The Men behind the President’s Birth Certificate
This is the chronicle of a trip to nowhere. An effort of over a year to find the birth certificate of Nicolas Maduro—the key piece to solve the controversy over the nationality of the Venezuelan leader—led the team of Armando.info to the only document that the civil registry of La Candelaria Parish in Caracas could show, a few scanned pages. There is an unknown land where the original document is, if any. According to different versions, it is in a safe under the ongoing argument of "State security reasons," under a 24-hour personalized custody of at least four gatekeepers committed to deny access to the folios inside.
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An alleged birth certificate of Nicolas Maduro Moros—record
2823, page 435, stating that the current president of Venezuela was presented in
that registry on November 27, 1964, i.e. two years and four days after his birth
in the capital of Venezuela—is supposed to be in the civil registry of La
Candelaria Parish in downtown Caracas. However, even if the existence of this
document is verified, the true nationality of the President would remain a
mystery.
Since he was forced with forceps as president of the Republic
in January 2013, during the invisible agony of Commander Hugo Chavez in Cuba,
and later on, after the death of the revolutionary leader at the Military
Hospital of Caracas, when he won the presidency in April 2013 after a fierce
election, the birthplace of Nicolas Maduro became more a State issue than a
subject of public controversy. The current Constitution provides that the
president must be Venezuelan by birth. If it were established that Maduro was
born in another country and has another nationality, opposition factors estimate
that even the obstacle of a Supreme Court firmly controlled by chavismo
could be overcome to take an express path to remove president Maduro from office
and call for new elections.
The estimate was not unfounded. There are plenty testimonies
ensuring that the former foreign minister and current president had a close
relationship with neighboring Colombia during his childhood and adolescence. An
article published in 2015 on this website reported on a family
home in Cucuta, a city in Norte de Santander Department, where the mother of
the president, Teresa de Jesus Moros, was born. Documents published by various
media show that the father, Nicolas Maduro Garcia, with ancestors in the former
Netherlands Antilles, studied in the town of Ocaña, in the same Colombian
province. The chavismo hierarchs barely contributed to solve the
genealogical puzzle of Maduro, since by trying to give convincing explanations
about the president's place of birth and his identity, they boosted the
discussion with frequently contradictory versions. For example, in 2013, the
governor of the State of Tachira Jose Vielma Mora said that Maduro was born in
El Palotal area of the town of San Antonio del Tachira, bordering Colombia.
Hermann Escarra, the favorite jurist of chavismo, has referred to the
president on several occasions, including in some sessions of the current
Constituent Assembly, as "Nicolas Alejandro Maduro Moros," including a middle
name that is not associated to the president not even in the papers kept in the
Supreme Court, nor in his file of the National Electoral
Council.
In the midst of all these events, Maduro's birth certificate
became a key piece to decipher the enigma. After a year and a half of
intensively checking the civil registries of Libertador Municipality in the west
central area of the Venezuelan capital, the team of Armando.info was on
the trail of the document.
Subject to the Kakfian caprice of those responsible, the
intentional disorder of completing personal proceedings in Venezuela, and
various statements from spokesmen of the Chavista regime -like Vielma
Mora, who in 2013 referred to three different parishes as the place of birth of
the Venezuelan ruler in separate interviews, the team members began to take
turns and search in all the registries of Caracas until mid October 2016. Then a
decision of the Constitutional Division of the Supreme Court of Justice revealed
that the president was registered in La Candelaria.
Hence, a case that is perhaps unusual arose — a president
whose place of birth was declared by decree. But the decision made it possible
to focus the tracking efforts on that registry, located on Avenida Universidad
of the Venezuelan capital city.
Every other Friday, as established by the arbitrary
consultation rules of the registry, a member of this team checked the volumes
where the presentations of newborns are recorded. It was decided to review the
books from 1962 to 1967, under the premise that in order to begin his first
studies, Maduro should have been enrolled in preschool education with an
official document sometime during his first five years of life. There was no
need to go that far. A volume of late 1964 containing scanned records only held
the birth certificate of the president of Venezuela.
To request this document at the registry of La Candelaria,
the interested parties must be there from Monday to Thursday before 7:00 AM to
get one of the numbers distributed to make a request. Only 80 numbers are
distributed and some people arrive at 4:00 AM to make sure that they can
complete the proceeding in one day. At the peak of the protests against the
regime, from April to August 2017, some people even spent the night to be among
the first. The increase in requests for birth certificates corresponded to the
exodus of the Venezuelan people during recent months.
Many indexes of the books checked by the Armando.info
team were torn out. When, as a test, the team requested the registry one of the
certificates previous to that of Nicolas Maduro, corresponding to Jose Eliseo
Arias and recorded in the same book, it turned out that the original volume was
not available for consultation by the public, though you could photocopy the
scanned document. This procedure confirms the secretiveness and mystery around
the volume containing the birth record of the president of Venezuela.
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A Matter of State
The registrar of La Candelaria Parish, Camilo Angel, does not
specify where Maduro's birth certificate is. He says: “It is protected, but I do
not know where it is. Sebin (Editor’s Note: acronym for the Bolivarian
Intelligence Service), as a political police, assumed the protection of this
information. But I do not know if Sebin, the Presidency of the Republic, the
Mayor's Office of Libertador, or the National Electoral Council has
it.”
