It’s hard being born Canadian if your ambition is to be a real-life version of movie tough guy Jean-Claude Van Damme (“Blood Sport,” “Death Warrant,” “Universal Soldier,” “Last Action Hero”). The same goes for being Belgian, of course, but Van Damme just wanted to be in the movies.
Jordan Goudreau wanted the real thing, and joining the Canadian army reserves while studying computer science at the University of Calgary didn’t quite do it for him. So he moved to the United States and joined the Green Berets, which provides a much better mix of derring-do, martial arts and exotic foreigners to kill (“Sudden Death,” “Die Fast Die Furious,” “6 Bullets,” “Kill ‘Em All”).
Goudreau was not a fake. He did several tours in Afghanistan and Iraq killing real people, and by all accounts was a brave and competent soldier. But action heroes have early expiration dates.
At 60, Van Damme is doing self-mocking tough-guy commercials for Coors Light. Goudreau’s luck ran out in 2016, when he was injured in a parachute accident and had to retire from his beloved Special Forces at the age of 40.
Nobody offered him any beer commercials, and his great idea to sell the services of military veterans to schools to stop mass shooters — parents would pay a subscription of $8.99 a month — didn’t fly. So he ended up doing what washed-up American action heroes always do: he went to Latin America (“Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid,” “The Magnificent Seven,” etc.).
Specifically, he went to Colombia. Having set up a “security company” called Silvercorp in Florida, he got in touch with the Venezuelan congressional leader who claims to be the legitimate president, Juan Guaido, offering to overthrow Nicolas Maduro (who actually lives in the presidential palace).
This would be done in the time-honored way, by recruiting and training exiles and mercenaries who would go in, attack the regime and trigger a mass uprising. (Think the 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba, only successful.) And for about two weeks last October, Guaido was tempted.
He even signed a $213 million contract with Goudreau’s Silvercorp for unspecified “general services,” but he canceled the contract in early November. Maybe Guaido is not quite as gullible as he seems, or maybe he just remembered that hiring foreigners to overthrow your country’s government, even in the name of democracy, is a bad look.
Anyway, that was the end of the grand plan, but Goudreau didn’t quit. The U.S. government had recently declared Maduro a “narcoterrorist” (whatever that is), and put a $15 million price on the Venezuelan dictator’s head. So Goodreau’s Plan B was to send in a crack team (they’re always called “crack teams”) to capture Maduro, airlift him out of the country and collect the reward.
By now Venezuela’s intelligence service and practically everybody else knew about Goodreau’s plan. The Associated Press even ran a story about it on May 1, quoting associates of Goudreau as saying he was “in way over his head.” But before we get to the end of the story, a brief pause to contemplate the equally spectacular incompetence of the other side.
By late March, the Venezuelan government was on hair-trigger alert for Goodreau’s planned raid, and on March 30, the Venezuelan navy spotted a Canadian-owned cruise-ship, the RCGS Resolute, stopped off the Venezuelan island of Tortuga. So the navy patrol ship Naiguata ordered the ship to proceed to port for inspection.
And, finally, the tragicomic end. A few dozen volunteers and mercenaries tried to land on the Venezuelan coast near Caracas a week ago. Several were killed, all the rest were arrested. Goodreau would have been there, too —“He would have 100 percent gone out in a blaze of gunfire because that’s who he is,” a friend said — but he couldn’t leave Florida because of coronavirus travel restrictions.
President Donald Trump denies any official U.S. involvement, and for once I almost believe him.
Gwynne Dyer’s new book is “Growing Pains: The Future of Democracy (and Work).”