Checkpoint: Bay Of Pigs, The Sequel
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In the midst of political turmoil, a small group of American soldiers for hire hatch a plan to bring about a revolution on foreign soil. They have no official backing from their Government, and must rely only on their training, the guns in their hands, and each other. The plan is simple: sneak into a Latin American country with a hostile Government, seize a military airport to clear a path for escape, and kidnap the President of the country and bring him to justice.
It reads like the plot of a generic Hollywood action film, but this blockbuster is a true story. At the beginning of May President Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela announced that an American-backed coup attempt in his country had been foiled. Several American mercenaries led roughly 60 Venezuelan exiles in a botched sea invasion that was spotted and reported by local fishermen. Two Americans were captured, and another two were killed, during the operation.
One of the captured Americans, Airan Berry, is reported to have connected both the Trump administration and Venezuelan opposition leader Juan Guaidó to the plot. Both Guaidó and the White House have denied involvement, with Secretary of State Mike Pompeo telling reporters “it would have gone differently” had the US been involved. Miami-based strategist Juan José Rendón and opposition lawmaker Sergio Vergara, two of Guaidó’s advisors, are alleged to have signed a $212m contract with Jordan Goudreau, founder of Florida-based private military company Silvercorp USA and the architect of the Macuto Bay raid.
Maduro has held the raid up as a modern day Bay of Pigs invasion, drawing parallels with the botched CIA operation in 1961 to smuggle trained Cuban exiles onto the Carribean island to overthrow the Communist Government of Fidel Castro. These coup attempts, however, are not isolated events. America has had a long history of supporting regime change, covertly and openly, to strengthen their country’s position on the world stage.
As far back as the late 1800’s, Americans living in Hawaii were supported by the US Government in overthrowing the native monarchy, which eventually led to the annexation of the island kingdom. In the early 1900’s US interests were involved in the secession of Panama from Colombia, gaining sovereignty over the Panama canal until 2000, and in the Banana Wars in Honduras.
After World War 2, with Cold War tensions rising by the day, the CIA became more and more involved in organizing and executing coup attempts across the globe. Many of these coups, such as those in Syria in 1949, Egypt in 1952, Iran in 1953, and Guatemala in 1954, were successful, securing American interests like oil and deposing Governments aligned or sympathetic to the Soviet Union. Others, such as a second coup attempt in Syria in 1956 and Indonesia from 1957-59, ended in failure.
The secretive nature of organisations like the CIA makes connecting the US Government to some coups more difficult than others. The 1959 assassination attempt on Iraqi Prime Minister Abd al-Karim Qasim involving a young Saddam Hussein was allegedly a joint venture between the CIA and Egyptian intelligence. The Eisenhower Administration concocted a subsequently abandoned plan to sneak poison toothpaste to Patrice Lumumba, the democratically elected Prime Minister of the Congo, in 1960 because of his ties to the Russians. Some reports put a CIA operative at the scene when Lumumba was executed following his capture by Katangese rebel forces.
In the 1970’s the CIA, through Project FUBELT, engineered the rise to power of General Augusto Pinochet in Chile, leading to the death, imprisonment, or exile of nearly a quarter of a million Chileans. Other notable operations instigated or backed by the US around that time include the arming of right-wing paramilitary groups in Angola (Operation IA Feature, 1975), the funding of Jihadi guerrillas fighting to overthrow the government of Afghanistan (Operation Cyclone, 1979), and the invasion of Grenada to remove its Marxist government (Operation Urgent Fury, 1983).
The Reagan administration also provided training, weapons and funding to the Contras, a rebel group fighting to overthrow the left-wing Sandinista National Liberation Front in Nicaragua in the 1980’s. The training included a CIA manual, titled Psychological Operations in Guerrilla War, which taught the Contras how to successfully bomb the country’s infrastructure, assassinate members of the judiciary, and blackmail the local population. Despite the fact that the Sandinistas won the 1984 election, American backing for the rebels only ceased when the Sandinistas lost the 1990 election to the US-aligned National Opposition Union.
While it might be tempting to see this level of espionage as a product of the Cold War, US involvement in regime change around the world continued during and after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. The following year the CIA launched a coup attempt against the Iraqi Government that included a three year bombing campaign against civilian targets. Even into the 2000’s the Bush administration instigated a near Civil War between Palestinian political factions Fatah and Hamas, further dividing the West Bank and Gaza. The State Department under Hillary Clinton supported the Honduran military in their removal of President Manuel Zelaya in 2009 because, according to Colonel Andrew Papp, “we really didn’t like the guy”.
Given the historical precedence, it's not hard to imagine that the US has the ability to attempt a coup in Venezuela. But does it have the motivation? The short answer is yes. The Soviet Union may have fallen, but the rise of Communist China as a major economic power is more than enough to continue the “Red Scare” among members of the American Government. Added to that the resilience of Cuba, where Castro reportedly survived hundreds of CIA assassination attempts until his death of natural causes in 2016, stands out as a symbol that US power in Latin America, indeed across the globe, is not limitless. Venezuela’s socialist Government is perceived as a threat to American influence in a world where new generations are seriously looking at alternatives to capitalism.
Venezuela is also rich in oil. The overreliance of the country’s economy on the production and export of oil is a major contributing factor in Venezuela’s current economic difficulties. The US has earned a reputation for spreading “freedom” and “democracy” in oil-rich countries. The overthrow of Maduro, and the installation of a friendly leader like Guaidó, would ensure a flow of cheap oil into the US and away from America’s enemies.
Finally, populist leaders like Donald Trump are known to use successes on the international stage to distract from their failings at home. Benito Mussolini famously diverted the Italian public's attention away from their floundering economy during World War 2 by launching a disastrous military invasion of Ethiopia. With the COVID19 pandemic ravaging the country, and facing the worst recession since the Great Depression, the current administration may have gambled on the overthrow of Maduro giving them a needed boost in the polls.
We may never know the extent of US Government involvement in the Macuto Bay raid, or if there was any serious involvement at all. What we can say at this moment in time, given the history of American involvement in foreign coups, is that it is not impossible or even unlikely that the White House was seeking a sequel to the Bay of Pigs, with a more typical Hollywood ending this time around.