The Mercenary Who Botched a Maduro Coup Is Lying Low in Florida

Nelson Galvis slept through the first shots. His wife, an insomniac, ran in from the other room and woke him up. Still groggy, the retired business professor stepped to the balcony of their eighth-floor apartment and peered into the 4 a.m. darkness of Macuto, a coastal Caribbean town 25 miles from Caracas. He had a long view of the shoreline, where he could see two boats, one of them flashing blue police lights, and a helicopter circling overhead. Drug seizure, he figured. More gunshots followed.

When Galvis looked again a couple hours later, as day broke on May 3, he could make out a dozen soldiers and police standing on a rock jetty on the beach, with several unmoving human forms at their feet. The state-owned TV news soon reported that authorities had captured foreign mercenaries who’d attempted a coup, but that didn’t make any sense. Macuto is pinched between steep mountains and the sea; any quick maritime getaway from the lone beach is easy to cut off. Besides, the purported firefight occurred directly behind a fortified government building, which a savvy team of infiltrators would’ve known to avoid. More likely, Galvis concluded, the Venezuelan government had staged a phony coup in an effort to unite its angry citizens against a common foe.