Jailed suspect in plot to overthrow Venezuelan president Maduro blames Colombia, Guaidó

From a windowless cell in a maximum-security prison in Colombia, Yacsy Álvarez awaits trial on charges she helped organize an attempted armed invasion to overthrow the government in neighboring Venezuela.

Álvarez was a translator and business partner of Jordan Goudreau, the former American Green Beret whose ill-fated plan to depose Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro with a ragtag army he allegedly helped train in the jungles of Colombia ended in disaster last year.

Prosecutors in Colombia said Álvarez helped smuggle weapons to the volunteer army. But she claims she’s being made the scapegoat for the sins of others, including U.S.-backed Venezuelan opposition leader Juan Guaidó, who distanced himself from the self-declared freedom fighters. Last month, her attorney asked prosecutors to add Guaidó as a co-conspirator in the case.

She’s also lashing out at her accusers in Colombia, who she claims were in contact with the plot’s Venezuelan ringleader. Despite being aware of the soldiers’ movements, she said, Colombian authorities did nothing to stop them — even after Maduro’s vice president, a full seven months before the raid, announced the coordinates of the rebels’ safe houses from the floor of the United Nations General Assembly.

“I’ve got no military training, no political experience, no economic resources,” said Álvarez in the brief jail-cell interview from prison in Medellin. “They grabbed me, the most ignorant, to clean up the dishes broken by others.”

Álvarez’s claims raise new questions about the role of staunch U.S. ally Colombia in the so-called Operation Gideon — or the Bay of Piglets, as the bloody fiasco came to be known. The failed attempt last May to ignite an uprising ended with six insurgents dead and two of Goudreau’s former Special Forces buddies behind bars in Caracas.

Colombia, whose security forces are among the top U.S. partners in the world, has steadfastly denied knowingly serving as a staging ground for the incursion, just as the U.S. has insisted it was unaware of any illicit activities.

But Álvarez said the man coordinating the clandestine effort, retired Venezuelan army Gen. Cliver Alcalá, had been in contact with Colombia’s intelligence services ever since he arrived in the country in 2017 following a failed barracks conspiracy inside Venezuela.

The information matches findings of an AP investigation last year that the always loquacious Alcalá openly touted his plans for an incursion and appealed for support in a June 2019 meeting with two agents from Colombia’s National Intelligence Directorate, or DNI.

Alcalá at the meeting in a hotel in Medellin also boasted about his relationship with Goudreau, describing him as a former CIA agent, according to a former Colombian official familiar with the conversation. But when the CIA in Bogota denied any link to Goudreau, Alcalá was told by his handlers to cease all talk of an invasion or face expulsion, the former official said.

Plotter or double agent?

Nine months after Operation Gideon became a laughingstock on social media, a full account of how it was organized and what led to its unraveling remains cloaked behind questionable confessions and propaganda ploys from Caracas as well as silence and subterfuge from Maduro’s opponents.

Álvarez, 39, has been portrayed in Colombia media as something of a Venezuelan Mata Hari, alternately accused of conspiring to overthrow Maduro or working as a double agent to sabotage the operation from behind enemy lines. But in her telling, her only crime is having come to the aid of the forlorn troops when Guaidó and Colombia, after encouraging the deserters and offering them free housing and assistance, abandoned the men.

She was arrested along with three other Venezuelans last September following a five-month investigation into the arming and training of an exile militia on Colombian soil.

Colombian President Iván Duque said at the time the four were “presumably promoted and financed by Maduro’s dictatorial regime” although so far authorities haven’t presented any hard evidence establishing such links.

Álvarez served as Goudreau’s translator during his visits to Colombia and the two opened an affiliate of his small Florida security firm Silvercorp, in mid-2019. It listed its address at an upscale hotel in Barranquilla, according to Colombian public records.

She also flew with Goudreau and the two other former Green Berets — Luke Denman and Airan Berry — to Barranquilla aboard a Cessna jet belonging to her boss, businessman Franklin Durán, who has a long history of deal-making with the Venezuelan government. At the time, Álvarez was living in the Caribbean coastal city and working as a director in a unit of Durán’s auto lubricants company.

Durán was arrested in May by Venezuelan authorities, accused of financing the plot. Through his lawyers, he has denied any involvement. But Maduro’s opponents have pointed to Durán’s murky past — he spent four years in a U.S. jail for working as a foreign agent of Hugo Chávez to cover up bulk cash contributions to Argentina’s former president — as evidence that the mission had been co-opted.

Wherever his loyalties lie, Álvarez said it was Durán who put her in touch with Alcalá, who he knew for years.

Álvarez said the Colombian authorities were intimately aware of what was going on and appeared to be supportive if not directly involved. At one point, Alcalá introduced her to his longtime handler at the DNI, someone identifying himself as “Franklin Sánchez,” which she now believes was a pseudonym.

At no time did she suspect she was under investigation. Instead, she claims it was Sánchez who tried to protect her, urging her to change residences due to possible threats originating from the Maduro-controlled elite police unit known as the Special Action Forces. She gave the same explanation to her lawyer, Alejandro Carranza, in a recorded conversation from jail on Nov. 26, a copy of which the attorney provided to the AP.

The threat is also referenced in a letter, also provided by Carranza, sent by the DNI a month before her arrest to prosecutors urging them to take “urgent” action to prevent her from being harmed or fleeing illegally to Panama. The letter, which is labeled “secret,” was written at the request of the DNI’s director, retired Vice Admiral Rodolfo Amaya.

She also claims to have spoken via videoconference for three hours to agents from the FBI, who have a parallel investigation into whether Goudreau broke U.S. laws requiring State Department approval for American companies supplying military training or equipment to foreign persons. During the meeting, she says she pleaded with the FBI to protect her mother, who remains in Venezuela, from retaliation by Maduro.

A plot hidden in plain sight

Colombia’s DNI in a statement said it had no prior knowledge of plans for a military incursion nor any information about Alcalá’s relationship with Goudreau. It also denied ever having any contact with Álavrez, to warn her of threats or otherwise, but didn’t dispute the authenticity of the letter sent to prosecutors about her movements.

But numerous public statements from Maduro’s government, as well as police reports in Colombia of suspicious activity by Venezuelan military deserters, indicate the plot was hidden in plain sight.

On Sept. 27, 2019, Venezuela Vice President Delcy Rodríguez delivered a blistering speech against Colombia at the U.N. General Assembly in which she revealed the location of what she said were three safe houses where soldiers were being trained to oust Maduro. Hours later, the Venezuelan government broadcast on social media the address and a photo taken from Google Earth of one of the houses — what it called “Camp Two” — in the coastal city of Riohacha. Days earlier, her brother, then Communications Minister Jorge Rodríguez, had provided the same information.

The simple concrete home on an unpaved dusty street was rented for around $700 a month on July 1, 2019, by two Venezuelans, according to a copy of the rental contract provided to the AP by the owner. One of the men, Luis Gómez Penaranda, was arrested two months later in Venezuela for allegedly transporting C-4 explosives for a planned bombing of government buildings. In a videotaped confession that was heavily promoted by Maduro’s government, Penaranda fingered Alcalá and one of Álvarez’s co-defendants, Rayder Russo, as the architects of the thwarted attack. Penaranda was freed last year as part of a mass release of government opponents.