While the network developed and grew to handle millions of barrels of crude oil and thousands of tons of other goods, the mystery also persisted as to how much of it was known to the Mexican government of Andrés Manuel López Obrador, and whether it had his approval. The Financial Intelligence Unit (UIF) began an investigation a year ago into some of those involved, but no further progress has been made in the Mexican justice system. The agency’s action was not only insufficient but came too late, just when Washington was ready to impose financial sanctions against Joaquín Leal and other protagonists of the business. 

However, an investigation by EL PAÍS and Armando.info, based on thousands of internal documents of the network, found evidence that at least one instance of the Mexican government could have acted as an ally of the network. As per papers of company Libre Abordo, it portrayed itself as a company designated by the Mexican government to carry out this type of transactions, and as a client of Segalmex —the food security agency of the Mexican State.

In addition, documents in possession of both media and interviews with several sources confirm a relationship between young businessman Joaquín Leal – at the apex of the plot – and the Undersecretary of Foreign Affairs for Latin America and the Caribbean, Maximiliano Reyes Zúñiga. The number two of the Foreign Ministry says in his defense that, as part of his responsibility, it is essential to support “every Mexican company, regardless of its name, regardless of its political or partisan position.” “We assume that the businessmen who approach us do so in good faith and wish to have better economic ties in the region,” adds Reyes in response to this report. 

“Libre Abordo was appointed by the Mexican government to join the humanitarian oil-for-food exchange program with Venezuela for the purpose of selling a variety of foodstuffs to be traded between both countries,” the company assures in a corporate presentation prepared in January 2020, which is part of the documents in the hands of both media. In the presentation, the company created ad hoc by Joaquín Leal for business transactions with Venezuela, explains that the agreement was conceived in a series of bilateral conversations between Caracas and Mexico City authorities.

All Aboard

The same presentation indicates that Libre Abordo reached an agreement with Segalmex, the government agency for food production and distribution. “Segalmex receives instructions from the federal government of Mexico to continue with the humanitarian aid, aiming to benefit the people of Mexico and Venezuela,” the document reads. According to Libre Abordo’s version, Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s administration instructed Segalmex to sell 210,000 tons of corn to Libre Abordo, destined for Venezuela. The amount coincides with the operation that Libre Abordo carried out in June 2019 with the state-owned Corporación Venezolana de Comercio Exterior (Corpovex). Two contracts were signed to supply those tons of corn and 1,000 tankers of drinking water in exchange for two million barrels of oil ⸺a two hundred-million euro operation.

Another document from the electronic file obtained for this journalistic investigation adds up. In the search for clients willing to process the PDVSA oil that had been exchanged for food, in early 2020, Libre Abordo contacted Reliance, the Indian refinery. Apropos of the due diligence process initiated by the Asian company to certify its prospective new supplier, Libre Abordo submitted a letter dated December 16, 2019, with the letterhead of Segalmex, the agency that was to sell to this company the corn intended for Venezuela. “We hereby confirm that we have received instructions from the Mexican government to proceed with this deal,” reads the missive that bears the purported signature of Segalmex’s then head of Administration and Finance, René Gavira. “The corn will be distributed in three deliveries scheduled for the third week of January 2020, the third week of February and the third week of March.” Sources close to the former official, who left office in June last year tangled up in corruption accusations, assure that the signature on the letter is not Gavira’s and claim that it was forged by Leal and his collaborators.

Libre Abordo also submitted proof of a bank transfer of December 11, 2019 to Segalmex for 330.6 million pesos ($15 million), as an advance for the delivery of the 210,000 tons of corn of the initial operation. The company that made the payment was Consorcio Panamericano SA de CV, a Mexican company in which Leal’s grandmother is a partner along with alleged front men, who participated in other entities of the businessman. Libre Abordo assured in the emails sent to Reliance that Consorcio Panamericano granted them a “loan” to complete the transaction. When ask on this matter for this report, Segalmex answered that it “will not comment” on the alleged transaction.

Those initial two million barrels negotiated in June 2019 turned to be at least 30 million barrels of crude oil in shipments that sailed between November 2019 and May 2020. According to emails in the possession of EL PAÍS and Armando.info, Libre Abordo explained that the jump from two to 30 million barrels was due to the international fall in the price of crude oil, since the equivalence of the exchanged goods had changed to the detriment of the Venezuelan party. The Mexican company sought advice from law firms to complete the operations through bartering under the guise of “humanitarian aid.”

The transaction, which included corn and tanker trucks in exchange for Venezuelan crude oil, undertook to alleviate the misfortunes of the regime in Caracas. Pressured by the U.S. sanctions imposed on some of its top officials and agencies, such as the state oil company PDVSA and the Central Bank of Venezuela, the Maduro government was facing more and more difficulties to place its dwindling crude oil production in international markets and obtain foreign currency. A professed humanitarian swap seemed to provide a convincing enough façade for the transaction to pass Washington’s scrutiny.

Despite the schemes, in the end, the U.S. Department of the Treasury sanctioned Libre Abordo and Joaquín Leal for doing business with Venezuela, a measure announced a year ago, in June 2020. At that point, the Mexican FIU started an investigation to follow the trail of the 200 million euros. The investigation made little progress until last May 18, when the FIU filed a complaint to the Attorney General’s Office requesting the seizure of a hundred or so accounts of Leal and Libre Abordo, as confirmed in this investigation. However, to date, there has not been any official pronouncement about the alleged agreements with Segalmex.

Real Link

Two testimonials sources assured the authors of this investigation that Maximiliano Reyes Zúñiga, the number two of the Mexican Foreign Ministry, enabled the approach between Leal and Segalmex in 2019. As these sources confirmed, the first contacts took place at a meeting in Monterrey, capital of the State of Nuevo León, with senior officials of the Venezuelan government, who visited Mexico and proposed to open a channel of institutional communication between the two administrations. That meeting was held shortly after the visit to Caracas of a group of Mexican businessmen, including José Adolfo Murat, Leal’s former partner. Then, based on the documentation obtained, there was a meeting with Omar Abou Nassif, brother of a businessman close to Venezuelan Vice President Delcy Rodríguez, who raised the possibility of using the Chihuahua branch of Industrias Lácteas Asturianas (ILA, producer of the Reny Picot brand) as a supplier in Mexico. Sources close to Segalmex confirmed this information. 

In the course of this investigative series, of which this report is a part, Joaquín Leal and the Venezuelan government were requested to give their versions, but no request received a response. 

The Administration of Andrés Manuel López Obrador, of the National Renewal Movement (Movimiento de Renovación Nacional – Morena), although leftist, has maintained an ambiguous position regarding the Venezuelan conflict since he came to power. He certainly avoided recognizing the opposition leader and president of the National Assembly, Juan Guaidó, as interim president, something that pleased Maduro, but at the same time he has helped to bring Venezuelan opponents out to give them asylum in Mexico. The relations of the Chavista government and the Venezuelan opposition with the Mexican diplomacy are close and frequent, to the point that Mexico is emerging as the prospective venue for an upcoming negotiation between both parties to seek a way out of the political and humanitarian crisis that has become chronic in the South American country. As to President López Obrador, who does not hold back his opinion on all kinds of matters at his morning conferences, has referred to Venezuela on very few occasions. Three days before the U.S. Treasury sanctioned the Mexican businessmen, he said that he would be willing to collaborate with humanitarian aid if the government of Caracas required it. “It (the Venezuelan government) has not made any request to us. But if it made a request pertaining a humanitarian need, we would act on it.”

Mexico did not need to have a leftist government to act as one of the apexes of a surreptitious trade scheme with the Chavista Venezuela. Already in 2016, under the administration of Enrique Peña Nieto, of the once hegemonic Institutional Revolutionary Party (Partido Revolucionario Institucional – PRI), businessmen close to Nicolás Maduro, such as Alex Saab, found in Mexico the suppliers to buy tons of food that were sent to Venezuela in the CLAP boxes. In 2018, the then authorities of the Office of Mexico’s Attorney General opened an investigation against that business —virtually on the eve of the elections won by López Obrador— for finding evidence of poor quality products and overpricing in the shipments. However, the case resulted in only small fines for the companies involved. 

But the potential involvement of a government entity and the fact that a senior Foreign Affairs official, Maximiliano Reyes Zúñiga, was aware of –or perhaps even promoted- the business scheme, would assign an unprecedented level of commitment by the Mexican government. 

Even though no other evidence has been found to confirm the link with Segalmex, there is no doubt about the relationship between Joaquín Leal —the young entrepreneur who took over the reins of the circuit from Mexico to evade international sanctions against the Chavista regime— and the number two of the Mexican Foreign Ministry, the Undersecretary (Vice Minister) of Foreign Affairs for Latin America and the Caribbean, Maximiliano Reyes Zúñiga. Leal and Reyes met at least twice in two restaurants in Mexico City before the deal between company Libre Abordo and Corpovex was closed, as the reporters confirmed with three different sources.

A Venezuelan Woman with Dual Loyalty

Those meetings set a public precedent pertaining the ties between Leal and Reyes, due to a column by Carlos Loret de Mola in the Mexico City newspaper, El Universal. The influential Mexican journalist brought into the open a letter, dated June 20, 2019, less than a week after the contracts between Libre Abordo and Corpovex were signed. The letter was to the attention of the Venezuelan government, where a Venezuelan, Haymel Brito Martínez, appears as a member of the Mexican delegation to the 49th General Assembly of the Organization of American States (OAS), held in those days in Medellín, Colombia. Haymel Brito was the only participant of the Mexican delegation headed by Reyes, who did not hold a high diplomatic position. In his column, Loret de Mola described Brito as “an influential woman in the Mexican Foreign Ministry” and wondered how it was possible that a diplomatic official “representing two countries” simultaneously, Mexico and the United Arab Emirates, could have been born “in another country,” Venezuela. After the spreading of the letter, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MFA) decided to leave Brito out of the delegation. Facing at least two requests for information, the Foreign Ministry denied that the woman worked at the Undersecretariat for Latin America. Nor does she appear in the directory as a fee-for-service employee of that office.

Based on her curriculum vitae, Brito Martínez has been a representative of Fedecámaras – Venezuela’s main business union –, analyst of the International Organization of Employers, intern at the United Nations, and has worked for the office of the ambassador of the United Arab Emirates in Mexico. It was during that stage of service for the Arab country, in late 2018, when the first meeting between Brito and Reyes took place, as at least two sources affirmed.

During the transition period from the government of Enrique Peña Nieto to that of Andrés Manuel López Obrador, in September 2018, the former mayor of Mexico City, Marcelo Ebrard, visited the UAE Embassy, as appointed foreign ministry. He was accompanied by part of his team, including the current undersecretary for Latin America and the Caribbean, Reyes Zúñiga. Soon after, Reyes and Brito began to actively interact on the social media and traveled together to different places, like Panama City, Buenos Aires and Barcelona, as this investigation has been able to verify.

