The Rise and Fall of General Cliver Alcala Cordones: A Venezuelan Military Leader’s Journey to Infamy

2024-03-13 03:34:08
Illustration of retired Venezuelan general Cliver Antonio Alcala Cordones, right, in federal court in New York (Elizabeth Williams via AP, File)

With his strong military bearing, his determined walk and his firm handshake, Clíver Alcalá still looks like a retired major general of the Venezuelan army, even though the only uniform he wears now is khaki prison pants.

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Alcalá, a fearsome adversary of Venezuelan socialist President Nicolás Maduro who twice attempted a coup against him, is in an upstate New York penitentiary awaiting sentencing Thursday on unrelated federal charges. of providing weapons to rebels financed by drug trafficking, who could imprison him for three decades.

“The only thing I regret is that my love for Venezuela has caused my family so much pain,” Alcalá, 62, told the AP agency in his first interview behind bars. “I take full responsibility for my actions, but they are the ones who pay the consequences.”

The interview took place earlier this month, just before two days of shocking court testimony that had nothing to do with the crimes to which Alcalá had pleaded guilty.

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In new testimony, the convicted drug traffickers alleged that they saw Alcalá, two decades ago, take advantage of his position as one of Venezuela’s most powerful military officers to provide safe passage for shipments of tons of cocaine at dirt airstrips, checkpoints, border control and a major airport.

In exchange, they say they paid him millions of dollars in bribes: at one point he charged $150,000 for each flight loaded with cocaine that left for Central America.

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As part of a plea deal reached last year, prosecutors dropped all drug charges against Alcalá. Instead, they left only two counts of supplying weapons to the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, considered by the United States to be a foreign terrorist organization.

Prosecutors are now urging federal Judge Alvin Hellerstein to consider even previously dismissed charges and unproven allegations of drug smuggling when he hands down sentencing, something that surprised Alcala when he pleaded guilty to the lesser crimes.

“The defendant was not simply a general following orders,” prosecutors wrote in their sentencing memorandum recommending a 30-year sentence. “He collected millions of dollars in cocaine kickbacks to allow and help tons of poison transit into this country.”

Adam Isacson, a longtime analyst of the armed conflict in the Andes for the NGO Washington Office on Latin America, said a harsh punishment for Alcalá will likely deter other members of the Venezuelan military — whose support is critical to Maduro’s control over the power—to break ranks.

“It could complicate any transition from dictatorship to democracy,” Isacson said. “Without any leniency from the United States for past crimes, the Maduro regime can point to Alcalá as an example of the high price that anyone considering disloyalty will pay.”

Isacson noted that the minimum 30 years prosecutors are asking for in Alcalá’s case is longer than the average 12 years served by a group of Colombian paramilitary leaders extradited to the United States in 2008 on drug trafficking charges.

Alcalá surrendered in Colombia in 2020 to face a federal charge that he, Maduro and a dozen other military and political leaders led an expanding illicit association to turn Venezuela into a launching pad to flood the United States with cocaine. They are all supposed to be members of what US authorities have called the “Cartel of the Suns,” in reference to the epaulets on the uniforms of high-ranking military officers.

Before laying down arms as part of a 2016 peace deal, the FARC regularly used Venezuela’s porous border region as a safe haven and hub for cocaine shipments bound for the United States, often with the support, or at least the consent of the Venezuelan security forces.

During the two-day hearing earlier this month, Hellerstein heard testimony from two associates of major Venezuelan drug traffickers and from a former police officer who was a well-paid informant for the DEA drug agency.

All three witnesses described Alcalá as a trafficker whose power extended far beyond his rank and formal responsibilities in the military.

But Alcalá’s public defenders have disputed that description. They noted that he lived openly in Colombia for years before his arrest, in a small rented apartment, with a beat-up Nissan and barely $3,000 in his bank account.

“He was not living the life of a corrupt Latin American leader in exile, rich off the loot of corruptly earned money,” his lawyers wrote in a pre-sentencing memo seeking just six years behind bars.

They argue that the drug accusations against him lack credibility and are a blatant attempt to retaliate against the general by the traffickers he attacked or to recover part of the $10 million reward the United States offered for his arrest and conviction.

A witness mentioned Alcalá only nine years after his cooperation agreement with the DEA, and after Alcalá’s arrest.

“At a certain point did you become a good man?” Hellerstein said as a quip to a witness who admitted on the stand to having hired corrupt police officers to rob his grandmother and to having lied to his responsible operators in the United States about the threats he had made. made to his partners in Miami.

Then there is Alcalá’s role as an open enemy of Maduro, whom the United States has blamed for destroying democracy and the country’s oil-rich economy.

Around the same time Alcalá was plotting against Maduro, the Trump administration was offering a $15 million reward for Maduro’s arrest and actively urging members of the military to rebel.

Alcalá opposed Maduro almost from the moment he assumed the mantle of the Bolivarian revolution from Hugo Chávez, who died of cancer in 2013, the same year Alcalá retired from the military. His dissent intensified in 2017 when, with the knowledge of the U.S. government, he leveraged his influence among the Venezuelan officer corps to rally troops to overthrow Maduro.

“These were not theoretical debates about democratic change, they were plans for an armed insurrection against a regime and its leadership,” his lawyers wrote.

The 2017 barracks revolt failed and ended with several conspirators arrested. Alcalá managed to flee across the border to Colombia, where he contacted the CIA.

A few years later, he would try again, this time in coordination with the democratic opposition led by Juan Guaidó, whom the United States recognized in 2019 as the legitimate leader of Venezuela.

Alcalá’s comrade in arms in his fateful final battle was Jordan Goudreau, a former American Green Beret and decorated veteran of Iraq and Afghanistan. An AP investigation in 2020 detailed how the two like-minded warriors teamed up to train a motley group of Venezuelan military deserters in clandestine camps in Colombia.

Alcalá’s arrest doomed any hope the rebellion had of success.

“Traitor, deserter, drug trafficker,” Maduro boasted after his arrest. “The devil is paying you the way the devil knows how.”

The rough road to Alcalá is something like an honest Venezuelan journey. Unlike many of Maduro’s civilian opponents, who come from Venezuela’s white elite minority, Alcalá was born into poverty and raised by his grandmother after being orphaned at a young age, when he was abandoned by his father and his son. mother died.

To provide some structure, he and two brothers were sent to the army. He finished first in his class and impressed his colleagues—including Chavez, a charismatic tank commander and instructor—with his physical and mental stamina. The person closest to him was his older brother, Carlos Alcalá, whom Chávez would name as head of the army and until recently served as Maduro’s ambassador to Iran.

Even in prison, Alcalá is still a fighter. He said he has used his time behind bars to reflect on his decisions, mistakes and regrets. He has read more than 200 books—most of them history books—and maintains a battle-ready physique: He runs 5 miles (8 kilometers) on a treadmill every day.

“I haven’t run this fast since I was a lieutenant,” he jokes about his personal best pace: 1.6 kilometers (1 mile) in 7 minutes. “The guards just look at me like I’m crazy.”

(AP)

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