According to an Associated Press report, a US agent, of Puerto Rican origin, tried to bribe the personal pilot of the President of Venezuela, Nicolás Maduro, to help in his arrest. The plan was for the pilot to divert the plane carrying the Venezuelan president to a country where the US government could arrest Maduro.
Mexico City, October 29 (However).- “You still have time to be the hero of Venezuela”, this was the proposal that the United States Government made the pilot personal Nicolas MaduroPresident of Venezuela, in an attempt to capture the South American president, however, despite the fact that the reward reached 50 million dollars, the plan failed, as revealed Associated Press (AP).
According to information released by APit all started on April 24, 2024, when an informant went to the United States Embassy in the Dominican Republic and assured that aircraft from the Dominican Republic had arrived in this country. Venezuelan president to carry out maintenance work, data that was known to Edwin López, a United States federal agent.
López, 50 years old and originally from Puerto Rico, was part of the United States Government. At the time he learned about the informant, he was working as an attaché at the US embassy and a Homeland Security Investigation (HIS) agent of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).
Among the details that the informant provided to Agent López was that they were two planes from the Venezuelan presidential flotilla, which were at the La Isabela executive airport in Santo Domingo, in the company of five pilots, among them was the person in charge of the Venezuelan president’s personal transportation.
Knowing the sanctions that Venezuela’s actions entailed, due to the restrictions that weigh on said nation, Agent López preferred, first of all, to implement a plan: try to convince Maduro’s personal pilot to take the Venezuelan President to a place where the United States Government could arrest him.
To do this, the agent interviewed all the pilots, although his main objective was Bitner Villegas, who was usually in charge of transporting Maduro, so he began a kind of negotiation with him, which at first came to nothing, but which was recorded by a colleague of López.
During that first meeting, the DHS agent offered to make the pilot a millionaire and in exchange Villegas would only have to divert Maduro during one of his usual trips, to one of three possible destinations: Guantánamo, in Cuba; Dominican Republic or Puerto Rico, so that he would be captured there by authorities of the Government of the American Union.
Although the agent and the Venezuelan pilot did not reach any agreement, the latter would have taken López’s contact to Venezuela, which later served to make the Puerto Rican insist on his objective with Villegas, who at that time was a colonel in the Venezuelan Air Force and was part of that nation’s presidential honor guard.
Regarding the two planes that were in the Dominican Republic, the Dassault Falcon 2000EX and the Dassault Falcon 900EX, both were seized by the US Government, under the argument that they lacked the necessary authorization to return to Venezuela. Likewise, López assured that in one there was information about the movements of Venezuelan air force officers.
According to information obtained by APIn the following months, López insisted, through WhatsApp and Telegram messages, in his attempt to convince Villegas to betray Maduro, without success, until the time came for the American agent’s retirement, at which time the plot against the Venezuelan President was still unknown, which gave López an advantage to seek more support.
Although the US agent retired last July, that did not prevent him from contacting Maduro’s opposition leaders, who described López as an agent “obsessed” with stopping and prosecuting the Venezuelan president, which many of the opponents of the Maduro regime considered “more valuable” than the opposition within the South American country.
In case you need context
sobre Bitner Villegas pic.twitter.com/dOe6MaV85S— 𝐴𝐀𝐀𝐀𝐀 (@Arr3ch0) September 19, 2025
“You still have time to be the hero of Venezuela and be on the right side of history!” was the message that López sent to Villegas in August, after he learned that the Government headed by Donald Trump doubled the reward on Maduro’s head to $50 million, to which there was no response from the Venezuelan pilot.
On September 18, López saw a publication from an anonymous plane spotter, a user identified as @Arr3ch0, who for several years tracked the route of Maduro’s planes and who this time made public the screenshot with the tracking map of the presidential Airbus, which made a strange maneuver of several circles before taking off from Caracas.
“Where are you going?” Agent López, with a new number, asked the Venezuelan pilot, who responded, not knowing the Puerto Rican’s number, “Who is he?” he said, at which point the US agent reminded him of his encounters in the Dominican Republic, which caused Villegas to call him a “coward.” “Venezuelans are made of another ksa,” Villegas added.
“And the least we are are traitors,” the Venezuelan concluded, so López sent him a photograph in which they both appear sitting on “a red leather sofa” talking. “Are you crazy?” replied the pilot; “A little…” answered López, who as a strategy to defeat Villegas, mentioned that the Venezuelan’s three children, whom he identified by name, could have a better future in the United States.
“The window for your decision is closing,” López emphasized before the pilot blocked the number of the US agent, who turned to Maduro’s opponents to seek a confrontation between him and the pilot. To do this, Marshall Billingslea, a former National Security official who had been harassing Maduro for weeks, now attacked Villegas.
The ideal moment was the day the pilot turned 48. “Happy birthday, ‘General’ Bitner!” he wrote in a message, which was accompanied by the photograph that López had sent to Villegas, only in Billingslea’s version the American agent did not appear; The publication was seen by approximately three million people, after which no one heard anything more about the pilot.
It was on a Venezuelan television program, broadcast on September 24, when Villegas made his reappearance. Dressed in a Venezuelan air force flight suit, the pilot was interviewed by Diosdado Cabello, Minister of the Interior, who scoffed at the idea that the Venezuelan military was corrupt. “They are uncompromising patriots,” he said, while the pilot raised his fist as a sign of loyalty.
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