The president of Venezuela, Nicolás Maduro, speaks during an event at the National Electoral Council after the Essequibo referendum in Caracas, Venezuela. Photo: Rayner Peña/EFE.
The president of Venezuela, Nicolás Maduro, reported during the presentation of his annual message about the dismantling of four coup plots during the year 2023, which had remained unknown until now. “All intelligence and investigation procedures were carried out, and in May, August, November, and December we dismantled a total of four conspiracies attempted by foreign agents, planned from Miami and Colombia,” the Venezuelan president said in his speech on Monday, January 15.
He pointed out that he had already informed the Colombian government that the CIA base in Colombia, established during the governments of Juan Manuel Santos and Iván Duque, “continues to act secretly and with impunity, conspiring against Venezuela.”
He also accused the US Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) of continuing to act from Colombia in conjunction with drug trafficking groups, “conspiring against Venezuela.” He said that this conspiracy links the Miami-Colombia axis and has its epicenter on the border of Venezuela and Colombia.
In the four conspiracies, the objective was to assassinate President Nicolás Maduro, the Venezuelan Minister of Defense Vladimir Padrino, and other important political and military leaders of Venezuela to create chaos and commotion in the country in order to cut off the peace. The objective of one of them was to assault a military unit in San Cristóbal on January 1, 2024, at dawn, with traitor mercenaries brought from Miami, Peru, and Colombia, along with a few officers recruited during 2020-2021.
“They are all prisoners, convicted, confessed! Everyone declared their betrayal, everyone declared their crime!” said Maduro. He noted that they are providing evidence, testimonies, and recordings to the president of the National Assembly, Jorge Rodríguez, and that the terrorists will be known in due course.
One of the plots sought to assassinate President Maduro and Minister Padrino in May 2023, in La Viñeta (home of the Vice Presidency). The plan was discovered a week after Antonio Ledezma declared from Madrid that he had soldiers at his disposal and that they were going to act. The person responsible for that operation was a first lieutenant, recruited on the border by the DEA and the CIA, who was part of a “sleeper cell” that had been “reactivated” at the beginning of 2023. The plan was to assassinate Maduro in a meeting in La Viñeta.
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Maduro warned: “May God protect me and take care of me; I will live for years and decades. But if you did something to me one day, you would pay so dearly that your last name would disappear from this country for 300 years! Our people would know what to do! Our Armed Forces would know what to do! The plans are made, they would be activated immediately, and you would regret it for a thousand years! You wouldn’t have enough centuries to repent, criminals! And the long hand of the revolution would reach them wherever they go … I know what I’m saying!”
President Maduro pointed out that in May 2023 they were also sitting down with the United States government to seek an agreement to lift the sanctions. “We sat down, it seemed like there was going to be progress and suddenly they threw everything back. We stopped and left, and I told Jorge Rodríguez: ‘They are betting that something will happen in Venezuela.’”
In September 2023 the Venezuelan government was in talks again with the United States, but again they suddenly left the table. “And there a third conspiracy was discovered by a commander captured in Colombia in 2021, a sleeper agent within the FANB,” whom Maduro had just appointed commander of a battalion in Maracaibo.
“They gave him the same order: attack, coordinated statements, to do something to me on a trip I had planned to inaugurate some works in Zulia.” Maduro pointed out that, at that time, when he moved through the interior of the country, the ZODI found out about all of his movements. “But I have a Guardia de Honor [equivalent to the US Secret Service], that takes care of me 24 hours a day.”
He also denounced that another of the insurrections intended to attack a barracks in San Cristóbal on January 1, 2024, at dawn, and assassinate the governor of Táchira, Freddy Bernal. “They were sleeper cells,” Maduro said. “One officer had a decent career. I had just promoted him, and they had named him commander of this San Cristóbal unit, which they intended to attack on January 1 at dawn. We put the hooks on him [we arrested him] and he testified. He told all of his accomplices, how much they had been paid and when they got reactivated. “They began to reactivate all their accomplices.”
The Venezuelan president added that all these maneuvers are organized by the CIA and the DEA. He recalled that the DEA mounted the conspiratorial movements to assassinate him on August 4, 2018, as well as Operation Gideon in May 2020. “The DEA pulls the strings of the main drug trafficking groups in Colombia and seeks financing there for the conspiracy against Venezuela. ”
President Maduro pointed out that he does not have evidence to directly accuse US President Joe Biden of the plan, but he points out that someone in that country gave those orders to try to assassinate him at the same time that negotiations were being held.
Traslation: Orinoco Tribune
OT/KW/JRE
