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.
One hand of the government of Nicolás Maduro does not even know what the other hand does in Western Sahara, the former Spanish colony that Morocco illegally annexed itself in 1975. While the Chavismo pledges solidarity to the Saharawi pro-independence movement of the Polisario Front, the Venezuelan state's petrochemical companies continue to buy from the invader valuable phosphate cargoes extracted from mines in the occupied territories.
When Vice President Delcy Rodríguez turned to a group of Mexican friends and partners to lessen the new electricity emergency in Venezuela, she laid the foundation stone of a shortcut through which Chavismo and its commercial allies have dodged the sanctions imposed by Washington on PDVSA’s exports of crude oil. Since then, with Alex Saab, Joaquín Leal and Alessandro Bazzoni as key figures, the circuit has spread to some thirty countries to trade other Venezuelan commodities. This is part of the revelations of this joint investigative series between the newspaper El País and Armando.info, developed from a leak of thousands of documents.
Nicolas Maduro’s main contractor was arrested last Friday, right after landing at the international airport of Cape Verde, an archipelago in the Atlantic, on the gates of Africa. It may be his penultimate trip, if he is finally deported or extradited to the United States, as U.S. authorities expect. It would be the worst of all endings after many years travelling and earning miles but, above all, millions of dollars thanks to opaque corporate structures, whereby he managed preferential currencies, public works, food supplies for the CLAPs, contracts with PDVSA, and even the trade of Venezuelan gold and coal since 2013.
An unknown company called Salva Foods 2015 —created months before Nicolás Maduro put out his idea of establishing a network of stores for the state program of the Local Supply and Production Committees (CLAP)—is the current beneficiary of that business. They are called CLAP Stores and are mistaken for a state-owned company, with food outlets where there were once the premises of Abastos Bicentenarios (state-owned supermarkets). Behind that operation, the shadow of Colombian entrepreneurs Alex Nain Saab Morán and Álvaro Pulido Vargas reappears, both linked since early 2017 to the CLAPs due to a dummy company registered in Hong Kong.
