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• Content META

  Title	Report- U.S. Tried To Bribe Maduro's Pilot To Kidnap Him And Bring Him To The United States.
  ID	15309365
  External ID	33a201f2b7f488158f5eefe9c52724a6
  Author	The Dissident
  Published Date	Oct. 29, 2025, 2:09 p.m.
  Summary	A New Report In The AP Uncovered That The United States Tried To Bribe Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro's Pilot To Kidnap Him and Bring Him To The United States.
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  URL	https://the307.substack.com/p/report-us-tried-to-bribe-maduros
  Sentiment	Negative: 0.79708    Neutral: 0.16887    Positive: 0.03405
  Relevance	0.00000

• Content Details

  Content ID	23155424
  Key	b8b5ff45-5aed-4e06-b01d-901f27dee780
  Content	A new report from the Associated Press uncovered that in 2024, the U.S. DHS agent, Edwin Lopez, with 'permission from his superiors,' attempted to bribe Bitner Villegas, the pilot of Venezuelan president Nicolas Maduro, to kidnap him and bring him into U.S. custody. The AP investigation wrote: The federal agent (Edwin Lopez) had a daring pitch for Nicolás Maduro's chief pilot: All he had to do was surreptitiously divert the Venezuelan president's plane to a place where U.S. authorities could nab the strongman. In exchange, the agent told the pilot in a clandestine meeting, the aviator would be made a very rich man. The conversation was tense, and the pilot left noncommittal, though he provided the agent, Edwin Lopez, with his cell number — a sign he might be interested in helping the U.S. government. Over the next 16 months, even after retiring from his government job in July, Lopez kept at it, chatting with the pilot over an encrypted messaging app. The plan attempted to bribe Bitner Villegas into flying Maduro 'to a place where the U.S. could arrest him' on bogus charges that Maduro was 'flooding the U.S. with cocaine' in order to enact regime change in Venezuela and install a puppet government. According to the investigation, Lopez 'and fellow agents' asked Bitner Villegas to 'join them individually in a small conference room' when Maudro's plane was landed in the Dominican Republic. According to the investigation, during the meeting, 'Lopez made his pitch: In exchange for secretly ferrying Maduro into America's hands, the pilot would become very rich and beloved by millions of his compatriots. The rendezvous could be of the pilot's choosing: the Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico, or the U.S. military base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba' adding, 'Villegas didn't tip his hand. Yet, before departing, he gave Lopez his cell number'. The investigation went on to report, 'The pair texted on WhatsApp and Telegram about a dozen times. But the conversations seemed to go nowhere'. Lopez apparently offered Villegas a '$50 million reward' if he carried out the U.S. plot of kidnapping Maduro and bringing him into U.S. custody. After Villegas replied, 'We Venezuelans are cut from a different cloth, the last thing we are is traitors', Edwin Lopez made veiled threats towards Villegas' children, in an attempt to force him to carry out the U.S. kidnapping plot. The investigation wrote, 'Lopez tried one last time, mentioning Villegas' three children by name and a better future he said awaited them in the U.S.' adding that Villegas followed this by saying, 'The window for a decision is closing, soon it will be too late'. This marks the latest in a long string of U.S. regime change attempts in Venezuela, which started when Nicolas Maduro's predecessor, Hugo Chavez, was elected president. As the AP noted, 'the scheme reveals the extent — and often slapdash fashion — to which the U.S. has for years sought to topple Maduro'. Going back to 1999, when Chavez was first elected president, the U.S. embassy in Venezuela gave $15 million to USAID to enact a policy of regime change in Venezuela, which included, 'penetrating Chavez's political base, dividing Chavismo, protecting vital US business, and isolating Chavez internationally.' By 2002, the CIA cutout National Endowment for Democracy paid and trained members of the Venezuelan opposition, who carried out a short-lived coup against Hugo Chavez, which was reversed after his supporters demanded he be reinstated. In 2013, the National Endowment for Democracy ran a propaganda campaign attempting to swing the upcoming National Assembly elections towards the U.S. opposition, through 'mobilizing a voter database that identified and targeted swing voters through social media'. When the opposition won the National Assembly in 2015 for the first time since Chavez's election in 1999, the NED bragged that they 'ultimately played an important role in their resounding victory in the 2015 election,' adding that a 'determining factor in the success of the coalition in the parliamentary elections of 2015 was a two-year effort prior to the elections'. 