Haymel Brito’s personal relationship with Joaquín Leal is also a fact, as evidenced by photos and messages on social media of her together with the closest entourage of the Mexican businessman. In July 2019, Brito began working as a director of Institutional Relations for Hábitos Luzy, the Mexican subsidiary of Luzy Technologies, one of the companies that were blacklisted by the U.S. Department of the Treasury along with Libre Abordo, and also part of Leal’s portfolio. The company specialized in health and food, and its most noticeable product was a mobile application to provide medical advice. From her position at Luzy, Brito managed the sale of medicines and medical equipment to the Panamanian government, directly supported by the Mexican Embassy in the Central American country.

On December 10, 2019, Maximiliano Reyes Zúñiga traveled to Buenos Aires to represent Mexico at the inauguration of Argentine President Alberto Fernández. According to transparency records, on that trip, the undersecretary made a stop in Panama to “hold meetings at the Mexican Embassy.” That same day, Brito shared on her social media pages that she was in Panama. Based on the emails, she visited the Mexican Embassy during that trip to discuss trade agreements between Luzy and the Panamanian government. In late 2019, the Mexican ambassador to Panama, Luis Manuel López Moreno, began to report his progress on behalf of the company to the Venezuelan woman, whom he called “master.” “We will meet before Friday to talk about the [Luzy] application. I will let you know as soon as I have an outcome,” the ambassador wrote to Brito in an email on December 16 about a meeting he had with a businessman, just a week after the visit. “Very well, ambassador,” she replied.

In a written response for this investigation, Venezuelan Haymel Brito assures that her “external advisory services” to Hábitos Luzy concluded in 2019 “and that had nothing to do with Venezuela or affairs in that country (...) I have no relationship with any Mexican government institution.” She adds that she learned about Libre Abordo through the publications of EL PAÍS newspaper in 2020, “when I was no longer there” [at Luzy].

Reyes’ Man in Caracas

The shadow of the Foreign Ministry over the Venezuelan oil scheme also extends to the Mexican Embassy in Caracas, especially with Reyes’ right-hand man in that delegation —Rodrigo Benedith Reyes. Both officials have known each other for at least a decade, when the now deputy foreign minister was a legislator in the Mexico City Assembly in 2009 for the Democratic Revolution Party (Partido de la Revolución Democrática – PRD, a leftist political party from which López Obrador and Morena broke away in September 2012) and the other was an advisor to the legislature. They also worked together as area directors in the Miguel Hidalgo borough (municipality) of Mexico City from 2012 to 2013. In September 2019, Benedith held the position of director of Urban Services of the Mayor’s Office of Azcapotzalco – another metropolitan municipality – when he was appointed, without any experience in the diplomatic sector, to be in charge of the economic cooperation and promotion of the Mexican representation in Venezuela. His name appears in the emails of Leal’s circle, who also boasted of having “contacts in Embassies and consulates.”

In an email that Joaquín Leal sent to his team on September 12, 2019, when the official had just arrived in office, the businessman asks them to send Benedith some cards and a contract.

The name of the Mexican official also appears in other communications. As in one dated April 1, 2020, in which the director of Libre Abordo, Olga María Zepeda Esparza, sends an email to the Mexican Embassy in Caracas informing his agreements with PDVSA. “We would like to give you some context related to our work as a Mexican company that provides humanitarian aid in Venezuela in exchange for oil,” reads the message, addressed to Benedith Reyes.

For this investigation, the reporters sent a detailed questionnaire to Maximiliano Reyes Zúñiga with ten questions on each of these specific issues. The undersecretary agreed to answer but with a general statement of nine paragraphs on the powers and objectives of his office, without confirming or denying anything. 

“As undersecretary for Latin America and the Caribbean, my responsibility is to be in permanent contact with all the governments of the region, based on the criteria set forth by the Mexican Constitution, which have always been publicly stated. Our principle is the utmost respect for the sovereignty of each country, and as far as possible, we are always willing to cooperate and collaborate in social, economic, cultural, humanitarian and commercial matters. And in this regard, we do not make exceptions with any government nor do we submit ourselves to the foreign policy of any country,” assures Reyes in his answer, who claims that he works “in favor of a solid and fluid dialogue with the private sector to improve the economic and commercial dynamics of our country in the region.” 

In this sense, Reyes assures that for his Undersecretariat (ministry division) “it is essential to support every Mexican company, regardless of its name, regardless of its political or partisan position. We assume that the businessmen who approach us do so in good faith and wish to have better economic ties in the region, based on a fundamental principle: win-win-win (Mexico wins, the country concerned wins, the businessman wins). In light of this, we have productive relations with many Mexican and foreign companies that fortunately see us as allies to facilitate their expansion, in the same way that other governments do with their companies.” Regarding the U.S. sanctions imposed on Libre Abordo and Leal, Reyes said, “Our line is public. We will never agree to solve anything through force or coercion, nor through sanctions. Our position is public and evident. We have always voted the same way in international organizations.”

Finally, regarding him knowing Joaquín Leal, he affirms that he “knew” the businessman together with “a group of Mexican and foreign investors in the energy sector, with whom I have had no contact for several months, before the sanctions were made public. My talks with them where about the same as with many other economic and business environments.”

* This is the second installment of the series “Mexican Bypass against the Sanctions” that Armando.info produced and publishes jointly with the newspaper El País of Madrid.

Since mid-2019, Alex Saab —detained in Cape Verde on June 12, 2020, and indicted on money laundering charges by a Miami court, where he could be extradited— and Joaquín Leal controlled a good part of PDVSA’s production with the marketing of crude oil through Mexican company Libre Abordo. Consequently, last year, the U.S. Department of the Treasury included the Mexican businessman in the so-called Clinton List of the OFAC (Office of Foreign Assets Control of the Department of the Treasury), where Saab and his partner, Álvaro Pulido Vargas, were listed since mid-2019. Along with that core oil operation, Saab and Leal expanded their lineup of Venezuelan products by incorporating coal from Zulia.

Soot Trace

A presidential decree published in Official Gazette No. 41.472 of August 31, 2018, announced the creation of the “joint venture” between state-owned Carbones del Zulia (Carbozulia) and the unknown Turkish company, Glenmore Proje Insaat. That authorization by Nicolás Maduro displaced the 2017-alliance between Colombian-Panamanian Inter American Coal and Carbozulia to make way for Alex Saab as a partner of the Venezuelan State. The Colombian businessman remained in the shadows, as in most of his activities with chavismo, but his collaborators appeared in the documents of the companies created ad hoc for the occasion.

The trace left in the articles of incorporation of Glenmore Proje Insaat leads to Lorenzo Antonelli, a 28-year-old Italian young man, director of several companies devised by the Colombian businessman and, more importantly, his brother-in-law. The company also has legal status in the United Kingdom, where Antonelli was a director. The scheme repeated the pattern followed with gold, where Antonelli was hidden behind another Turkish company that teamed up with Minerven when the state-owned company was already run by Adrián Perdomo Mata, a former employee of Saab and Pulido.

Antonelli’s ties to the business dealings of the businessman arrested a year ago in Cape Verde have been revealed in police investigations, like the one carried out by the Italian Guardia Di Finanza, which linked him and Saab’s wife to possible money laundering operations.

For the coal business, Glenmore’s attempt was only the first step. Joaquin Leal and his operations in Mexico completed the circle. That country had already served as a base for Alex Saab and Álvaro Pulido’s business, at least since 2016. From there, they bought and shipped thousands of CLAP boxes with poor quality food for Maduro’s regime after guaranteeing themselves millionaire contracts through companies from Hong Kong, first, and then from Turkey and the United Arab Emirates. In October 2018, the then Attorney General’s Office in Mexico confirmed the irregularities in the business and opened an investigation against several of those companies, but they finally got off with minor fines. So that this precedent did not inhibit them from adopting Mexico again as a base for their venture with Venezuelan coal.

Once Alex Saab’s relationship with Joaquín Leal was consolidated, the business in Mexico multiplied. The success of the duo can be measured by the sudden rise in 2019 of Venezuelan coal exports, which had been sluggish for years.

Aztec Empire —with a Hint of Greek and Colombian

“I am writing you to establish a first contact and make us known as a company. We have managed to gain access to a very high-level coal source and I would like to make ourselves available to offer you a first trial shipment.” So begins an email sent on April 3, 2020 from Imperium DMCC to several prospective customers for the purchase of the mineral.

Imperium DMCC was registered in 2018, in Dubai, one of the United Arab Emirates. Although it has Gyagkos Stylianou, a Greek, and Omeros Nishiotis, a Cypriot, as directors, it is actually another company of Joaquin Leal’s extensive portfolio. With this company, the team of the Mexican businessman and Alex Saab negotiated in May of last year the arrival in Venezuela of at least five ships of Iranian gasoline, and also sought to bring foodstuffs from Mexico. In communications obtained by Armando.Info and EL PAÍS, Imperium DMCC acts as a trader of the Venezuelan coal.

“This week, we finished loading the first spot cargo of 30,000 MT with the following specifications attached. This is the first cargo of a 3,080,000 MT +/- 3% forward contract,” continued that April 3, 2020 email. That contract alone far exceeded the 80,000 MT that Carbozulia produced in 2018, as company’s workers reported at that time. Four days before that email, the Venezuelan customs agency published on Twitter that they were carrying out the “recognition” of 41,000 tons of coal that would be exported, precisely from the “dock of Carbozulia.”

Any doubts that potential clients might have about the origin of the coal were cleared up in an email sent on May 25, 2020, addressed to the authorities of the port of Lázaro Cárdenas, on the Mexican Pacific coast. “We have a contract for 3 million tons with Carbozulia, 120,000 MT of which were already exported to Altamira [another Mexican port], sold on a spot basis to CFE (...) We would be very interested in taking our product to the TPP terminal in Lázaro Cárdenas to store it there temporarily and enable the sale operation to CFE from this point.”

The email also included the technical specifications of the product taken from the Paso Diablo mine, exploited by Carbozulia. Although in that communication it was assured that Imperium DMCC had already sold 120,000 tons to the Mexican Federal Electricity Commission (CFE) and that Joaquín Leal had experience in the Mexican electricity market, there are no indications that those deals have materialized.

Instead, the communications and documents reviewed jointly by Armando.Info and EL PAÍS reveal the pressure to try to sell and store the coal assigned to Leal.

