The ghosts of sometimes deadly Latin American coups of the past are being evoked by Donald Trump’s relentless military buildup targeting Nicolás Maduro, Venezuela’s autocratic socialist leader, whom Washington has branded a narco-terrorist.
Salvador Allende, the democratically elected Marxist president of Chile toppled in a military coup in 1973, and Rafael Trujillo, the longstanding dictator of the Dominican Republic who was assassinated in 1961 in an ambush organized by political opponents, are just two regional leaders whose fates serve as a warning to Maduro.
Allende is believed to have killed himself, although some doubt that explanation, as troops stormed the presidential palace in the Chilean capital, Santiago, in a coup – fomented by then president Richard Nixon’s administration – that ushered in the brutally repressive military regime of Gen Augusto Pinochet.
The CIA is believed to have supplied the weapons used to kill Trujillo.
Guatemala’s elected president, Jacobo Arbenz, escaped into exile after being overthrown in a 1954 coup also instigated by the CIA. But the event triggered a 30-year civil war that killed an estimated 150,000 people and resulted in 50,000 disappearances.
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The agency is also thought to have made at least eight unsuccessful attempts to assassinate Fidel Castro, the leader of Cuba’s communist regime, which is still in power and is closely allied to Maduro.
The plot to depose Castro also included the failed Bay of Pigs invasion carried out by Cuban exiles and organized by the CIA in the early months of John F Kennedy’s presidency in 1961, but which was defeated by Cuba’s armed forces.
Now, as the US stages its biggest naval buildup in the region since the Cuban missile crisis in 1962, some believe Maduro’s life is equally at risk.
Washington is preparing to carry out military strikes imminently inside Venezuela on already pinpointed targets that have been identified as military facilities used to smuggle drugs, according to reports.
US officials are leaving little doubt that this could lead to fatal consequences for Maduro.
“Maduro is about to find himself trapped and might soon discover that he cannot flee the country even if he decided to,” the Miami Herald quoted a source with close knowledge of US military planning as saying. “What’s worse for him, there is now more than one general willing to capture and hand him over, fully aware that one thing is to talk about death, and another to see it coming.”
The Trump administration has offered a $50m bounty for information leading to the arrest or conviction of the Venezuelan leader, after announcing in August that it was doubling the $25m reward initially offered during Trump’s first presidency.
Explaining his decision this month to authorize covert CIA actions against Venezuela, Trump pointedly refused to say whether US forces were authorized to “take out” Maduro. However, Fulton Armstrong, a former CIA Latin America analyst, said the intense security surrounding the Venezuelan leader in effect rendered the reward a “dead or alive” proposition, meaning any attempt to snatch him is likely to result in his death.
“Anybody who’s going to try to take him is going to be so heavily armed that any defense that he put up would lead to them pulling triggers,” said Armstrong.
“Let’s say it’s locals and they want the bounty. Most of them will assume that they’ll get the bounty dead or alive. Our forces would be a little bit more disciplined, but then imagine the adrenaline that anybody trying to do a snatch would have coursing through their veins. They’re going to be trigger-happy.
“Only a fool would think that they can go in there and say, ‘OK, let me put handcuffs on you and escort you to the car.’ That’s not how it’s going to work.”
Maduro has survived at least one apparent attempt on his life, when two drones exploded as he was speaking at a military parade in Caracas in 2018. Television footage shows several members of his security team rushing to his side to shield him after the explosions.
Maduro accused neighboring Colombia of being responsible, although some opponents suggested the episode was a false flag operation staged to win sympathy.
In May 2020, Venezuelan security forces foiled an attempt by about 60 dissidents, accompanied by two former US Green Berets, to capture and oust him in a plot that involved infiltrating the country by sea. The episode was afterwards dubbed the “Bay of Piglets” in mocking reference to the botched plot against Castro.
But a fresh sign of Washington’s determination to get its hands on Maduro emerged this week when the Associated Press reported that a US agent, working for the Department of Homeland Security, had unsuccessfully tried to bribe the Venezuelan president’s pilot into diverting his plane to enable American authorities to capture him.
