By 
Donald Trump recently oversaw a coup in Venezuela, kidnapping President Nicolás Maduro and his wife and bringing them to the United States. In their place, Trump said that the U.S. will run Venezuela until further notice, a blatant grab at Venezuelan oil resources under the guise of bringing democracy to a turbulent political system. But this wasn’t the first time that Trump’s administration attempted a coup in Venezuela.
In May 2020, the U.S. government and the opposition party in Venezuela attempted to stage a coup to unseat Maduro. Named Operation Gideon, the plan was orchestrated by Venezuelan dissidents and private security contractors who believed that the social-democrat Juan Guaidó was the rightful president-elect after what many saw as rigged elections in the country in 2019. Maduro also has a history of human rights abuses, as the U.N. says his administration unfairly arrested or disappeared foreign nationals, journalists, human rights proponents, and other supposed enemies of the regime.
Among the international backers of Guaidó’s claim to the presidency was the U.S., then governed by President Donald Trump, and plans were set in motion to arrest the leading figures of the Maduro administration. The story was swept under the rug in the news cycle — in spring 2020, most of the world’s eyes were trained on the coronavirus — but the fascinating ordeal is covered in detail in the new Neon-distributed documentary Men of War, which features interviews with some of the main players of Operation Gideon.
Men of War, executive-produced by hot-button Don’t Look Up and Vice filmmaker Adam McKay, examines the ways in which foreign governments can be toppled as well as the people American empire leaves behind in its wake. Our principal subject is Jordan Goudreau, who helped organize Operation Gideon, and much like Kathryn Bigelow’s hugely influential The Hurt Locker, the film examines how the U.S. war machine chews up and spits out young men and then leaves them broken, mentally and physically, and with little to no support.
It’s unsurprising that a man like Goudreau, a Special Forces operative who served in Iraq and Afghanistan for 16 years, was rudderless when he came home from the Middle East, or that he resolved to start a private security firm, Silvercorp USA. More surprising are the ways in which the U.S. government continued to use and abuse him to achieve their political ambitions in South America, finally pulling their support at the eleventh hour and leaving Goudreau holding the bag.
How to Overthrow a South American Government
In 2019, Goudreau said, he met with Keith Schiller and Venezuelan “political operatives” in Miami, where he claims they discussed enacting a regime change in Venezuela. Schiller has been a personal bodyguard for Trump and then his head of security, making headlines for allegedly inviting Stormy Daniels to dinner with Trump in 2006 and again for punching a protestor outside Trump Tower in 2015. He worked in the Trump White House until 2017, whereupon he and his company, KS Global Group LLC, started providing security services to the Republican National Committee.
Schiller’s participation in Goudreau’s story extends far beyond this initial meeting in Miami, as he’s the chief link between Goudreau and the president. Men of War doesn’t just rely on hearsay, though — filmmakers Billy Corben and Jen Gatien go to great lengths to verify their subject’s stories and his claims that he was connected to people within the Trump administration, from Schiller to Mike Pence. Of course, Schiller has officially said that no such meeting ever took place.
“Men of War” (2025) – source: Neon
The plan, Goudreau lays out, was to infiltrate the country by boat, arrest Maduro and other high-ranking Venezuelan officials, and extradite them to the U.S. Presumably, a trial would follow, while Guaidó would be instated as the country’s new president. The operation was nicknamed by some in the media as “the Bay of Piglets.” The description Goudreau gives for the process — which he makes sound as simple as a trip to the grocery store — is eerily similar to the actual coup the Trump administration enacted in January 2026. Except this time, the administration didn’t feel the need to bother with two-degrees-removed private contractors. Trump ordered the bombings of key military and political points around the country and just sent American Delta Force soldiers to kidnap Maduro instead.
Who Is Jordan Goudreau, The Man Who Led Operation Gideon?
Jordan Goudreau is a fascinating subject. He’s young, muscular, bald, and confident — imagine if the guy from Hot Ones could disembowel you with a spork. Born in Canada, he enlisted in the U.S. Army because he wanted better odds of being deployed overseas. He’s straightforward about how he got there, openly admitting to loving movies like Platoon, Full Metal Jacket, Rambo, and Starship Troopers as a kid (likely without ever seeing the deeper, anti-war subtext to those movies), but yet he also can rattle off Heraclitus and Hemingway quotes by heart.
Goudreau’s story is a familiar one. America sends young men overseas by the tens of thousands, exposes them to brutal and violent conditions, then brings them back home, where they receive poor medical and psychological support, little economic help, and extreme difficulty reintegrating to the workforce. It’s no wonder that they wind up going into private contracting — doing the same job they did in the military, but with less oversight and more to lose.
When he realized that the coup attempt wouldn’t play out as planned, Goudreau says, he stepped in and risked his life to save the men he’d sent into Venezuela. He could have feigned ignorance and fled the country, but he instead stuck his neck out to save those men, many of whom were former Special Forces soldiers in the same situation as Goudreau.
A Sympathetic Look at the Victims of Empire
Critics of the film chiefly complain that Goudreau isn’t a sympathetic figure and that the plot he outlines is too ridiculous to be real, but to me, Goudreau comes across as extremely sympathetic. It’s heartbreaking to see this Green Beret learn that America does not care one iota about him and that he’s sacrificed so much for his country for nothing in return. He’s not making apologies for his actions but rather explaining how and why he participated in the coup attempt. And watching the documentary and fully absorbing it should leave you with an immense amount of respect for this man, even if he was doing the ill-advised dirty work of a deplorable, greedy presidential administration.
“Men of War” (2025) – source: Neon
The film surrounding Goudreau and his story is rich with incisive editing choices, a solid structure, and good cinematic instincts. In the span of a minute, the film intercuts scenes from Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Rambo: First Blood, and Apocalypse Now to illustrate Goudreau’s mess of propagandistic influences. Fascinatingly, Men of War doesn’t merely cut — in its portrait of a former Special Forces soldier suffering from the aimlessness of civilian life, the edit looks closer to a constantly interrupted broadcast, with the image stuttering and going to static for a few frames before a new image bursts onto the screen with clarity. Sometimes, the effect works, successfully condensing years of a man’s life into the span of a few seconds, but sometimes it feels jittery and jumpy, delivering simple information in a roundabout, deliberately obfuscatory way — like if Jean-Luc Godard edited The Weather Channel.
Conclusion
Men of War is sympathetic to Goudreau, but in a fair and intelligent way. It primarily tells his story, with added fact-checking from the filmmakers and several other interviewees whose stories support Goudreau’s. It’s hard not to care for the guy — he was the guinea pig for the Trump administration’s first attempt at overthrowing Nicolás Maduro, and when Venezuelan authorities stopped Operation Gideon, the very people who hired Goudreau didn’t hesitate to arrest him and pin the whole ordeal on him.
The latest on Goudreau, at the time of writing, is that he is awaiting trial. The charges are failing to procure the proper export licenses for the AR-15 rifles used in the coup attempt. I hope he is granted, in the wake of Trump’s brazen coup of Maduro in January 2026, the justice that he badly deserves.
Men of War does not just inspire sympathy for one of the many soldiers that American imperialism chewed up, spat out, and stepped on — it is an essential portrait of how America attempts coups around the world, recounted by the very man hired to do the job. After the recent coup in Venezuela, Goudreau’s story risks being forgotten completely — but we should not let the Trump administration’s gross incompetence, callousness, and monstrousness go unpunished, then or now.
Men of War is now available to rent online.
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