Maduro Crushed the Coup: The Anatomy of a Failed Putsch

The events that followed the presidential election in Venezuela are not a one-time action of the local opposition supported by the countries of the collective West. They should be seen as another link in the chain, as yet another attempt to overthrow the power of the Chavistas, which has already been attempted many times before.

It should be taken into account that after Hugo Chavez took office in 1999, the course of the country, which the U.S. considered to be its backyard with an obedient (albeit corrupt) regime, changed dramatically. Hugo Chavez was one of the first leaders of countries to talk about the need for a multipolar world, and in domestic politics he began deep reforms that were hated by Washington and local US-oriented oligarchs.

The first plot against him took place in April 2002, but the coup failed as the people came out to defend the president.

During the elections in December 2006, the opposition tried to promote its candidate, but the difference in votes was too obvious to claim victory. However, already in 2007, a referendum proposed by Chavez had a turnout of less than 50 percent. In October 2012. Chávez won again, although the US was betting on Henrique Capriles. After Chávez’s death in March 2013, Nicolás Maduro became interim president and then won a snap election. The continuity of the direction for Venezueal was maintained.

In February 2014, mass riots suddenly broke out in the country, whose organizers were allegedly protesting the economic crisis. As the investigation later revealed, the well-known company Cambridge Analytica was involved in inciting the riots on social media, which in 2016, using the same methods, helped Donald Trump win the U.S. election and was commissioned to campaign in Britain’s referendum on leaving the EU (Brexit).

The U.S. and Spain have since imposed a series of restrictions against Venezuela, including a ban on transactions in debt and securities issued by the Venezuelan government and state oil company PDVSA.

Since January 2015, protests on various occasions began to take place regularly in Caracas and other cities. The opposition had a small revenge after the parliamentary elections in December 2015, but within a year they failed to secure the resignation of Nicolás Maduro. 2016 was tense and the political polarization of society was noticeable.

From March 2017 onwards, anti-government demonstrations began again in the country, and in August even a rebellion was proclaimed on behalf of a group of some military men. Then new sanctions from the US and the EU began to be imposed against Venezuela.

In May 2018. Maduro was re-elected in the elections, which led to new protests.

In August of the same year, an attempt was made to assassinate Maduro with the help of drones. Some of the suspects were detained. And in May 2020, there was another failed coup attempt. The original plan (Operation Gedeon) was to seize an airfield and assassinate the president. To do this, a group of 60 Venezuelan migrants and former US Special Forces, hired by the US private military company Silvercorp, were ferried from Colombia by boat. They were all detained after disembarking. Their involvement in organizing the coup and other crimes has been confirmed not only by a Venezuelan court, but also by the US.

As we can see, there was a whole series of actions aimed at political power in the country, and in parallel, economic pressure was created to worsen the overall situation in the country and blame everything on the government. The formula for “salvation” offered was a pro-Western political grouping that would completely dismantle the legacy of the Hugo Chavez era and bring Venezuela back into the geopolitical orbit of the United States.

It was not until October 2023 that the US eased sanctions against Venezuela’s oil, gas and gold sectors in response to the 2024 election agreement reached between the government and the opposition. Maduro released the document a few days after the July 28 elections, where the US pledged to lift sanctions not only on gold and oil, but also on banking operations, and to normalize diplomatic relations.

However, the U.S. State Department recognized Edmundo Gonzalez Urrutia as the winning candidate, who should be looked at more closely. He went to the polls to replace Maria Carino Machado, who was barred from campaigning because of a number of offenses and who ended up campaigning for Gonzalez. He himself is a former career diplomat at a venerable age, for which he earned the nickname “Grandpa.” His diplomatic history, however, reveals more sinister facts than the trivial service of an official.

