Earlier this week, we wrote about “Operación Gedeón”, a surreal and ultimately doomed military operation conducted by Silvercorp USA and a group of Venezuelan expatriates with the aim of instigating a nationwide rebellion against the government and capturing its high-ranking members, including President Maduro himself. The failed plot has attracted a significant amount of media…
Please see part II of this bizarre saga. The video begins with Jordan Goudreau posing confidently, flanked by a man wearing an armour plate and a Venezuela flag wrapped around his shoulder. The man introduces Goudreau in a stern tone. Goudreau begins to speak with the terseness of a battle-hardened warrior as he confirms that…
One of the newest chapters in the Venezuelan political saga involves a group of National Assembly lawmakers who were named in a report by the investigative news website Armando.Info alongside allegations that said lawmakers were involved in a corruption network. According to an investigation published by the website in December 2019, this group of lawmakers…
All times appear as local time UTC-4. Venezuelans awoke to a tumultuous morning on April 30, 2019. Leopoldo López, the leader of the Voluntad Popular [Popular Will, VP] party — under arrest since 2014 — had been freed. In a pair of messages shared on his Twitter account, López appeared beside National Assembly president Juan…
On March 23, 2019, Twitter lit up with a series of images showing two Russian aircraft at the Simón Bolívar International airport just north of Caracas, Venezuela. The images also showed a group of individuals in uniform disembarking from one aircraft, and cargo being unloaded from the other. Maria Zakharova, the spokeswoman for the Russian…
On Saturday February 23 2019, hundreds of volunteers and political activists hoped to deliver over 600 tonnes of humanitarian aid into Venezuela on two bridges connecting Colombia’s Norte de Santander department with Venezuela’s Táchira state, and a road connecting Roraima and Bolívar states in Brazil and Venezuela, respectively. The highly anticipated event was part of…
All times appear as local UTC-5. On January 17, 2019, at 9:32 AM, an SUV loaded with 80 kilograms of pentolite exploded inside the Escuela de Cadetes de Policía “General Francisco de Paula Santander (General Francisco de Paula Santander Police Cadet School, ECSAN), the Colombian National Police academy located in southern Bogotá, killing 21 people…
All times are shown as UTC-4 local time. On December 8, 2018, reports appeared on Twitter claiming that YV2030—an airplane used by President Nicolás Maduro’s nephews during their failed drug trafficking career—was taking part in a military operation in Canaima, a remote town located in Venezuela’s Bolivar state. The news came via a journalist named…
On the 4th August, President Maduro of Venezuela gave a speech in Caracas, celebrating the 81st anniversary of the National Guard. However, Maduro never finished this speech, as part-way through two explosions rocked the area. He was quickly hustled off stage by his security detail. Claims rapidly spread on social media that the event had been targeted by drone-borne IEDs (BDIED), which were later supported by official statements by the Venezuelan government.
This report (Spanish version) was co-researched and authored by Giancarlo Fiorella (@invenezuelablog), author of In Venezuela, and Aliaume Leroy (@Yaolri), member of the Bellingcat Investigation Team. Bellingcat undertook the investigation in collaboration with Forensic Architecture who have constructed a navigable three-dimensional digital platform of El Junquito in which the more than 60 pieces of evidence…