In addition to Mexico, Leal’s team sought to place the mineral in Guatemala, Honduras and the Dominican Republic. In no case is there evidence that the attempts were successful. As recorded in hundreds of emails, the coal was offered to companies, such as Trafigura, a global commodities trading giant with headquarters in Geneva and Singapore; or BB Energy, a Lebanese consortium that appears in the Mossack Fonseca documents contained in the so-called Panama Papers for managing an offshore company in the isthmus that traded millions of dollars of Russian oil in Latin America during the nineties.

In some communications, Imperium DMCC claims to act on behalf of Mexican company Suministradora Bennu. Enrique Woodhouse, the owner of Bennu, explained for this article that Joaquín Leal asked his company to receive the coal on consignment, imported from Venezuela free of charge, until the deal with the Mexican state electricity company CFE could be closed. But the origin of the goods, according to the shipping documents, was not Carbozulia, but Glenmore, the Turkish company behind which is Alex Saab’s brother-in-law, Lorenzo Antonelli.

The link of Imperium DMCC, Leal’s trading company, with Alex Saab was also evidenced in writing in the company’s exchanges. “We cannot carry on this cooperation with Alex Sabb [sic],” reads one of the emails that the Liberian-flagged Ceto Shipping sent to the company, in that case, after more than 100 days of disagreements over the payment of one of the fuel cargoes from Iran. This dispute was reviewed last year by Bloomberg agency.

The business explains the rebound in Venezuela’s coal exports, which in 2019 accounted for some US$ 40 million, as Reuters reviewed. In 2020, the figures soared higher —one destination alone, the United Kingdom, received 460,000 tons of the Venezuelan mineral, valued at US$ 46 million, while almost 220,000 tons arrived in Spain for US$ 23 million, according to United Nations trade statistics.

Alex was Axel

All the e-mails sent by Imperium DMCC, offering the Venezuelan coal, bear the signature of Alex Rodríguez, a relatively common combination of first and last name in Spanish and the namesake of the former Major League Baseball player, a star of the New York Yankees, among other teams. But there is a code that makes it possible to decipher that the sender adopted a pseudonym, as at the time he played with anagrams. In the communications, the name was almost always accompanied by a telephone number that, in reality, matches that of Axel Galit Capriles Hernández, a young Venezuelan businessman with experience as a commodities broker and son of the well-known psychologist, Axel Capriles Méndez, who in recent years has been involved in the real estate business in Madrid.

That telephone number is the same one that Armando.info called months ago to contact Axel Capriles Hernández (junior) before the publication of a first report on his connection with Joaquín Leal. Just as on that occasion he declined to comment, this time he did not respond to a request for an interview to clarify the use of the pseudonym Alex or other aspects of his relationship with Joaquín Leal.

In a communication sent to the authors after the publication of this report, Axel Capriles — through his lawyer in Madrid, Efrén Díaz— denies that he is actually Alex Rodríguez or that he has ever used such a pseudonym.

Before signing Imperium DMCC’s communications, that name and alleged alias of Alex Rodriguez already appeared in 2019 as a trader of Libre Abordo, the Mexican company that negotiated tanker trucks and corn in bulk with the state-owned Corpovex in exchange for Venezuelan oil, and which in June 2020 triggered the sanctions by the Department of the Treasury against Joaquin Leal for considering him as the head of a scheme to evade sanctions against PDVSA, imposed in early 2019.

On one occasion, the mask of the pseudonym was uncovered by the interlocutors. That email claiming the failure to pay, sent by the shipping company, Ceto Shipping, to Imperium DMCC was precisely addressed to “Axel G”.

The Venezuelan businessman’s lawyer, Efrén Díaz, acting as his spokesman in a written letter, insists that the inclusion of Axel Capriles’ name in that email was a “mistake,” but fails to provide proofs to support this statement. According to the lawyer, the confusion arose “because a wrong email was mistakenly sent to Mr. Capriles Hernandez, an email which he never had access to nor was he aware of it.”

The partnership of Axel Capriles with Joaquín Leal has been confirmed – for some time now – in companies like Generadora de Electricidad y Gas in Mexico, registered in Guanajuato, capital city of the state with the same name in central Mexico.  His lawyer acknowledges from Madrid the partnership between Capriles and Leal, but points out that it was “a brief association” in that electricity company, which did not prosper in the end, and “the legal issues” of Joaquín Leal “accelerated the early closing of the project.”  

Sources familiar with Joaquín Leal’s business dealings, as well as the role that Axel Capriles Junior played in Mexico, confirm that Alex Rodríguez was a pseudonym of the young Venezuelan. “Axel’s nickname is Alex Rodríguez. He used a fake WhatsApp account for his conversations with PDVSA,” states a businessman, who prefers anonymity.

Those versions are also denied by lawyer Efrén Díaz, representative of Axel Capriles Hernández.  “Mr. Capriles Hernández has never participated in any oil or coal process, negotiation, project or scheme nor with the persons mentioned.”

After the sanctions of Donald Trump’s administration against Joaquín Leal, Axel Capriles’ trace in Mexico vanished. The telephone number provided in the emails with the name of Alex Rodriguez seems to be inactive. In digital media in Spain, there have been recent statements by Capriles Hernández promoting Totam Technologies Inc, a mobile payment application in gas stations.

The platform belongs to Totam Servicios Tecnológicos, a company registered by Axel Capriles in Monterrey, in May 2019, when he was also a trader of Venezuelan coal in the scheme devised by Alex Saab and Joaquín Leal to evade U.S. sanctions against the Chavista regime. 

* This is the third installment of the series "Mexican Bypass against Sanctions" that Armando.info produced and publishes jointly with the newspaper EL PAÍS of Madrid.

NOTE TO READERS. During the reporting process of this article, the editors tried to get Axel Capriles Hernández’s version, among that of others mentioned, but he did not respond to the journalistic requests. Only after the piece was published, Mr. Capriles Hernandez’s lawyer in Spain sent a letter to the editors of EL PAÍS and Armando.info with some comments regarding the article and his version of the matters in which he is mentioned. For the sake of a more comprehensive understanding of the story and, in accordance with the ethical standards of both publications, some quotes from that letter were added to the original text, quotes included in the section under the crossheading “Alex was Axel.”

They began to outline the formula that they found for their plans after a request for clarification in an email sent on July 16, 2019, barely a month after the first “humanitarian” operation of Leal’s Mexican network with Venezuela —an alleged barter of two million barrels of oil for tanker trucks and white corn. “What would be the specific object of Paquete Alcance? I am asking because the object defined in the incorporation papers is extremely diverse and confusing, as it combines food with technology,” reads the communication, which is part of the leak of thousands of documents that the newspaper EL PAÍS of Madrid and Armando.info obtained and reviewed together to produce this series of articles entitled “Mexican Bypass against Sanctions.”

The email with the question was sent by Venezuelan lawyer Roxana Daneska Mundarain López. The lawyer was already someone Leal trusted in Caracas and had represented him in Venezuela in the operations of Libre Abordo, the Mexican company that first acted as a pivot for the scheme with tentacles in 30 countries to avoid U.S. financial and commercial sanctions.

Roxana Mundarain was also in charge of registering in Venezuela, in September 2019, the company she was asking about in her July 2019 email , “Paquete Alcance” (literally, Reach Package).

Paquete Alcance was the play on words, certainly suggestive and catchy, that Leal used to name an alternative purchasing system, outlined to replace the use of Visa and Mastercard credit and payment cards in Venezuela “in the event that they leave the country,” and use it with the government’s social programs through a prepaid card system of its own and even collect remittances sent by Venezuelans abroad. This is stated in a slide presentation that is also included in the leak that EL PAÍS and Armando.info received.

Although registered in Mexico, Paquete Alcance was expected to be part of Mystic Universe, Joaquín Leal’s holding company in the British Virgin Islands, with a mirror company in Canada. Both companies were registered in May 2019, precisely at the early stage of Leal’s trips to Caracas and his billion-dollar transactions, according to information of the companies. The Mystic umbrella organization also covered Libre Abordo, used since shortly before in underground business with Caracas and eventually sanctioned by Washington, closed to filing bankruptcy in June 2020.

After the inquiries that Mundarain sent by email, the company’s object was finally established in its registration documents, with focus on the provision of a “service to reload balance or credit for consumption of goods or services” and “services to send funds abroad and receive funds from abroad,” as per commercial records.

Paquete Alcance achieved an unusual milestone in the state bureaucracy, which is rarely willing to facilitate the incorporation of companies in the pro-Chavez Venezuela —Sudeban, the regulatory agency of banks and financial institutions, accepted the registration of the company even though it had not been registered in the commercial registry.

Once the business was defined, the next step was to move forward in the operational platform to get remittances from Venezuelan migrants, almost simultaneously with Nicolás Maduro’s interest—as high as the hyperinflationary rate—in “digitalizing” the economy.

Captive Clients

The plan of Joaquín Leal and his company Paquete Alcance still lacked an ally in Venezuela, one that could provide the business establishments with the necessary points of sale for users to cash or redeem remittances received from abroad. That ally was to be Alex Saab with his CLAP Stores, which he managed through company Salva Foods 2015, after Maduro surreptitiously privatized many establishments that where, until then, attached to the failed state supermarket network, Abastos Bicentenario.

Since late 2017, the then unknown Salva Foods began to take establishments of Abastos Bicentenario to set up the CLAP Stores. The president of the company was Carlos Rolando Lizcano Manrique, also a Colombian national and trader of Alex Saab and his partner, Álvaro Pulido Vargas, in Venezuela.

The documents of Paquete Alcance indicate that the Salva Foods establishments were open to serve as “marketing channels,” where clients of the system would redeem remittances wired or buy merchandise charged to prepaid cards. The other channel would be “institutional or official to address government issuance programs.”

Paquete Alcance’s projection for the first year of operations in Venezuela was to issue 10 million cards and set up 80,000 to 100,000 points of sale, with an investment of US$ 30 million.

The papers in the hands of EL PAÍS and Armando.Info reflect the scale that Leal and Saab were preparing to give to the business —on average, they calculated that each cardholder would move US$ 140 a year, which was equivalent to having the transit of some US$ 1.4 billion a year. The company’s treasury would be in Mexico and in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, a jurisdiction where both Leal and Saab usually incorporate their companies.

According to the presentation of the project, Leal and Saab were aiming at getting US$ 7 billion out of those US$ 1.4 billion, which was the amount in which they placed the volume of remittances sent by expatriates to their relatives and correspondents in Venezuela. In other words, they sought to channel 20% of the flow of foreign currency. But figures from specialized consulting firms, like Ecoanalítica in Caracas, recently put the annual value of remittances at US$ 3.5 billion, half of what was estimated by the company controlled by Joaquín Leal, which means that the goal of the businessmen might be to get 40% of the remittances. In any case, Leal and Saab were betting on getting a piece of that cake, fed by Venezuelans abroad.

