The partial or total crushing of Operation Gideon against Venezuela left a significant number of mercenaries captured, including a self-confessed DEA agent supposedly dedicated to the fight against drug smuggling and abuse.

The DEA, which employs more than 10,000 people to implement its objectives as well as to prosecute money laundering linked to these crimes, also often serves the imperialist purposes of the U.S. government in Latin America and other parts of the world.

This new victory of the Bolivarian Armed Forces and the Venezuelan people has been another defeat for Donald Trump’s neo-colonializing policy. It has created a focus of violence in various Venezuelan states and in the capital, Caracas. It’s done against a backdrop of systematic campaigns of lies in the hegemonic media aimed at spreading disorder in order to make governance impossible.

The idea is to create a matrix of opinion that shows Venezuela as an ungovernable country by forcing its president, Nicolas Maduro, to ask for support from the OAS and Inter-American Treaty of Reciprocal Assistance (TIAR), first. These would then approve a humanitarian military intervention in his country.

It is not news that President Trump and his officials have denied Washington’s participation in the defeated maritime incursion. They know that it would be contradictory and unacceptable for the U.S. government to appear linked to mercenaries and drug traffickers. Such a scenario is not compatible with the image of representation that they want to project to internal and external public opinion, much less admit this scandalous failure now.

That is why Mr. Mike Pompeo told the press in his defense that “if we had been behind those actions the result would have been different”, omitting any comparison of such a humiliating American defeat with what happened in Vietnam.

Something similar was done by the US ambassador to the UN, Adlai Stevenson, on April 15, 1961, when he denied any link of his country with the bombings of mercenary planes against Cuba.

The Cuban Foreign Minister at the time, Raúl Roa, unmasked this when it became known that the mercenaries in the service of Washington had surrendered to the Cuban militia troops barely 64 hours after the invasion landed at Playa Girón (Bahía de Cochinos, aka Bay of Pigs).

Stevenson made an ethical gesture and recognized that this was the greatest humiliation that his government would have received, an ethical gesture that cannot be expected from Trump or Pompeo.

But now the shot has backfired on Trump, who apparently did not know that drug trafficker and DEA agent Jose Alberto Socorro-Hernandez, aka “Pepero,” had been apprehended in Caracas. There, he confessed to the instructions he received to carry out various violent actions in the state of Miranda that were carried out by DEA-oriented drug gangs and common criminals.

According to Pepero, they were intended to divert the attention of Venezuelan security services to entertain them and to guarantee protection for the landing plan, which took place this past May 3 in the town of Macuto, in the state of La Guaira.

It should come as no surprise to anyone that the U.S. government has used the DEA to carry out these actions, as well as to play a façade role in Operation Gideon. If this turned out to be successful, there would be applause, if it went wrong, they would disqualify their agent.

This is why they did not use an American, but rather the Venezuelan drug trafficker-agent Socorro Hernández (aka) Pepero, who is linked to the Colombian cartels operating in Zulia. This is on the border with the Upper Guajira Colombian-Venezuelan region, a territory that was under the control of the powerful leader of the Northern Block of the narco-paramilitaries, Rodrigo Tovar Pupo, extradited by Álvaro Uribe Vélez in 2008, who claims that Uribe betrayed him.

The installation of 10 U.S. military bases in Colombia, officially agreed to by the government of Barack Obama, is a humiliation to its people and a regional threat. It will take years for the Colombians to eliminate this Yankee military occupation. Guantánamo is an example, illegally occupied and denounced in all international forums whose agreements are not obeyed and/or blatantly violated.

May 13, 2020

- Manuel E. Yepe

http://manuelyepe.wordpress.com/

Translated and edited by Walter Lippmann.

https://walterlippmann.com/precedents-in-cuba-of-operation-gideon/

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