The Trump administration has deployed a daunting array of military hardware off the Venezuelan coast in what appears to be an intimidating statement of intent to bring about regime change in the country.
Last week, the Pentagon announced that the USS Gerald Ford, the biggest aircraft carrier in the US navy, would sail from Europe to join a military force consisting of destroyers armed with Tomahawk cruise missiles, B-1 and B-52 bombers, and special forces helicopters.
At least 57 people have been killed in more than a dozen US military strikes on alleged drug-trafficking boats in the Caribbean and Pacific. Washington has accused Maduro and other senior Venezuelan officials of being at the head of a cartel smuggling drugs into the US. Maduro denies the charge and experts dispute the significance of Venezuela’s role in the illegal drug trade.
Trump has intensified the pressure further by authorizing the CIA to carry out covert activities inside Venezuela, although the contents of his instructions are classified and unknown.
Armstrong argued that Trump was aware that his policy could prove fatal for Maduro.
“What person wouldn’t be aware of that potential because you’re trying to take out a head of state, a tenacious head of state,” he said.
“We do assassinations on a routine basis of people that we suspect of not even being senior members of groups that we consider to be terrorists. If we’re authorizing the assassination of regular combatants in the war on terror, how crazy is it to think that the administration would authorize the use of lethal means, if necessary, to snatch the head of a cartel.”
Another former CIA officer, speaking on condition of anonymity because of their previous involvement in targeted assassinations in the Middle East, said decisions to authorize such killings were normally taken with great care and based on threat severity.
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“It is very specific and usually because there is a lethal threat to America and our allies. They are done super carefully,” the former agent said.
“The president and the [national security council] come up with the plan, and then they decide who’s going to take the shot … Is it going to be the military [or some other agency], will it lead to war?”
High-profile assassinations in recent times include Osama bin Laden by a Navy Seal team in 2011; Qassem Suleimani, the commander of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Qods force, killed by a drone strike ordered by Trump in 2020; and Ayman al-Zawahiri, Bin Laden’s former deputy in al-Qaida, who was killed by a drone in Afghanistan in 2022 during Joe Biden’s presidency.
“Bin Laden was an easy decision – he killed thousands of Americans, and even before the 9/11 attacks he had done lesser stuff,” said the ex-officer. “Suleimani, too, was easy because he had killed so many Americans.”
Maduro, however, presents a less clearcut target, even though Marco Rubio, the US secretary of state, has described the Venezuelan regime as “the al-Qaida of the western hemisphere”.
“The idea of going after a guy, Maduro, who is a sitting leader of a sovereign country, whether we like the country or not, just seems really strange and disproportionate,” the former agent continued. “Maduro is not Hitler. Bin Laden, Suleimani and al-Zawahiri were not heads of countries.
“If you look at our history, even in the last 40 or 50, years, we’ve been staying away from going after world leaders.”
Disclosures about the CIA’s role in backing coups and assassination attempts on foreign leaders during the 1950s and 1960s led to committees being established in Congress to oversee the agency’s activities.
While there is no evidence that Trump has authorized Maduro’s assassination, John Ratcliffe, the CIA director, told senators during his confirmation hearings that he would make the agency less risk averse and more willing to conduct covert action when ordered by the president.
Armstrong suggested the administration’s preferred course was to goad Maduro’s opponents in the Venezuelan military and other parts of society to topple him in a coup, setting the scene for a democratic transition while precluding the need for direct US action.
But some analysts believe such a scenario would probably spawn a replacement loyal to the leftist movement spearheaded by Maduro’s late predecessor, Hugo Chávez – with a full-blown democratic transformation potentially taking years to bear fruit.
Angelo Rivero Santos, a former Venezuelan diplomat in the country’s US embassy and now an academic at Georgetown University, said the chances of a coup were likely to be dashed by domestic realities and the fact that even Maduro’s critics have rallied around the flag in response to recent US pressure. .
“The year 2025 is not 1973,” he said, referring to the coup that deposed Chile’s Allende. “Statements from the opposition show that this is not heavily supported inside the country.”
