The Mercenary Influencer

A former Green Beret and prolific Instagrammer signed a contract to, essentially, heist a whole country and turn it over to a new government. The results were embarrassing

- Brendan Borrell and Christopher Solomon

Nelson Galvis slept through the first shots. His wife, an insom-niac, 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.