In many presentations of Paquete Alcance, it is assured that the company had four years of experience in Mexico, a huge market for transfers and parcels from abroad, “by finding a market niche in remittances” and going “against large companies that only seek to extract the largest amount of resources from migrants.”

However, there is no evidence that the experience they boasted about was true. In fact, in order to operate in Venezuela, the promoters of the system sought an alliance with Edenred, the French company that manages services for companies and the payment of benefits through the Cesta Ticket cards.  

When the Package reaches them

In fact, the documents supporting this report confirm that the team of Joaquín Leal and Paquete Alcance established contacts in Caracas with Edenred’s local managers. In an email dated July 10, 2019, Leal wrote to an Edenred executive, “I hereby attach the presentation we discussed yesterday. I look forward to your comments and the steps to follow.”

The intent of Paquete Alcance was for Edenred to provide the operating platform for remittances, as well as the connection to the CLAP Stores and any eventual social programs of the Maduro government that he may choose to use the system. In September 2019, the lawyers of Paquete Alcance and Edenred were still holding meetings, where Leal was represented by Haymel Brito, a key player in the connection of the Mexican businessman with the authorities of the government of President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, even though she is a Venezuelan citizen.

A year after those communications and meetings, everything went awry for Joaquín Leal and Alex Saab. The U.S. Department of the Treasury sanctioned Leal on June 18, 2020, after being identified as the ringleader of a scheme to evade the U.S. sanctions imposed on the Venezuelan state-owned oil company, PDVSA. While Saab was arrested a week before in Cape Verde, when he was making a stopover in that African nation to follow an itinerary that was to take him to Iran on behalf of Nicolás Maduro under an alleged diplomatic status, according to the counsel for the defense of the Colombian trader after his detention.

Both events, the accusation against Leal and Saab’s arrest, may have stopped the business that both conceived to get the remittances of Venezuelans abroad. Although Maduro continues to insist on the need to move towards an economy with a digital currency, there is no evidence that the plan of Paquete Alcance had materialized or even turned into a more or less similar operating system, like the one already installed under the name of Carnet de la Patria. 

The last traces on the social network of the initiative of Paquete Alcance date from July 7 to August 3, 2020, shortly after the bad luck—instead of the package of millions they expected—reached Leal and Saab.

As gathered from a large file of documents, jointly obtained and processed by the Spanish newspaper EL PAÍS and Armando.info, which has given rise to this series of investigative reports entitled “Mexican Bypass against Sanctions,” a company unknown in the raw material production business, called Consorcio Panamericano de Exportación (Copaex), proposed to the presidency of CVG a plan to “reactivate the aluminum industry in Venezuela.”

The project with CVG was another idea of Mexican businessman Joaquín Leal Jiménez, an ally of Alex Saab in Mexico, who activated a secret network for the trading of Venezuelan commodities designed from an original request of Venezuelan Vice President Delcy Rodríguez to solve the inconveniences generated by the national 5-day blackout, in March 2019. By a subtle irony, it was precisely that electricity crisis what condemned the state-owned aluminum industry to inoperability… the electricity from Guayana —a Venezuelan region south of the Orinoco River, rich in minerals and water flows— until then abundant, continuous and inexpensive, is one of the essential supplies for this industry to produce. To concentrate aluminum in its cells, Alcasa and Venalum, the two CVG companies engaged in the aluminum market, require around 1,500 megawatts per day.

The blackout represented the coup de grace for an industrial park that in March 2019 reached a production equal to barely 10 percent of its installed capacity. It was the end of a decline that began in 2010, when the late former President Hugo Chávez ordered the aluminum industry to shut down in order to save electric power during the first great crisis of the electric utility, officially blamed on that year’s drought and the drop of the level of the Guri dam, on the upper Caroní River, in the State of Bolívar, one of the three rivers —together with Delta Amacuro and Amazonas— of the Guayana region. If the production of this conglomerate of mineral processing companies has never been the same since then, after the 2019 blackout, it fell to zero.

A Blessing for Leal’s sake

The debacle, however, looked like a business opportunity for Leal, who was a rising star in Mexico, as a businessman in the electricity sector. He saw within reach the possibility of adding another Venezuelan raw material to his portfolio of products for the global market.

Through the unknown Copaex, he proposed to the Venezuelan counterpart to make a one-off US$ 300-million investment to supply and transport “gas-based power generation plants of 200-MV capacity” which, together with an alliance with the Venezuelan state-owned Corporación Eléctrica Nacional (Corpoelec), would be enough to activate within nine months 125 out of the 905 aluminum cells paralyzed since the blackout of March 2019.

After one more year, according to the document addressed with much familiarity to “Pedro,” referring to Pedro Maldonado, president of CVG and trusted man of Vice President of Economy Tarek El Aissami, Leal and Copaex estimated that all the cells could already be active.

“Copaex will send power generating plants to Venezuela as of July 2019, and expects to complete the installed capacity of 200 MW within the next 12 months. With the 16 MV, it is estimated that 10 cells will be reactivated with a production of 510 tons per month. To start with the production, it is required to enter into a cooperation agreement by and between Venalum and Copaex, where the contributions of the parties and their benefit will be determined,” reads the proposal in an optimistic tone, dated June 10, 2019.

While in the letter addressed to the president of CVG, the Mexican company assured that it was solely motivated to submit the proposal due to its “commitment to the industrial development of Venezuela,” and highlighted that Leal had accumulated experience in the electricity business, the plan fell short when it came to envisioning the eventual rescue of the Venezuelan aluminum industry.

The business proposal acknowledged that at least 1,448 megawatts of generation would be needed to activate all the aluminum cells, but did not disclose whether the new added capacity was part of the proposed agreement or how many power generation plants it entailed. In fact, it ended up explicitly assigning to the state-owned Corpoelec the responsibility of generating and supplying some 1,250 megawatts of the required capacity from the planned Tocoma hydroelectric plant on the lower Caroní River, which never went on stream despite the state’s injection of nearly US$ 10 billion. However, it does make it clear that Copaex’s services would be paid “in kind with produced aluminum.”

Resuscitation maneuver

The bet on aluminum was a maneuver that Leal attempted to channel income towards the aforementioned Consorcio Panamericano de Exportación (Copaex), created as a variable stock corporation in 1998, but finally registered in the Mexican state of Guanajuato in 2017, with a very broad corporate object, slightly inclined to livestock or agricultural activity. The company was not created by Leal, who later acquired it through relatives.

The company was registered with a capital of 50,000 Mexican pesos and with three members on its board of directors, until August 2019, when its initial corporate purpose —also very broad but now with some ambition in the field of food and oil trading— was modified, and the three directors who were on record at its creation were removed from their positions giving way to two new members, María Guadalupe Villanueva Ayala and Francisco González Ramírez. Ramírez was the signatory of the proposal to CVG, as president of the Consortium, which, based on the dates, he had just joined.

At an Extraordinary Meeting held in October 2019, the company took another turn with the increase of capital from 50,000 to 100,000 Mexican pesos (from US$ 2,500 to US$ 4,500) and the inclusion of a new board member, María Teresa Alfaro Castañeda, Joaquín Leal’s grandmother, which ratifies a common practice in Leal’s companies —he does not appear in the articles of incorporation of the companies, but his relatives.

Three months after that modification, the company made a transfer with a check for 15 million dollars to another company of Leal’s scheme, Libre Abordo, which it gave in turn to the state-owned Seguridad Alimentaria Mexicana (Segalmex) as part of the payment for 210,000 tons of white corn that would eventually be exchanged for oil in Venezuela. This was one of the first moves of a sophisticated corporate structure, in which Alex Saab also participated to obtain resources in exchange for oil and thus evade U.S. sanctions. Then came the control of coal, the interest in collecting remittances from Venezuelans abroad, and aluminum.

A year after that signature, which meant the entry of Leal’s relatives in Copaex, in March 2020, the “variable” capital stock of the company dramatically increased to 100 million pesos (a little more than five million dollars); it multiplied by 1,000. The two former shareholders resigned, as per the minutes to which EL PAÍS and Armando.info have had access, and Leal’s grandmother is joined by a new partner, Carlota Leal Jiménez, Joaquín’s sister, with a minimum 0.5-percent share.

While Copaex was trying to close the deal with CVG, it also offered to place a shipment of 180,000 tons of coal in Central American ports, specifically in Guatemala, for a value of 12.3 million dollars. This sales proposal had much clearer technical specifications than the proposal to reactivate aluminum. Although nowhere it is stated in the document that the coal was of Venezuelan origin, by that time, the network of Leal and Saab was managing the coal exports of the state-owned Carbozulia.

There is no indication that the business proposed by Consorcio Panamericano de Exportación had materialized. Reactivating Alcasa and Venalum with a 200-megawatt gas plant is virtually impossible. An engineer with over 20 years of experience in the aluminum industry, who prefers to keep his name confidential, explains, at the request of the reporters, what is really needed for this basic company to resume operations. “The total energy requirement for a 100 percent production of the aluminum industry is around 1,800 to 2,000 megawatts, equivalent to 18 or 20 percent of the capacity of Guri, with a total capacity of 10,300 megawatts. It is not possible to talk about package power plants of this size or about sectioned plants that are gradually added. It is necessary to have a highly reliable dedicated system, which would require a large investment or the recovery of the national interconnected system within a clear balance strategy between the consumption of the industry and that of the rest of the country.”

On the other hand, the improvised scheme seemed to be a great deal for businessman Joaquín Leal. What began under the guise of a “humanitarian exchange” of oil for goods, ended up opening a source of Venezuelan raw material to feed his energy business in Mexico, as he once envision, or to resell it in a hungry global market, just before the outbreak of the pandemic, for goods like oil, coal and aluminum.

But that offer was as far from reality as it was from Venezuela. Deceived, Lilia ended up  as a hostage of a sexual exploitation network in Trinidad and Tobago. Like her, over 21,000 Venezuelan women, both adults and minors, have been victims of human trafficking in the last six years in that country, as per official figures from the Caribbean Community (Caricom). The victims, according to a Caricom report, are usually between 18 and 25 years old, although a significant number are between 16 and 17, and some, even younger.

Once recruited by criminal gangs?often through deceit to get them to accept their transfer to the island?, they are then subjected to conditions of slavery through physical and psychological violence. This journey of horror leads the victims to prolonged sexual exploitation, which can result in arrest, a dangerous escape, or death. Meanwhile, the human trafficking business between both countries remains profitable and the criminals go unpunished.