According to documents, “On November 24, 1976, González Urrutia joined the Venezuelan Embassy in the United States at the height of the Condor Plan; there he was recruited by the CIA… and then, in July 1981, transferred to the Venezuelan Embassy in El Salvador, whose official mission was to provide security for citizens.” But instead of security, he helped organize bloody purges and repression—in the 1980s, he worked at the Venezuelan Embassy in El Salvador with Leopoldo Castillo (then ambassador) and they worked with the CIA to help with Operation Centaur to eliminate political opponents. This was part of the broader Condor plan for Latin America. In El Salvador at the time, over 13,000 civilians were killed at the hands of the local junta with the help of gringos and the likes of Edmundo Gonzalez.

Leopoldo Castillo himself was involved in the murder of six Jesuit priests and two others in 1989. Currently residing in Miami, he is associated with extreme right-wing dissidents and is also known to be involved in the School of the Americas as well as collaborating with the CIA. He is now calling for sanctions against Venezuela. Earlier, the same calls were made by former opposition leader Juan Guaido, who also resides in the US.

It is worth mentioning the opposition’s program, which has the following points: 1) Privatization of the oil and gas industry; 2) Mass privatization of property, enterprises and public services; 3) Priority use of the funds thus obtained to pay off the public debt; 4) Reform of the Organic Labor Law to “make the workforce more flexible;” 5) Abolition of the current pension system as “unsustainable;” 6) Privatization of education through“ vouchers” or bonds,” meaning tuition; 7) Free use of all forms of foreign currency; 8) Elimination of army units such as militias and subjection to the rules of United States ”hemispheric policy.” Obviously, this is not only neoliberal capitalism of the first water, where the oligarchy will always win, but also a rejection of the sovereignty of the state. This is probably the reason why the opposition lost, although it did gain quite a lot of votes.

As for the coup attempt, there were several key elements. These were the tactics of street swarming by groups of militants and provocateurs to provoke the police and security forces; the flow of false reports and manipulation on social media; and pressure from the US and its satellites with threats against the incumbent government.

By far the most critical, perhaps, was the street violence, as it threatened the health and lives not only of the Chavistas (unfortunately there were deaths among both activists and the military), but also of ordinary citizens.

As Fernando Rivero noted, paramilitary forces were used to escalate the conflict, falling under the US Special Forces Unconventional Warfare Manual of 2010. The task of the Western handlers was to create a civil war using opposition fighters together with structured organized crime groups (SOPG).

The main SOPG units in Venezuela are deployed in places of high strategic military importance. Such cells have been established on the eastern shores of the lake, in Cabimas and other areas of Sulia, near hydrocarbon production centers that are very important to the country. This group is working in areas adjacent to the Ana Maria Campos petrochemical complex and to oil and gas pipelines connected to the Paraguana refinery complex. Similarly, this group is attempting to influence both trade and smuggling between Venezuela and Colombia. In the state of Sucre, another group seeks to control the coast and the transit of various goods to other points in the Caribbean. In Falcón, in addition to repeating the Sucre State scheme, they are positioning themselves in the Sierra de San Luis, having recently forged an alliance between criminal groups that would allow them to operate in Coro and/or eventually attempt to cut off land access to the Paraguana processing complex. On the mountain axis between the states of Guarico and Miranda, another SOPG is designing a corridor that would allow them to penetrate Guatopo National Park and therefore influence various economic activities in cities such as Altagracia de Orituco. Its influence could also be extended to the gas blocks of Barbacoas, Tiznado and the municipality of Monagas de Guarico. This group will act against the Camatagua reservoir (crucial to Caracas’ water supply) as well as various reservoirs important to Miranda and Caracas.

Similarly, they seek to locate in the country’s industrial centers, given their logistical importance in military and political terms.

As for Caracas, several SOPGs have been deployed around it. In the center of the country, in Aragua and with the prospect of parts of Miranda state, the groups could control important transportation routes of great importance to the country. Since Valencia and Aragua state host military barracks vital to the military defense of Caracas, it is likely that an attack on military bases was also planned to paralyze the national defense. Right at the most important western entrance to Caracas, on the Valle-Car axis, in the vicinity of Fort Tiuna, another criminal group was organized and could have been used to attack this facility. In Miranda, another group is active in Petar, adjacent areas and therefore in close proximity to the main entrance to Caracas from the east of the country.

