From the Editorial
La Jornada Newspaper
Sunday, November 17, 2024, p. 19
Donald Trump’s administration engineered an operation in September 2018 to overthrow Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro through a combination of economic sanctions and a secret campaign that included a cyberattack on the Venezuelan military’s payroll system by the Central Intelligence Agency ( CIA), according to the investigative media Wired.
The above after interviewing United States officials with direct knowledge of said secret maneuvers.
For his part, Maduro responded with a speech delivered from the United Nations in which he accused Washington of imperialist aggression, motivated by greed for Venezuelan gold and oil reserves. He even linked a failed attempt on his life, the drone attack in Caracas in 2018, to American actors, although at the time the Trump administration denied any involvement.
The investigation revealed how the Republican administration had initiated a secret operation led by the CIA to digitally sabotage the Maduro government, uniting these actions with the diplomatic strategy of international pressure.
On January 23, 2019, Juan Guaidó, president of the National Assembly, proclaimed himself interim president of the South American nation during a demonstration in Caracas. His movement promised restore constitutional order and received immediate support from the United States, which urged other countries to recognize him as a legitimate leader. More than 60 nations eventually supported Guaidó.
In this context, the US government applied more severe economic sanctions, including the freezing of Venezuelan assets and measures against the state company Petróleos de Venezuela. At the same time, they would have turned to the CIA to take a more active role in destabilizing the government. The agency formed a task force and one of its main hits was a cyber attack against the Venezuelan military’s payroll system in 2019.
Accounts of the operation vary slightly: some describe it as a remote cyberattack, while others mention the intervention of agents on the ground. In any case, the result was a dissatisfied army that increased internal instability. Although the expected coup was not achieved, the action sought to further delegitimize the government.
While the secret efforts were developing, Donald Trump continued to bet on Juan Guaidó as leader of the opposition. However, according to Bolton’s memoirs, the president began to lose confidence in him, describing him as the “Beto O’Rourke of Venezuela” and considering him weak against Maduro, whom he saw as a more leader strongreported the investigative outlet.
Despite the combined efforts of the Trump administration and the CIA, the operation fell short of its ultimate goal. According to Wiredthe lack of alignment between covert plans and general US foreign policy limited the scope of these actions.