Deceptive job offers  are often one of the most common recruitment strategies that these criminal gangs use, a fail-safe bait in a country with 94 percent poverty, according to a 2020 survey by Universidad Catolica Andres Bello. The financial situation incited an unprecedented 18 percent migration of the population ?a total of 5.5 million Venezuelans in the last six years, based on data from the United Nations Refugee Organization.

Lilia told her parents that she was going to a party at a friend’s home. That night, in early November 2019, the teenager left with a small purse only. Her departure did not raise any suspicion in Jorge,* her father, but worries began when she had not returned home a few hours later.

The following days, she sent messages to her closest on Facebook, which intended to be reassuring, “with very vague information, no word about where she was or who she was with,” affirms Jorge. It seemed that she was in Colombia or on her way there, but she did not give any information that allowed to locate her. Then, three weeks later, her father received a phone call that confirmed his worst fears ?his daughter had been arrested in a police raid in Cunupia, in Trinidad and Tobago, along with dozens of teenage girls, who were to be sexually exploited.

About 50 trafficked women were locked up in different rooms, in a bar in the Chaguanas region and in a house located in the Diego Martin sector, in the northeast of the island, according to media reports. These places were a sort of “collection centers,” from where the women were to be distributed in many nightclubs on the island, as the reports said. Like Lilia, there were other Venezuelan teenagers from El Furrial - another town in the State of Monagas - and from Maracay, State of Aragua.

Facebook chats, which her father could check later on, show that her recruiter convinced Lilia for months to undertake the trip. The Facebook profile of this trafficking networks’ recruiter shows a very young girl with a network of more than 2,600 friends. This list includes hundreds of names of teenagers, mainly students from different high schools and universities located in Maturin, but also from different cities in the eastern part of the country. 

“Maybe we, as parents, should take more precautions,” Jorge questions himself. “I always had so much fear and talked to her a lot to protect her, but my daughter had to learn it in the worst way. Financial conditions make people desperate and then come these type of individuals to offer quick solutions,” he complains.

A misleading job offer was the same bait that recruited Zurima,* 29, a resident of Petare, Caracas. She and another woman were recruited in 2019 by a man named Jonathan. Zurima held at that time a position as a telephone sales executive for a courier company, but her salary ?back then the minimum wage in Venezuela was equal to less than $6? was insufficient to cover her expenses, especially those of her father, who was ill and lived in the State of Sucre.

“I used to send medicines to my dad, but I couldn’t manage it all. We had our friend Jonathan, who told us that he was doing well in construction there, in Trinidad and Tobago. I even knew his family, his girlfriend. He always told us that there were job opportunities cleaning houses, or in bars or restaurants. Until he told us about the opportunity to take care of the mother of a Trinidadian, who, according to him, was a serious man,” recalls Zurima.

To travel to Trinidad, they had to go to Güiria, also in the east of the country, from where they would take a boat to the island. The price of the ticket was US$ 500 for both friends, but they managed to raise the half only. The rest was to be covered by their employer, as they agreed with the man in charge of the boat that would disembark on the island. But once they arrived at their destination, their supposed employer announced that he would not pay the full amount, so the captains withheld their passports, which they never got back. They had already become - without even suspecting it - hostages of a human trafficking gang.

The Journey

Until a few years ago, Venezuelan trafficking victims, on a smaller scale, used to leave the country on commercial flights to Trinidad. But in recent years, the States of Sucre and Delta Amacuro have become the hot spots from which peñeros (small fishing boats) constantly depart for the island, a situation that has not stopped despite travel restrictions imposed during the covid-19 pandemic.

A friend who lived in Güiria convinced Maritza* to make the trip to Trinidad and Tobago with the promise that she would get a job as a waitress. Born in Irapa, State of Sucre, she recalls that this person assured her that her pay would be “decent” and that they would even give her a place to live. He tried to persuade her to get three other girls to travel with her, but she could not convince others.

Irapa and Güiria, two towns in the State of Sucre, in eastern Venezuela, are among the places that the Caricom report identifies as the most active in recruiting victims for trafficking networks. The document puts the number of victims extracted from that area in the last six years for sexual exploitation in Trinidad at 4,000. However, the victims taken to these departure points are also recruited in different Venezuelan cities, including Caracas, La Guaira, San Cristobal, Maracay, Maturin, Valencia and Puerto Ordaz.

Survivors of human trafficking report that they had to go through at least three stages within the Venezuelan territory before being embarked. In each of these stages, those involved play a specific role, not necessarily connected to the next links. Once they have been recruited by a friend or acquaintance for the criminal organizations, the victims fall into the hands of groups that will take them to the points where they will be held for several days, waiting to board the transport that will take them to their destination.

Maritza set out on April 14, 2019, from her village to Güiria, a coastal journey that takes about 50 minutes by car.  She, who was then 17 years old, had had to wait a month while her recruiter rounded up his other victims. When she arrived, her friend took her directly to Las Salinas, another coastal sector of the State of Sucre, which has become one of the clandestine and early morning departure points.

Before boarding the boat, Maritza was taken to a house with open spaces and a patio with banana trees, where she met 20 other women, five men and the captain. They all waited under the shade of the tropical fruit tree until nightfall. But that day, they did not leave. A boy arrived in the early hours of the morning to warn that the Trinidad Coast Guard was keeping “heavy” watch in the area.

Other obstacles would appear on the way, or rather, in the middle of the sea. The boat left Las Salinas at midnight and, shortly after leaving, the engine died. The captain returned to shore and Maritza specifies that the official time of their departure from Venezuela was at half past midnight and their arrival in Trinidad at six thirty in the morning.

Navigation between the Paria peninsula and Trinidad can be hostile and dangerous. Victims agree that traveling aboard these peñeros is a chilling experience. The fear of waves crashing against an overloaded boat is present throughout the journey. In fact, there is word that four boats have been wrecked in the last two years.

Even though this is a traditional trade route in the area, its use as a migration route has consistently grown along with the Venezuelan crisis, and has not stopped during the covid-19 pandemic, as it is estimated that one to two boats still depart every night, based on figures released in January by the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs of the United Nations Organization. All in all, this has occurred due to the corruption and blind eye of Venezuelan authorities, who are responsible for supervising the boats both in Tucupita and in Güiria, who fail to carry out the required migratory and port registrations, or charge fees for each irregular peñero leaving for Trinidad, according to testimonies of travelers and data from the OAS Working Group for Venezuelan immigrants and refugees, consulted for this investigation.

It was on that route between Paria and Trinidad that the boats named Jhonaily Jose and Ana Maria disappeared in April and May 2019, and so far, there is no information about 60 of their passengers, who are still missing. It was known that several of the teenage girls and women on those boats had been pre-sold to human trafficking gangs. In December 2020, the boats named Mi refugio and Mi recuerdo, which also departed from Güiria, were shipwrecked ?33 people drowned in a murky incident.

The peñeros usually arrive in Trinidad in the middle of the night or at dawn, and as in Maritza’s case, in desolate clandestine ports, where groups of armed men wait for the travelers. The teenager arrived in one of these sites in Carenage, in the northwest of the island, an area where cases of human trafficking have been previously reported, according to Venezuelan immigrants in Trinidad and local media.

Testimonies from travelers indicate that armed men divide the disembarking migrants by sex, until those who “rescue” them show up. Some of these transporters  may be local cab drivers or members of the gangs.

But the criminal organization that exists on clandestine beaches and in mountain areas also has tentacles in the island’s legal ports. In such cases, a new actor is added to the modus operandi that allows the triangulation between captains and armed groups ?the immigration police?, as some victims affirm and as confirmed by the Caricom research and reports from the U.S. State Department. 

Zurima has witnessed that passports do not mean much in these offices. When they arrived in the port of Chaguaramas, the immigration officers did not stamp their passports and neither intervened when the captains of the peñero took their passports and left.

Even if the women enter with their documentation, many of them are not formally registered in the immigration forms. As it happened in Zurima’s case, officers may give the go-ahead or turn a blind eye to the gang leaders who pick up the girls in black vehicles, known as “maxi cabs,” and pay the boat captains. The Caricom investigation indicates that there are three modes of complicity: “those who are coerced or threatened into collaborating,” those who receive money to “turn a blind eye,” and those who actively participate in the criminal activities.

Once the victim disembarks, the trickery designed by these criminal networks to trap them dissolves. When they set foot on the beaches, they let them know that there is no turning back. That the job offer does not exist. What do exist are a debt and a contract that they never signed with the criminal gangs.

Fernanda*, 19, born in Tucupita, barely understood English when she arrived in Trinidad. Hence, when she disembarked at Playa Lucero, in the island’s southwest coast, she did not realize that her freedom had a price. “A Trinidadian man handed some money to the friend who brought us. I thought it was from previous passengers. The same man sat us down and asked if we wanted to take a bath. I still did not understand. And then, I saw my friend getting on the boat back to Venezuela,” she recalls.

Soon after, a woman arrived and took Fernanda to a nearby hotel. It was there that the procuress of this cell, a Venezuelan national, appeared. She told Fernanda that she had acquired a debt of US$ 1,500, and if she did not pay, she would be sold to another more dangerous gang, where she would be beaten, abused or killed.

The “Cooling Off”

The dreams of Fernanda, a teenager who worked in a family business until recently, shattered in an instant. She was in a hotel in Lucero Beach, Trinidad and Tobago, when she learned the news. Her captors informed her that she would be prostituted. The announcement came from the mouth of a man who said his name was Randel Jones and claimed to have “bought” her from the man who had taken Fernanda to the island. She was now to accompany him to Port of Spain.

The made-up debt that generates the trip to Trinidad is the original sin where the story of organized crime is born ?from that moment on, the women can only live to prostitute themselves and, thus, they are forced to pay it. The amount of money that Fernanda allegedly owed was the amount that she expected to save during the following months in some job that she may get as a saleswoman or waitress - as she believed - to help her family in Tucupita. The notice from her captor was a slap in the face to her self-esteem. “My freedom was worth US$ 1,500. Just remembering it makes me angry.”

Learning that she had been sold was just the gateway to horror. Fernanda had entered a “cooling off" period, a sort of preparation for her later sexual exploitation. Experts on how human trafficking gangs operate describe it as a moment in which criminals “break” the spirits of the victims, an intermission before taking them to sexual exploitation. The testimonies from eight women who survived human trafficking, as well as four relatives of the victims, who were interviewed for this Armando.Info and CONNECTAS investigation, give an insight into the scope of this nightmare.

It can take days or weeks. Women suffer intimidation, threats, harassment, sexual abuse and violence… a strategy to break their will to escape, seek help or report the criminals. Extortion does the trick. “They make you psychotic,” Fernanda recalls to describe the mental state in which she sunk, a mixture of terror, shame and despair.

