The accomplished election of the National Constituent Assembly has flourishing businesses between Mexico and Venezuela in suspense. The country of North America has considered adhering to the trade sanctions announced by Washington, now that the chavista regime will cease the Parliament elected in 2015 and will initiate a raid against the political opposition. If the decision materializes, it will be a blow to the flourishing trade exchange between the two countries, which has allowed stocking the Local Supply and Production Committees, President Nicolás Maduro’s emergency plan to face shortages and the discontent of the population with Mexican supplies. It is a silent business, marked by opacity, from which entrepreneurs linked to the Venezuelan regime, as Samark López and Alex Saab, have benefited.
The 'eternal commander' of the Bolivarian Revolution wanted to have his chain of socialist supermarkets and to that end he ordered the expropriation of the Éxito Stores in 2010, which he believed to be Colombian. By the time he found out that they belonged to the French Casino Group, it was too late: the Paris government had intervened and obtained not only a hefty payment for the business, but also helped retain a French participation in what became Abastos Bicentenario. Seven years later, when the supply chain languishes, the French continue to sell up to 3,000 tons a year of non-food products through a company in Panama.
Overbilling, up to three times the original value, in merchandise, freight and insurance; incomplete exports; disproportionate down payments; companies created ad hoc days before being awarded contracts; diversion of funds to accounts of tax havens. There is everything in the menu of tricks used by entrepreneur Juan José Levy to keep the lion's share in the contracts he signed to supply TV antennas, hygiene products and medicines from Argentina to Venezuelan. A look at the Argentine judicial investigation report reveals such a diversity of irregularities that it is difficult to understand why official companies Suvinca or Cantv chose him as a supplier, or maybe not.
Alex Saab's name reappears. The Colombian entrepreneur, linked to the contractor Global Construction Fund, seems to reinvent himself. Thanks to a company registered in Hong Kong, he has managed to sell food to Venezuela for over 200 million dollars in a negotiation approved with Nicolás Maduro’s signature and the intermediation of the State Government of Táchira, led by José Gregorio Vielma Mora. The products, paid with preferential dollars but billed with a surcharge, have been directed to the Local Committees for Supply and Production (CLAP), the flagship program whereby the Venezuelan authorities intend to mitigate hunger.
The inclusion of the Venezuelan businessman in the list of drug traffickers and money launderers in the United States of America reveals the plot of his business with Nicolás Maduro’s regime. First, he sold kits for the government's housing building programs. Then, he benefited from the massive sale of food and even Christmas decorations; all this through a structure that has found, to date, shelter in the jurisdiction of Barbados. The small Caribbean island acts as the lair that hides some of its assets to the U.S. Department of the Treasury.
The Government of Nicolás Maduro gave China the large-scale manufacture of the Venezuelan cuatro (four in English, as it has four strings). The policy of mass production of the instrument, with the purpose of adding it to the well-known National System of Children and Youth Orchestras, created by José Antonio Abreu, has prevailed over the quality entailed in its handcrafted frame. It is not, as it seems, just a cultural resignation or a contradiction with the nationalist discourse of the historical comrades of the self-styled Bolivarian revolution. Each unit manufactured in the Far East is a business for importers and ends up costing almost the same as the guitar manufactured in the country.