Angel assures that he has seen it, because he has signed
copies thereof many times when Maduro was a representative of the Assembly—he
would become the president of the National Assembly a little more than a year
after, from January 2005 to August 2006. But now, he says: "It is confidential
information," as it is "a matter of State. He is the president of the Republic",
he affirmed.
"It was the same with Rafael Caldera, Jaime Lusinchi, and
others. It is confidential information and that has happened with all the
presidents of the Republic, not only with Nicolas."
Manuel Gil, head of the Directorate of Civil Registries of
Libertador Municipality, did not give news about the birth certificate either.
He said that it is beyond his powers. But minutes later he called the registrar
of La Candelaria to warn him about this search precisely when a member of the
Armando.info team asked his subordinate why do they only show a scanned
copy.
Unlike others, Maduro's certificate is in one of the few
scanned books of 1964. It is, according to the registrar, a pilot digitization
plan that has included—by chance—the volume containing the information on the
birth of the head of state. "Since we are in a transition there is no order.
Everything has been digitized in Antimano and El Valle, but we do not handle
that specific information,” he affirmed.
Armando.info has not been able to verify the
authenticity of the document through a technical expert’s test. However, we
established that the original book is outside the registry building in La
Candelaria, kept inside a safe, under the responsibility of Irving Gonzalez,
director of the National Registry Office. This office is attached to the
National Electoral Council (CNE) and operates on the second floor of the
headquarters that the voting agency has in the old Caracas Teleport building in
Plaza Venezuela, Libertador Municipality. Gonzalez, a CNE employee since
December 2014, was temporarily appointed director on May 10,
2017.
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Apart from Camilo Angel, Manuel Gil and Irving Gonzalez, only
a few from the National Registry Office know why there is only a scanned image
of the President's birth certificate available for consultation. This team could
not solve the mystery. But to get to the office of any of them, you have to go
first through Gutierrez’s filter, the figure who acts as a guide through
bureaucracy in every Venezuelan public office.
To be precise, Gutierrez is much more than a guide. The
neighbors of the alley that adjoins the back of the registry building, where
there is a secret entrance, affirm that he is the guardian of the place. The
taxi drivers who make their living in the alley call him when they see
suspicious persons hanging around the area to find out if he knows them. On
several occasions Gutierrez has run out thieves who steal spare parts or force
the entrances of the adjoining businesses. He has done it at night and with
punches, so they say, and he also warns the workers of the neighboring premises
when he has seen a break-in attempt when awakened by the noises.
Some say that he used to be a policeman. Others avoid
explaining why he lives in the registry office of La Candelaria. However, he
once said that he was there taking care of Maduro's birth certificate. That
night—according to the witnesses who told this history on the condition that
their identity was protected—he had drunk too much.
During the day, Gutierrez –a thin, dark-skinned man with
imposing tone of voice– opens the registry office, organizes queues, hands out
copies of requested birth certificates, and even parks Camilo Angel's car. He is
his right-hand man. They both get in and out the register from the back door.
Gutierrez did not accept to be interviewed and delegated the authorization to
Angel.
From afar
That birth certificate has only been seen from afar when the
president of the Electoral Power, Tibisay Lucena, showed it during an interview
with journalist Vladimir Villegas from Globovision, on October 10, 2013. Lucena
wanted to settle the strong controversy that arose about the nationality of
Maduro, who had been invested as head of state six months earlier, after winning
the elections called to elect the successor of the late President Hugo Chavez by
a close margin.
His detractors and a good part of the opposition press
maintained then that he was Colombian. The former representative of Panama to
the OAS, Guillermo Cochez, even showed an alleged document that claimed that the
president was born in Cucuta exactly one year before the date of birth recorded
in Venezuelan documents. Others assumed that he had, at least, double
nationality, because his mother, Teresa, was born in that city bordering with
Venezuela. All the suspicions seemed to be true because in addition to the
foregoing, Nicolas Maduro and his older sisters, Maria Adelaida and Josefina,
has consecutive identity card numbers. And they are registered to vote in San
Pedro Parish, a lower middle-class area in southwest Caracas, where the ruler
lived part of his childhood.
Lucena, a trusted figure of Chavismo in the electoral body,
did not offer much information about the alleged official document. She only
said that Nicolas Maduro was born in a polyclinic in Caracas and was registered
in La Candelaria Parish. The official confirmation of the location of his
alleged certificate was issued in October 2016, when the Constitutional Court,
in response to a request for "unnamed action for constitutionality control"
filed by Maduro's legal adviser at that time, Elvis Amoroso, confirmed that
Maduro is a Venezuelan citizen by birth, was presented at La Candelaria Parish,
has no other nationality, and "has fulfilled and meets the requirements provided
for in articles 41 and 227 of the Constitution of the Bolivarian Republic of
Venezuela to exercise the position of Constitutional President of the Bolivarian
Republic of Venezuela."
However, a thick veil still hides the document from
researchers and onlookers. The birth certificate has turned into one of the most
protected secrets of the Caribbean, and is treated with the disguise of the
great mysteries treasured by the Vatican in its archives. The zeal has
contributed to boost suspicions.