After more than 10 hours waiting at the port of Chaguaramas, Zurima and her friend were picked up by their alleged employer. He immediately ordered them into his car. “We didn’t understand English, just the basics. We wanted to go back to Venezuela, but we had no money, so we got in the car, scared,” she recounts.

As part of the strategy to “break” them, they rotated the following days between two houses. On their first night in Trinidad, at three in the morning, two men burst into their room. Zurima remembers that they were high. They made advances and there were tense moments, but in the end, they left. “We got out of that. I thought we had survived the worst night,” she affirms.

But she was about to find out that the worst was yet to come. A few days later they were moved, along with three other Venezuelan women, to a house in the Diego Martin area, west of the capital. There was a man called “boss” with other members of his gang. They were all doing drugs and drinking.

She and her friend were sent to a room with no doors and no furniture. There was only a mattress on the floor, where two other Venezuelan women were. At eleven o’clock at night, the boss said to Zurima’s friend, “You go to the room with him.” They cried their goodbyes. They did not know if it would be the last time they would see each other. “Let’s forget about your children, your family,” Zurima said to her friend before the man grabbed her from behind. “We hugged for a few seconds, crying nonstop,” she describes.

A few minutes later the boss returned, yelled “trash” at the other two women and grabbed Zurima by the arm, who would not stop crying. “Don’t cry, don’t cry,” the man told her. “I was crying and shaking. I was speechless.” The man took her to the other room. He took off his clothes and cracked his knuckles as a sign for her to hurry. “No, please. I am not a prostitute,” she told him. The man grabbed her by force, pulled off her shirt and pushed her onto the mat that was on the floor.

"I was shaking my head no, crying. He took out a condom, put it on and lay on top of me. It was the worst. It was horrible. He covered my mouth and kept telling me not to cry,” she recalls.

Maritza and other Venezuelan women were intimidated for two days to explain them that their job was to prostitute themselves without expecting any money in return. The women tried to resist, which resulted in an atrocious punishment. They were transferred for a week to a wooden plank house in the mountains, where they were isolated, beaten and raped.

Once the gangs ensure through intimidation and violence the silence of those who will become victims of sexual exploitation, a profitable “business” begins for the criminals and hell for the women. After the initial tortures, the Venezuelan women rotate through different bars, brothels and hotels on the island. Fernanda’s destination was a “luxurious area” in Port of Spain; Maritza’s was a house on the main street of Diego Martin; and Zurima’s night of horror ended the next day in a police raid.

Sold Again and Again

When she arrived at the bar known as Spanish Harlem or at other called Hawaii Bar,  Fernanda says she worked until dawn, nonstop, until all the “customers” left. Deceived by the recruiters who sold them to criminal organizations, coerced through violence, without identity documents or regular immigration status, after days of “cooling off,” the Venezuelan women were finally subjected to sexual exploitation.

Fernanda was taken to the bars in black SUVs ?which have become the distinctive means to transport women for prostitution on the island? every night during the five months she was held in a house in El Socorro, escorted by one of the procuress, a Venezuelan woman. For the victims, the ordeal is not limited to the nights of sexual exploitation… it extends to the before and after that moment.

The women are forced under threat to take drugs. They are often isolated, cannot leave the houses where they remain under constant surveillance, have no access to the Internet or a telephone line. They are forced to prostitute themselves every day. “There are no days off,” one of the women remembers. On a single day, they are forced to have sex with at least five men, says Marlene,* from the State of Bolivar, who was prostituted at the age of 19, when she had just been awarded her associate degree.

The crime of human trafficking goes hand in hand with a high domestic demand for prostitution in Trinidad, says Canadian researcher Justin Pierre, who was responsible for Caricom’s report. He affirms that Trinidad concentrates more than 80% of the demand for sex trade and prostitution in the Caribbean, even though it is an illegal activity in the country. And he considers that the local consumption of prostitution “is higher than usual.”

As in Marlene’s case, not all victims are unaware that they are destined for prostitution in Trinidad when they make the journey. But their extreme vulnerability, due to the Venezuelan humanitarian emergency and the obstacles to emigrate legally, as well as the slave-like conditions they are subjected to, also turn term into human trafficking cases.

“Consent was irrelevant in cases of sexual exploitation, as it often involved abuse of power and vulnerability,” states a report by the Parliament of Trinidad and Tobago on human trafficking in that country, released in 2020. “Sexual exploitation could also include ‘debt bondage,’ where victims participate in wrongful acts due to the perception that they have no choice.”

In late 2018, financial needs forced Marlene to accept the offer of an acquaintance to travel to Trinidad to work as an “escort.” The salary she earned in Venezuela was “peanuts,” she says, and she had to help support a home where her mom and other relatives lived, including two young nieces. “The power outages back then burned out our refrigerator and TV,” she recalls. Then, one night, five criminals broke into her house.

Marlene was one of the women prostituted in the brothels run by Jinfu Zhu, a Chinese man, and Solieth Torres, a Venezuelan woman. The names of both were mentioned in the media in Trinidad because they were arrested in a raid of several houses and bars in February 2019, in which 19 Venezuelan teenage girls between the ages of 15 and 19 were rescued. The court charged them with 43 cases of sexual offenses, according to news reports released at that time.

The dismantling of Jinfu Zhu exposed some figures about the business. The cost of a “one-time” service was US$ 100, while one night was US$ 250, recalls Marlene. Half of that money was kept by the bosses and the other half allegedly belonged to the women, but they never received it. It went into a piggy bank with which they were supposed to be paid at the end of their captivity. In her case, Fernanda says that each “customer” paid US$ 300.

The accounts are recorded in a notebook kept by the traffickers. They write down the total amount of the alleged debt and the profits generated by the women each day. Should a woman be arrested, the bosses add to her debt the fines they must pay for the bail bonds. They also deduct sums for food and the rent of the rooms.

One indicator of the surge in human trafficking on the island is the increase in financial irregularities linked to this crime. Figures from the Financial Intelligence Unit of Trinidad and Tobago indicate that in the last four years the crime of human trafficking has mobilized at least US$ 2.2 million in the financial system of the country. In 2017, 11 transactions for a total of TT$ 9 million, equal to
US$ 1.3 million, were identified as suspicious of being linked to this organized crime.

In 2018, the same number of cases were identified through the tracking of irregular movements of TT$ 2 million, a total of US$ 294,000. The identified cases increased to 23 in 2019, which suspiciously moved a total of TT$ 1.9 million, about US$ 279,000. There were other 11 suspicious transactions identified in the 2020 latest report of FIU (Financial Intelligence Unit) equal to TT$ 2.6 million, approximately US$ 392,000. Further information on the characteristics of these transactions was requested to FIU, but no response was obtained.

These amounts are a glimpse  of what the crime is generating. One of the researchers who participated in the preparation of the report for Caricom on women trafficking on the island, and who asked to keep her name confidential, explained that it is difficult to quantify the profits of the gangs, as well as the number of victims or those concerned, “but the amount of money involved makes it a highly profitable business, because the victims of trafficking can be sold over and over again.”

In the thick of this business, the violence exercised by “customers” and traffickers becomes part of the everyday life for Venezuelan women, who must survive in organized crime networks.

Reina*, 20 years old, was forced to get high and drunk every weekend in a house under construction in San Fernando, where she spent a little more than a month in sexual slavery with another young Venezuelan woman. She says, “A month, more or less” because while she was kidnapped, the days went by in a haze. She could hardly remember, as she was not allowed to be aware of herself.

She had accepted in 2018 the offer of an acquaintance to travel to Trinidad in the midst of a precarious financial situation that did not allow her to cover the expenses neither for her nor for her daughter, in Maturin, State of Monagas. The woman promised her that she would receive lodging and food until she could find a job to settle down and be able to pay. But the man who came to pick her up in a boat in La Barra, Delta Amacuro, a dangerous place known as a transport point in the human trafficking business, was a drug dealer.

He forced her to use drugs; otherwise, he threatened to send her to the police to be deported. Since she noted that he was a man with potential contacts in the police and a member of a criminal gang, she realized that there was very little within her reach to escape from that hell. She remembers having a gun pointed at her head the day she refused to drink alcohol, while at the same time, she was trying to prevent her “boss” from raping her.

One of the modus operandi of the gangs is to rotate the women from place to place, generally every three to five months. Among the names of the businesses that have been recognized as places where sexual exploitation occurs on the island are Copa Cabana, Villa Capri, 4Play Bar, and Tzar Night Club.  With the restrictions because of the covid-19 pandemic, some of these places have temporarily closed their doors. However, the business has not stopped.

Survivors report that it has continued at private parties for which they are hired and in the rooms of hotels like Alicia’s Palace Hotel and Dads Dan. This last establishment was reported for cases of women trafficking at least six years ago, when the owner and his assistant were arrested for trafficking two Venezuelan women in 2015 and for having a place engaged in prostitution. An attempt was made to ask the administrators of the above bars and establishments about these facts, but they did not answer. In the case of Dads Dan hotel, they said that they cannot provide information because the case is still open in court.

Once the victims fall prey to human trafficking networks, they face a maze with no way out. Escape routes are almost nonexistent. Some are rescued in police raids, but are then imprisoned in detention centers under precarious conditions. Others take the risk of escaping. And in a few cases, the only hope left to the victims is to cling to the word of the “bosses” that they will be released once they settle their debt. That is why they keep thorough accounts of how much money they generate for each day of exploitation, in order to know when they will be free to leave.

Fernanda, after working for five months for the gang, learned that she had completed the amount they demanded as a quota. Her captors offered her to stay working as a prostitute, but she refused, acted quickly to leave and preferred to “move far away” to another city in Trinidad. However, she lives in fear.

She had to change jobs because a man showed up asking for her, saying that she owed him money. “I’m afraid. I’m very careful about taking a cab, a car, walking. At some point I could run into them and I don’t know how they might react,” says Fernanda.

As to the case of Marlene, the raid on the “Chinese houses” resulted in her leaving the human trafficking networks. She worked for a while in a casino in Trinidad until she had enough money to return to Venezuela. She never saw a penny of the US$ 9,500 she had been promised she would receive, with which she had planned to buy a house for her family.

The most far-off possibility of getting out of the sexual exploitation circuit is to escape, a decision that very few make because they know it could mean death. Maritza took the risk of running away from the second house of sexual exploitation where she was being held. One night, she managed to keep TT$ 100 from one of the “services.” At two o’clock in the morning, she took advantage of her boss being asleep and took his cell phone.

