimate Venezuelan forces,” that
include any armed supporters of Maduro and Constituent Assembly President
Diosdado Cabello.
Alan MacLeod
@AlanRMacLeod
I'm reading the insane contract Silvercorp and @jguaido signed for the
#Venezuela coup. 🇻🇪
The operation was to capture, detain or 'remove' @maduro_en. This sounds
awfully like a hit contract.
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Maduro and Cabello happen to be the same figures placed at the top of a US Drug
Enforcement Agency hit list. The US offered $15 million and $10 million
respectively for their capture, effectively putting a bounty on the heads of
the elected president and the head of his country’s main legislative body.
The contract signed by Guaidó and Silvercorp also enables the killing of anyone
they deem to be “armed and violent colectivos.” For a sector of Venezuela’s
upper-class opposition, the term “colectivo” is a dehumanizing, oft-used
catch-all term applied to any working-class person. Trade unionists,
pro-government protestors, even anyone riding a motorcycle is presumed to be
part of an armed and dangerous gang in the lurid fantasies of the light-skinned
elitists of Eastern Caracas. Therefore, the contract essentially permits
Silvercorp to kill any member of the government’s popular support base with
impunity.
Alan MacLeod
@AlanRMacLeod
· May 8, 2020
Replying to @AlanRMacLeod
This seems pretty big: The contract seems to suggest Silvercorp was going to
become a private death squad training up Venezuelan paramilitaries, a la
Colombia, after the coup.
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Alan MacLeod
@AlanRMacLeod
This section makes clear that Guaidó and Silvercorp were planning to kill
anyone and everyone who opposed them, including "collectivos" - i.e. working
class people.
I wonder why Guaidó isn't more popular?
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A New Death Squad
Perhaps more worrying, however, is what Silvercorp envisaged its role to be
after a successful coup. The contract stipulates that the mercenary
organization would “convert to a National Asset Unit that will act under the
direction of the Administration [Guaidó] to counter threats to government
stability, terror threats and work closely” with other security forces.
Their missions would include, but not be limited to, surveillance, covert
operations and target programming. In other words, Silvercorp would transform
into a private paramilitary squad answerable only to Guaidó, crushing any
opposition to his dictatorship, in much the same way death squads in Colombia
and other Latin American countries have operated for decades.
The US Connection
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo recently announced his plans for “restoring
democracy” in the country were “gaining momentum” and predicted that we would
very soon see a change in government. Other regime change planners like John
Bolton spent the weekend not-so-cryptically tweeting that a coup was about to
happen.
The DEA bounty on Maduro and Cabello closely aligned with the Guaido-Silvercorp
contract, including the obsession with killing or capturing those two
individuals specifically, and the incessant rhetoric about drug traffickers.
(Drug trafficking is far less present in Venezuela than in US-aligned
neighboring states like Colombia and Ecuador, as official US reports concede).
In the days ahead of the botched Silvercorp invasion, Trump ordered the Navy to
deploy and sail to Venezuela, supposedly to counter the barely-existing flow of
drugs.
The contract also specifically states that the commander of the operation may
use AC-130 and Predator drones. These weapons platforms are deployed almost
exclusively by the US military, raising yet more questions. Did they simply
copy some existing US documents or were they expecting reinforcements?
In the wake of the failure, Pompeo issued an extremely half-hearted denial,
claiming only that, “there was no US government direct involvement” in the
bungled operation. The Secretary of State confirmed he was aware who funded it,
promising to “unpack” that information later.
Honor among thieves
A review of the document suggests a sense that Goudreau saw Guaidó as a sucker
to be fleeced. Despite charging nearly a quarter-billion dollars for possibly a
day’s work, Silvercorp also inserted a myriad of costly risers and clauses,
including a $10 million bonus for a successful mission. The mercenaries added
interest on payments, and a ten percent (therefore, over $20 million)
administration fee on all transactions.
However, it seems the US mercs wound up being the suckers, as Goudreau admitted
that Guaidó has not transferred even a penny, not even the retainer fee, to him
since October. “They kept promising to pay, week after week,” Goudreau told a
Spanish-language TV station. Guaidó is infamous for being untrustworthy with
money, and is widely accused of embezzling tens of millions of US aid funds.
Why go ahead with such a dangerous mission? Perhaps he was blinded by the
prospect of a massive payday, collecting bounties from both the DEA and from
Guaidó’s team.
While charging hundreds of millions of dollars, Goudreau was also
short-changing his own employees, promising to pay the now-detained American
mercenaries only between $50-100,000 to risk their lives for the operation, all
while he stayed at his Florida home. It remains unclear clear who was the
biggest chump in the bungled operation: Guaidó, Goudreau, or his naïve
accomplices.
Official Denial
In an interview on CNN, the Miami-based, right-wing Latin American political
consultant J.J. Rendon confirmed the contract was genuine. For his part, Guaidó
is now insisting that the entire project was a government false flag operation.
“Nobody believes your lies,” he said to Maduro via Twitter on Saturday.
However, Guaidó’s political currency continues to declline. A December poll by
an anti-Maduro firm found him to have a 10 percent approval and 69 percent
disapproval rating among his countrymen. That was before he refused to
relinquish his leadership role in January after his year in office expired,
staging an embarrassing and much mocked publicity stunt in which he tried and
failed to climb the fence surrounding the National Assembly building. Guaidó
later “resigned” from his own party, choosing to jump before he was pushed. In
the midst of his national embarrassment, he left the country to be a guest of
honor at Trump’s State of the Union speech in February, where he received a
bipartisan standing ovation.
While Guaidó travels the world lobbying for sanctions, and carries out coups
and terror operations at home to achieve power through absolutely
anti-democratic means, he has yet to be arrested by Venezuela’s government. But
as his latest embarrassing failure showed, one of the most potent weapons
against the opposition might be the buffoonish acts Guaidó routinely commits as
a free man.