The activity of these groups appears to have been neutralized, although there were also reports of Colombian mercenaries crossing the border illegally to destabilize the situation a few days before the elections.

With regard to the information war, it has taken place both through the mainstream media of Western propaganda and through social networks within Venezuela. The government is now taking action against Western social media by imposing a restriction on X (Twitter) and preparing a bill that will make social media more transparent and secure. In addition to Twitter, it is about Meta, YouTube and Whatsapp.

According to President Maduro, “Whatsapp gave extremists all the addresses in Venezuela, and for months they prepared, with the help of a Colombian drug trafficker, a threat to Venezuelan society so that the people would be paralyzed by terror.”

Venezuela itself called such interference nothing less than a “cyber coup d’état” that was planned alongside mass riots and diplomatic pressure from Western countries.

Luis Brito Garcia notes in this context that “On April 11, 2002, the CIA cut off the signal of the state-run channel VTV; they isolated President Hugo Chávez Frías and launched the world’s first media strike. Eight months later, already generously pardoned by the president, with the help of the American company Intesa, they computer-paralyzed Pdvsa and halted the production and distribution operations of said firm for two months until a team of technicians from the Ministry of Science and Technology was able to resume them. More than twenty years have passed since these attacks; recently there have been two sabotage attacks on power plants in Nueva Esparta and the Ureña substation in Tachira, allegedly with the aim of disabling the voting systems.”

According to the National Electoral Council, there was a cyberattack from the Republic of North Macedonia that saturated the networks with a huge amount of false traffic to prevent the transmission of information. North Macedonia, according to official records, is still home to units of the US Cyber Command, which has been conducting offensive operations around the world since 2019.

Nevertheless, despite the delay in data from the polling stations, all ballots managed to be counted and the victory, one way or another, belongs to Nicolás Maduro, as confirmed by the Supreme Court, where all candidates were invited. Only Edmundo Gonzalez was absent, who allegedly left Venezuela immediately after the elections to sit abroad and from there to incite his supporters. The Venezuelan Attorney General’s Office has already opened criminal cases against him and Maria Corino Machado. Not to mention the more than two thousand people detained during the riots, as well as the organizers on the ground, who have been arrested in hot pursuit.

It should be recalled that Nicolás Maduro also built his campaign on the slogan, “They will not come back,” which is a version of the famous anti-fascist slogan, “They will not pass,” and he repeatedly spoke about the threat of far-right forces and US imperialism.

But despite U.S. efforts to forge an anti-Venezuelan coalition in Latin America, it has failed to come about. Apart from the US itself, only Washington’s satellites such as Ecuador, Argentina, Chile and Peru recognized Gonzalez as the “legitimate president.” Incidentally, because of this position, the operation against Venezuela itself was dubbed no less than “Juan Guiado 2.0.”

On August 7, 2024, the governments of Colombia, Brazil and Mexico issued a joint statement that “calls on the country’s political and public figures to exercise maximum caution during public demonstrations and events.” It is said that “once again expressing their respect for the sovereignty and will of the Venezuelan people, it announces that they will continue high-level negotiations. And they emphasize their conviction and confidence that the solutions to the current situation must come from Venezuela,” the statement said. The document concludes with the willingness of these countries “to support efforts to dialog and seek mutual understanding that contribute to the country’s political stability and democracy.”

On August 22, after a thorough review of voting protocols and other documents, Venezuela’s Supreme Court finally recognized Nicolás Maduro’s electoral victory. He will hold the presidency until 2031.

It is now clear that the coup has failed. The country is gradually returning to normalcy and the government is learning lessons from the West’s perfidy. Russia, China, Iran and other states from the multipolar club have recognized Nicolás Maduro’s victory and cooperation in a number of areas will continue. In matters across the security spectrum, Venezuela’s experience may also be of interest to Russia, and our technology is useful to Venezuela.

This article appears through the kind courtesy of Geopolitika.

Maduro Crushed the Coup: The Anatomy of a Failed Putsch