She jumped over the gate of the house and ran as fast as she could to Diego Martin’s stadium, where she saw a car pass by and flagged it down. The driver agreed to help her and took her to a fast food place in Port of Spain, where she was to meet some friends who she texted to come and pick her up. “From that moment on, I started from scratch. Those were dreadful moments. I even was on the verge of dying. I don’t wish this on any other girl.”

An Accomplice System

Once she paid off her “debt” and managed to leave the house where she was sexually exploited for over five months, Fernanda tried to report her case to the authorities. In June 2018, she went to the San Fernando Police and accused her captor.

“Everyone was speechless like a statue, as if I was speaking nonsense,” she says. The officers, she recalls, took some “very quick notes and never did anything else.” Her captor is still at large and, as far as she knows, the “business” remains operational, with at least seven women forced into prostitution.

Data show that the crime has enjoyed full impunity in Trinidad and Tobago for almost a decade. There have been no judicial sentences throughout this time. A parliamentary report released last year indicates that from 2016 to April 2020 Trinidad’s police services received 484 reports of sexual exploitation, 119 of which were officially confirmed victims. Fifty-seven persons have been charged and nine were brought into court for this crime during that time.

The research on women trafficking in Trinidad, conducted for Caricom, warns that “the lack of convictions and solved cases accentuates impunity, and in turn, the cycle of crime. The accused, after being released, reoffend because they know that there are low levels of prosecution, delays in trial process, lack of convictions and corruption in the different institutions, states the report.

In the document prepared by the parliament, the police argued that there are obstacles in detecting cases and insufficient evidence to secure charges. They mentioned, among others, the lack of CCTV images and the difficulty to have access to DNA tests in Trinidad due to their high cost. They also argued the unwillingness of witnesses to testify and affirmed that “the victims were reluctant to cooperate.”

But trafficking and sexual exploitation survivors constantly repeat that their cases are ignored by the police. Zurima says that after her captors were arrested in a raid, she went for four months to testify at police stations and in court. “When we arrived, they frowned,” she recalls. She believes it was because they did not speak English. “The treatment was blunt. When we had already made progress on the case, whoever was in charge took a vacation and passed it on to someone else.”

Police complicity is the elephant in the room when it comes to the lack of efficiency in the prosecution of women trafficking in Trinidad. Over the last three years, at least 36 police officers on the island have been associated to this crime - according to local media - but there have been no judicial sentences against any of them. Most of the victims in these cases are Venezuelan.

David West, director of the Police Complaints Authority, an independent organization that oversees police work in Trinidad and Tobago, says that in some cases, the officers involved take advantage of their position of authority to intimidate their victims and prevent them from reporting.

This was the case of two Venezuelan women who filed their complaint with this office but then disappeared, making it impossible to continue with the investigation, he says. “The women came and pointed out the officers who took advantage of them, but no charges were brought and the officers are still wearing their uniforms,” he points out.

Even the Ministry of Security agrees in the report made by the parliament that among the factors affecting the lack of sentences is “the public complicity of law enforcement and private sectors that participate in human trafficking and hamper the investigation.”

In August 2020 alone, 30 police officers were under investigation for involvement in a human trafficking ring operating between Venezuela and Trinidad and Tobago. Survivors interviewed for this investigation affirm that police officers are aware of the bars, houses and hotels where the crime is committed. “Some of them guard the house together with the gang,” says Maritza.

The research conducted for Caricom also indicates that police officers “provide transportation and work as security guards and even as pimps in establishments where prostitution and human trafficking occurs.” The report refers to cases where police have taken young women to a guesthouse elsewhere in Trinidad and charged people for “using” them.

Maritza witnessed this situation. She describes how the police would come to the house, where she was being held together with about 50 women, and select some of them to take them on a “date.” Fernanda also witnessed several times the visit of police officers at the place where she had to offer sexual services. “There was no problem with the police because he (her captor) befriends with all of them. The police are fully aware of what happens in those houses,” she says.

From time to time, there are police raids that intervene sexual exploitation centers, but this does not guarantee progress in fighting the crime. “In fact, some interviewees stated that high-profile raids may be exaggerated to make it look like the Government is doing something, but there are no real and serious procedures and protocols in place to address human trafficking,” Caricom’s research says about the cycle of impunity in Trinidad and Tobago.

One of such high-profile raids took place in November 2019, at the Yihai Entertainment Sports Bar in the Cunupia area, where 46 trafficked Venezuelan women were found. Among the detainees was a policeman. In February of the same year, as reviewed by local media, another officer had been arrested together with a Venezuelan man for being involved in trafficking of minor girls. 

This journalistic team requested the Trinidad Police to give information about these cases and, so far, no response has been obtained.

The lack of prosecution of the cases fuels the victims’ fear of meeting again with those who sexually exploited them. In fact, some have been threatened by their captors from prison. Zurima says that the criminals she had reported contacted her on Facebook or called her on the phone. They told her and other informers that they would kill them if they continued with the accusations.

Eventually, she was forced to drop the case. “We had no protection whatsoever. We feared that if we ruin those men, they would follow through with their threats. They have a lot of money and weapons. We had no protection from the police. We told them about the threats and they warn us to make the right decision, because otherwise the men would be out on bail,” Zurima says.

The report prepared by the Parliament points out that the slowness of the judicial procedures conspires against the possibility of imprisoning the culprits. The victims “are not willing to wait years for trials to be initiated and completed.”

The vulnerability of Venezuelan immigrants, who risk deportation if arrested, also favors human traffickers. In the last two years, U.S. State Department reports have emphasized that the government of Trinidad and Tobago does not effectively screen illegal immigrants or refugees, as it does not establish whether they have been victims of human trafficking and if they require special protection before arresting them.

This particularly affects the Venezuelan population that has massively migrated to the island in recent years. At this time, according to figures from the Organization of American States, there are 40,000 Venezuelans on the island, but only 16,000 have a regular migratory status.

Activists, survivors and reports, like Caricom’s, agree that trafficking victims have been imprisoned for up to three to five years on irregular immigration charges, after they are accused of being illegally in the country or on criminal charges, such as drug or weapon possession. These cases have occurred after the women are found in police raids.

The Counter Trafficking Unit (CTU), created in 2013 to investigate and prosecute human trafficking cases and also to provide assistance to the victims, is not, however, immune to accusations. Lack of investigation, follow-up and even abandonment of cases, precarious conditions in shelter houses, lack of psychological care to victims, and little transparency in resources, are some of the complaints that activists and trafficking victims make about this office. Since 2017, CTU has not reported its budget, based on a report by the U.S. State Department, although there is an evident drop in the allocation of resources for victims.

Reina experienced the shortcomings firsthand. Although she reported to CTU that she was kidnapped, drugged and raped, her case fizzled out, she says. After four months of statements, in which she and another victim of the same criminal group gave the name of their captor, nicknames of the criminal gang and even photos, officials of this institution told her that they did not consider her a victim and, thus, there was no open case. They had to leave the protection house where they were staying.

This journalistic team requested an interview with Alana Wheeler, director of CTU, to verify these claims, but she said that she is not authorized to give statements.

Deportation, without police and judicial resolution of the cases, is often the fate of Venezuelan women once they leave the trafficking networks. An official document, which the journalistic team had accessed to, described the passengers of a “humanitarian flight” to Venezuela in late 2020, and contained information about an 18-year-old victim who was repatriated.

Different organizations handle information about at least six other adolescent victims of sexual exploitation, who were deported - one of them pregnant - in the first months of 2021. Lilia, the 17-year-old teenager taken in Maturin, was repatriated at the beginning of the year, after having spent 13 months in a detention center for adolescents and in the home of a foster family.

Reina affirms that her complaint was not only abandoned, but also manipulated. “I told them everything that happened. That he (her captor) acted aggressively when he drank or took drugs, and that, on one occasion, he pulled a gun on me to make me have sex with him. But then I was able to read that CTU wrote in the file that I voluntarily had sex with him every day. It was nuts,” she says. In the end, Reina was also deported to Venezuela.

(*) The names identified in this report with an asterisk have been changed for security reasons.

**This story was written by Marielba Núñez and Claudia Smolansky for Armando.Info and CONNECTAS, with the support of the International Center for Journalists (ICFJ) in the framework of the Investigative Journalism Initiative of the Americas.

Both women were committed to the revolutionary cause proclaimed by then President Hugo Chávez. Either out of conviction or because they inherited a historical responsibility, they embraced the strategic ties with China: Betancourt through her presidency of the Venezuelan Development Bank (Bandes), and Maneiro via the Venezuelan Embassy in Beijing.

The strategy left dozens of projects scrapped or half-finished, and showed that Betancourt was no Christine Lagarde, the former head of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) in terms of her financial expertise,, and, in diplomatic terms, Maneiro was no Madeleine Albright, the US secretary of state under Bill Clinton.

What happened between 2010 and 2013 under the watchful eye of these two women was a mess. They may not have caused it, but they witnessed it first hand. It looked as if yuan and petrodollars would rain down for decades and it became easy to talk about the realisation of a mammoth 675 projects worth US$313.4 billion, financed only by the Chinese-Venezuelan Long Term Fund.

Maneiro and the confusion

Internal communications between Bandes, headed by Betancourt, and the Venezuelan Embassy in China, headed by Maneiro, show that both picked up on their Chinese partners early unease with Venezuela’s informality with respect to the terms of the Chinese Fund's financing contract.

In particular, they expressed discomfort with resources for projects that were contributed by China itself to the Large Volume and Long Term Fund, initiated in 2010. Chinese officials demanded certainty that obligations would be fulfilled and even resisted to continuing with major projects if full payment of the amounts stipulated in the contracts was not guaranteed.

Armando.info has had access to communications between Caracas and Beijing from 2009 to 2012 as the two partners agreed to cooperate on development projects. These documents and others form the foundation of the series Venezuela’s Dance with China. The stories are published in partnership with the Latin American Center for Investigative Journalism (Clip). Diálogo Chino has contributed with additional reporting.

In 2011, Bandes’ Executive Management of Development Funds addressed a communication to Betancourt, its president, informing her that China's National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC), the country’s highest planning body, had been "very emphatic in not accepting projects in which the approved amounts are less than the contracted ones". This was a reference to the 972 MW Phase 1 thermoelectric power plant project jointly executed by Sinohydro and PDVSA, Venezuela’s national oil company.

The high-level meetings were relaxed and friendly. Yet, operations at the management level were confusing. Letters were exchanged with a string of reproaches.

From the outset, the terms of the bilateral fund negotiation were unclear and suggest that behind closed doors the commercial relationship wasn’t entirely marked by mutual trust. The Venezuelans were in a hurry to obtain foreign exchange, while the Chinese were interested in execution and planning.

