From US jail, Venezuelan general who defied Maduro awaits potentially lengthy sentence
CARMEL, N.Y. — With his strong military stance, purposeful gait and firm handshake, Cliver Alcalá still looks like a retired three-star Venezuelan army general, even if the only uniform he now wears is dull khaki prison scrubs.
Alcalá is a formidable opponent of socialist Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, who has twice attempted coups against him. Alcalá is in a New York state correctional facility awaiting sentencing on Thursday on unrelated federal charges of supplying weapons to drug-funded rebels that could lock him up for three months. decades.
“My only regret is that my love for Venezuela has caused my family so much pain,” Alcalá, 62, told The Associated Press in his first interview behind bars. “I take full responsibility for my actions, but they are the ones who will suffer 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.
In the new testimony, convicted drug traffickers claimed they witnessed Alcalá twenty years ago using his position as one of Venezuela’s powerful military officers to provide safe passage for tons of shipments of cocaine on unpaved airstrips, border checkpoints and a major airport.
In return, they say he received millions of dollars in bribes — at one point collecting $150,000 for every cocaine-laden flight that departed for Central America.
As part of a settlement reached last year, prosecutors dropped all drug charges against Alcalá. Instead, they left just two counts of supplying weapons to the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, which the United States considers a foreign terrorist organization.
Prosecutors are now urging U.S. District Judge Alvin Hellerstein to consider even the previously dismissed charges and unproven drug trafficking allegations when handing down a sentence — something that took Alcalá by surprise when he pleaded guilty to the lesser offenses.
“The defendant was not just a general following orders,” prosecutors wrote in their sentencing memo recommending a 30-year sentence. “He accepted millions of dollars in cocaine-fueled bribes to allow the transit of tons of poison into this country.”
Adam Isacson, a longtime analyst of armed conflict in the Andes for the Washington Office of Latin America, said a harsh punishment for Alcalá would likely discourage others in the Venezuelan military — whose support is crucial to Maduro’s grip on power. prevent them from breaking ranks.
“It could complicate any transition from dictatorship to democracy,” Isacson said. “Without any US clemency for past crimes, the Maduro regime can point to Alcalá as an example of how high the exit costs are for anyone considering disloyalty. ”
Isacson noted that the minimum 30 years prosecutors are seeking in Alcalá’s case is longer than the average 12 years served by a group of Colombian paramilitary warlords extradited to the U.S. in 2008 on drug trafficking charges.
Alcalá surrendered in Colombia in 2020 to face a federal indictment that accused him, Maduro and a dozen other military and political leaders of a vast conspiracy to turn Venezuela into a launching pad for flooding the U.S. with cocaine. They are all believed to be members of what US authorities have dubbed the “Cartel of the Suns”, a reference to the epaulettes placed on the uniforms of senior military officers.
Before laying down weapons as part of a 2016 peace deal, the FARC regularly used the porous borderland of Venezuela as a safe haven and hub for cocaine shipments to the US – often with the support or at least permission of Venezuelan security forces.
During the two-day hearing earlier this month, Hellerstein heard from two associates of major Venezuelan drug traffickers and a former police officer who was a highly paid DEA informant. The three witnesses described Alcalá as a powerful human trafficker whose power extended far beyond his rank and formal responsibilities in the military.
But Alcalá’s court-appointed lawyers have disputed this view, noting that he lived openly in Colombia for years before his arrest, with a small rented apartment, a beat-up Nissan and barely $3,000 in his bank account.
“He did not live the life of an exiled, corrupt Latin American leader rich on the spoils of corruptly earned money,” his lawyers wrote in a pre-sentencing memo, calling for just six years behind bars.
They claim that the drug charges against him are not credible and are a blatant attempt to exact revenge on the general by the traffickers he attacked, or to recover some of the $10 million reward the US has rewarded for his arrest and conviction. One witness did not mention Alcala until nine years after his cooperation agreement with the DEA – after Alcala’s arrest
“Did there come a time when you became a nice man?” Hellerstein joked to a witness who admitted on the witness stand that he had hired corrupt cops to steal from his grandmother and had lied to his American handlers about threats he had made to associates in Miami.
Then there is Alcalá’s role as an outspoken enemy of Maduro, whom the US accuses of destroying the country’s democracy and oil-rich economy.
Around the same time that Alcalá was plotting against Maduro, the Trump administration offered a $15 million reward for Maduro’s arrest and actively encouraged members of the military to revolt.
Alcalá opposed Maduro from the moment he took over 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 escalated in 2017 when, with the connivance of the US government, he used his influence among the Venezuelan officer corps to rally troops to remove Maduro.
“These were not theoretical debates about democratic change, these were plans for an armed uprising against a regime and its leadership,” his lawyers wrote.
The 2017 barracks uprising failed and ended with the arrest of several conspirators. Alcalá managed to flee across the border to Colombia, where he made contact with the Central Intelligence Agency.
A few years later, he would try again, this time in coordination with the democratic opposition led by Juan Guaidó, whom the US recognized as Venezuela’s legitimate leader in 2019.
Alcalá’s comrade in his final fateful battle was a former American Green Beret and decorated Iraq and Afghanistan veteran named Jordan Goudreau. A 2020 AP investigation detailed how the two like-minded fighters banded together to train a motley crew of Venezuelan military deserters in clandestine camps in Colombia.
Alcalá’s arrest dashed the rebellion’s faint hopes of success.
“Traitor, deserter, drug trafficker,” Maduro crowed after his arrest. “The devil will pay you back the way the devil knows how.”
Alcalá’s arduous journey resembles a Venezuelan sojourn on the salt of the earth. Unlike many of Maduro’s civilian opponents, who come from Venezuela’s elite white minority, Alcalá was born into poverty and raised by his grandmother after being orphaned at a young age when abandoned by his father and his mother died.
To provide some structure, he and two brothers were sent to the army. He finished top in his class and impressed colleagues – including Chávez, a charismatic tank commander and instructor – with his physical and mental endurance. His best match was his older brother, Carlos Alcala, who Chávez would appoint as head of the military and until recently served as Maduro’s ambassador to Iran.
Even in prison, Alcalá remains a fighter. He said he has used his time behind bars to reflect on his choices, missteps and regrets. He has read more than 200 books – most of them history books – and maintains a combat-ready body by running 5 miles on a treadmill every day.
“I haven’t run that fast since I was a lieutenant,” he jokes about his personal best pace, a 7-minute mile. “The guards look at me like I’m crazy.”
___
Associated Press writer Jim Mustian in New York contributed to this report.
___
Follow Goodman on Twitter: @APJoshGoodman