2015 also marked the start of the sadistic U.S. sanctions on Venezuela, designed to destroy the country's economy in hopes that it would lead to regime change. A recent New York Times article admitted that, 'The tightening of American sanctions this year has pushed inflation back into triple digits,' adding that, 'U.S. sanctions created prolonged hyperinflation, collapsed basic services, increased malnutrition, and led millions to migrate to escape extreme poverty'. The article also admitted that the U.S.-backed opposition in Venezuela support, 'worsening living conditions in Venezuela' from the U.S. sanctions in hopes it will lead to regime change. From 2017-2018 alone, Economists Mark Weisbrot and Jeffrey Sachs found that the sanctions caused '40,000 deaths,' adding that, 'these sanctions would fit the definition of collective punishment of the civilian population'. Their report noted that the 2017 sanctions 'adversely impacted oil production in Venezuela,' adding that, ''It is important to emphasize that nearly all of the foreign exchange that is needed to import medicine, food, medical equipment, spare parts and equipment needed for electricity generation, water systems, or transportation, is received by the Venezuelan economy through the government's revenue from the export of oil.' It added, 'The sanctions implemented in 2019, including the recognition of a parallel government, accelerated this deprivation and also cut off Venezuela from most of the international payments system, thus ending much of the country's access to these essential imports, including medicine and food — even those that could normally be bought with available dollars.' The sanctions have killed over 100,000 people, as the former independent expert for the United Nations Human Rights Council, Alfred de Zayas, found in 2020. Trump's first term in office marked a ramp-up in the regime change attempts in Venezuela, including recognizing the unelected U.S. puppet Juan Guaidó as the president of Venezuela and getting him to declare himself president and set up a fake 'interim government' which the U.S. funded $1 billion to. The U.S. also attempted to funnel weapons to the fake Guaidó government, disguised as humanitarian aid packages, and tried to get Venezuelan generals to turn on Maduro and overthrow him in a military coup. Describing this policy, U.S. Senator Chris Murphy admitted, 'First, we thought that getting Guaidó to declare himself president would be enough to topple the regime. Then we thought putting aid on the border would be enough. Then we tried to sort of construct a kind of coup in April of last year (in 2020), and it blew up in our face when all the generals that were supposed to break with Maduro decided to stick with him in the end'. Now, Trump has officially ordered the CIA 'to carry out lethal operations in Venezuela', 'to take covert action against Maduro or his government, either unilaterally or in conjunction with a larger military operation'. Trump is also apparently 'weighing strikes inside Venezuela itself as part of a broader strategy aimed at weakening Maduro.' As the New York Times wrote, 'For weeks, the U.S. military has been targeting boats off the Venezuelan coast, it says are transporting drugs, killing 27 people. American officials have been clear, privately, that the end goal is to drive Mr. Maduro from power.' The Financial Times noted, 'When the US ordered its largest deployment of warships and fighter jets to the Caribbean in more than 30 years, the mission was initially billed as a war on drug trafficking,' adding, 'The priority now is to force the departure of top Venezuelan government figures, preferably via resignation or an arranged handover — but with the clear threat that if Maduro and his inner circle cling to power, the Americans may use targeted military force to capture or kill them'. One U.S.-backed opposition politician, Vanessa Neumann, admitted to the Financial Times, 'The plan now is a capture of Nicolás Maduro. Capture-kill or capture-arrest and take him out, one way or another,' and another admitted, 'The objective is clear: Maduro and his closest accomplices must be gone, one way or another, and soon'. The new AP story is just a small aspect of the United States' endless regime change plots in Venezuela, with the intention of setting up a puppet government.
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• Publisher

  Publisher Name	r/pennystocks (#16680)
  Publisher URL	https://substack.com/
  Description	None
  Trust Flow Score	80
  Citation Flow Score	79

• Data Source

  Data Source Name	NewsCatcher (#303)
  Data Source Type	news
  Data Source URL	https://www.newscatcherapi.com/
  Description
  Weight	1