[A] boat, some guns, and 62 men of dubious military skill.

[r_ness]

Raised from comments elsewhere:
I have never been a Green Beret, and I have never attempted a coup, though who knows where the future will take me. Nevertheless, I did assume - naïvely! erroneously! - that the first rule of organizing a coup is that you do not tweet about it. And doesn’t it require a lot of planning? Based on my many years spent

Comments

[achinhibitor]

As Cracked noted, it made the Bay of Pigs look like an act of military genius.

[r_ness]

No one thought these clowns were going to succeed, but everyone was willing to use them for their own purposes if that could be arranged.

It's like the old saying about being able to see who the chump is at the poker table.

[achinhibitor]

Worse than that, I think. The CIA supposedly warned them off more than once. It's believable that the US warned the Venezuelan government to buy some credibility. It leaves the question of who paid for the mess. I suppose it wasn't very expensive, since they didn't have proper training or equipment. I wonder if Goudreau either made or inherited a tidy pile of money, and like so many people, when freed from financial constraints, indulged his demons freely...

[r_ness]

I don't think your examples are particularly *worse*, but just examples of other parties using them for their own purposes.

Also, it seems pretty clear Goudreau didn't have any money of his own. He was going around begging for money and picking up jobs wherever he could find them.

I think the turncoat Venezuelan general might well have been using the mercenaries as cover for his drug-running operations, and spent a small amount of the proceeds on that.