According to official minutes, over a two-year period the Venezuelan-Chinese Joint Fund held around 600 briefings and almost a hundred operational meetings with the different stakeholders. The lenders were demanding a level of precision that the Venezuelan officials could not provide and Maneiro was entrusted to broker the relationship until Betancourt joined Bandes.

The role of Betancourt, the "Chinese minister", as Commander Hugo Chávez came to call her, was to oversee the finance. Behind her was a complex bureaucratic network whose sway depended on the price of oil and the will of the representatives of the Central Bank of Venezuela (BCV), PDVSA, ministries and banks who attended meetings.

Even Asdrúbal Chávez, the late president's cousin and by then vice-president of Refining, Trade and Supply of the oil company, later to become head of the Ministry of Energy, as well as president of PDVSA, was present. Still, Venezuela relied on Maneiro’s diplomacy in negotiations with the NDRC and China Development Bank (CDB).

The offices of Betancourt and Maneiro were in direct communication. Their exchanges reveal attempts to find a way out of the forthcoming whirlwind they both foresaw. Maneiro alluded to the silences of the then planning minister, Jorge Giordani, who promised high-level meetings with Chinese lenders. Betancourt, for her part, asked the ambassador for "her diligences to solve a matter related to the disbursements" of stalling projects that Venezuela had given a lot of publicity, such as those to develop electricity generation.

The ambassador’s responses were sober and sharp. She requested additional information on what President Chávez had signed, while Chinese partners asked for explanations of the agreed projects. Perhaps in the past Maneiro had enjoyed more direct communication with the revolutionary leader.Yet, in the last years of his life, as Chávez was afflicted by an aggressive cancer, more power was given to third parties who were closing the circle. From what one reads, Maneiro felt as if she was being thrown to the lions and needed an ace up her sleeve to get a deal.

On 19 May 2011, she wrote to Betancourt, underscoring the urgency of her situation: "I explained the reservations of the NDRC on some of the 28 projects and requested the attention of the competent Venezuelan authorities on this situation, in order to avoid difficulties for the disbursement of resources, and therefore, for the development of the projects (...) I consider it extremely important to have, before my meeting on Tuesday 24, some information".

The Chinese had numerous reservations, according to the letters circulated, and they let Maneiro know this. Each day that went by without a response aggravated relations with CDB and NDRC. On some projects, Venezuela remained silent for up to six months. One case, for example, was the contract between CVG Ferrominera Orinoco, the Chinese state-owned Wisco and the Venezuelan subsidiary of the China Railway Engineering Corporation..

"The NDRC requests clarification (...) and suggests that negotiations continue with the aforementioned companies to finalise the contracts and move forward with the execution of the allocated financing funds," wrote Ambassador Maneiro, outlining other cases in which no contract had been signed.

Betancourt’s stormy office

Edmée Betancourt had a relatively low profile in her previous role as trade minister, but she was active and not known for blunders. One day she would be seen inaugurating the Venezuelan Industria Tecnológica (VIT) factory to assemble computers, the next talking about the Empresa Socialista de Pañales (Socialist Diapers Company). In 2003 she was deputy Minister of Industry, and twice at the head of the Cinistry of Commerce, in 2005 and 2011.

Before that, the engineer born in Valencia, in the north of the country, had been a professor at the University of Carabobo. It was there that she became friends with the lawyer Blancanieves Portocarrero, who was Minister of Labour. In 2002, Betancourt was invited to join the executive branch. Both were linked to the left-wing political movement that upheld the ideals of the self-styled Bolivarian Revolution and they were noticed by its leader. 

When Betancourt took the reins of Bandes on the first day of January 2010, she did so with an existing team. She arrived at the bank with little time to soak up all the tax and legal reforms that had been made in Venezuela; much less to  adapt them to China’s. Executive reports on the different negotiations, administrative practices, customs procedures, legal nooks and crannies, and the latest deadlines passed through her office. She acted as a hinge between various institutions and economic powers, including the team of then planning minister Giordani, who was a mentor and close Chávez ally.

Neither Edmée Betancourt thought of going into trade and finance, nor Rocío Maneiro into diplomacy, but it was the task that chavismo assigned them. The women entered a circle of trust and managed trade relations between China and that had few controls or audits.

The documents that passed through Edmeé Betancourt's hands as president of Bandes concluded with recommendations condensed in two sentences. Under Betancourt, the bank's executive manager of Finance and Fund Administration was María de los Ángeles González, who authored numerous account items. González was later arrested in 2013 in the US after confessing to illicit handling of public debt bonds during her time at Bandes. She was sentenced to prison. She has already served her sentence.

But while this became known between 2010 and 2012 during Betancourt's years at the bank, the exchanges with China carried on. Many technical documents relating to the binational fund's projects were designed and exchanged but they did not cover all the loopholes and unforeseen events that arose from the novelty of working variously in US dollars, renminbis and bolivars.

An example of the confusion this generated in Bandes was when requirements arose that had to be met "with haste", such as the withholding of taxes related to disbursements from the Large Volume and Long-Term Financing fund. On 26 September 2011, when several projects were underway, Betancourt asked CDB  to "activate a financial mechanism" that would enable compliance with tax regulations, calculating taxes in advance to be deposited in accounts that Bandes would "open" in the Chinese bank’s Hong Kong office.

On 8 April 2011, Ambassador Maneiro warned former minister Giordani of concerns expressed by Zhang Ping, then chairman of the board of directors of the NDRC, and of the Chinese chapter of the China-Venezuela High-Level Joint Commission. He cited, for example, "the slow progress in negotiations". He also spoke of "the lack of coordination and accurate information" that prevented the two partners from being on the same page, "especially when it comes to amounts in financial resources that do not correspond to those established in the contracts signed".

The wall of indifference

When Nicolás Maduro assumed the presidency in 2013, the Chinese ladies were about to become septuagenarians. Yet despite their years in public life, almost nothing is known about them, apart from the fact that Edmée Betancourt is the mother of two children and that Rocío Maneiro has three.

In 2013, Betancourt was assigned new duties as president of the Central Bank of Venezuela (BCV)  but she would never again enjoy the privileges she was accustomed to under Chávez’s successor and Maduro soon fired her. She was never seen on television again.

Betancourt committed a cardinal sin of chavismo in speaking of corruption within Venezuela's financial establishment. "What was delivered in foreign currency last year (2012) were very considerable amounts, but there is also another considerable amount of foreign currency that was taken to briefcase companies (...) Between US$15 and 20 billion were passed on," she said at a press conference still remembered by the journalists present.

Noises got too loud and within 24 hours Maduro ostracised her. She suffered the same fate as Monk Giordani, another Chávez  made corruption allegations in foreign currency allocations. . Both were forgotten.

Maneiro continued as ambassador to China and then to South Korea until the end of 2013, when President Maduro himself requested the change for personal reasons.

"She has done an extraordinary job, a woman of great loyalty to Commander Hugo Chávez, to our Venezuelan homeland, she has been a builder in these ten years of service in China of these historic relations," the Venezuelan president said of the ambassador, who has became an important figurehead  in the history of relations with China.

His brother, Alfredo Maneiro, a notable figure of the Venezuelan left, had also visited Beijing several times, albeit decades ago. He was in Mao's China in 1959, when he was a young leader of the Communist Party of Venezuela (PCV), and in 1962 when he was Comandante Tomás of the Manuel Ponte Rodríguez front of the Armed Forces of National Liberation (FALN), a Venezuelan guerrilla group of the time.

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  Venezuela's ambassador to Beijing, Rocío Maneiro, enjoyed the confidence of Hugo Chávez and was a key player in negotiations with China. Photo: Peter Parks / AFP

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  Rocio Maneiro handled negotiations with the China Development Bank and the China National Development and Reform Commission, in communication with Bandes. Photo: Ed Jones / AFP

The ideas of this neo-Marxist philosopher -founder and thinking head, later, of La Causa R party, until his premature death in 1982, when he was not yet 50 years old- were an ingredient in Hugo Chávez's ideological lasagna, and it seems that they too for Nicolás Maduro's. The presidential speeches of both have been full of direct quotes from Maneiro or ideas clearly inspired by him.

Unlike Betancourt, Ambassador Maneiro did not leave through the back door. In June 2014, before resuming her diplomatic duties, she was awarded the Orden Libertadores y Libertadoras de Venezuela Primera Clase Espada for "her outstanding service to the homeland, which has contributed to the re-foundation of the Venezuelan nation".

Shortly afterwards, she was transferred to a modest office in the Venezuelan embassy in London.As Venezuela’s various economic and political crises deepened, staff at the embassy complained that they were not being paid. Some even saying they had gone months without pay. 

Maneiro, however, was not having such a bad time and admitted to having spent "a luxury holiday" in Paris when she testified at a recent court hearing.

Faced with the complaints of late payments to embassy staff, Maneiro alleged that "neither the Embassy nor the ambassador have anything to do with the allocation and administration of the resources of the Venezuelan pavilion in Shanghai," according to a statement that was published at the time. She was referring to an old controversy with former Vice Foreign Minister Temir Porras regarding the Venezuelan participation in the Shanghai World Expo in 2010. Porras had centralized all the contracting and allocation of funds for the event in the commercial and financial capital of mainland China, leaving Maneiro aside; then a report by Maneiro on alleged administrative irregularities by Porras would emerge. Both Maneiro and Porras then worked for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs when the Chancellor was the current president, Nicolás Maduro.

Maneiro’s standing did deteriorate in early 2019, however, when Juan Guaidó declared himself the president of Venezuela. UK prime minister Boris Johnson followed the US and EU in recognising Guaidó as the legitimate leader of Venezuela and Maneiro was stranded, replaced in the UK’s eyes by Guaidó appointee Vanessa Neumann, a Venezuelan-American diplomat and businesswoman. 

Corruption scandals also splashed Maneiro. Spanish newspaper El País published an investigative report claiming that Maneiro had hidden US$4 million in the Banca Privada de Andorra, a collapsed and obscured bank in that tax haven. The report said she had moved capital between four accounts of "instrumental companies" created in Panama by the same bank.

The large sum was registered with the bank as the result of an "international business consultancy", whose operations coincided with the diplomatic tenure of her in China from 2012 onwards. The Andorran Financial Intelligence Unit claimed, according to the Spanish media, that "the funds have their origin in corruption in Venezuela". Maneiro testified before a judge in the principality that the money was the product of "the sale of the rights of an inheritance in Venezuela".

The money ended up in the Swiss and US account of one of Maneiro’s three sons. The Financial Intelligence Unit that worked on the case said the intention was to deposit US$10 million dollars in one of his accounts: "It is about payments from Chinese companies through Diego Salazar to high-ranking Venezuelan officials in exchange for the concession of the construction of different infrastructures in the Venezuelan energy sector", the investigation concluded.

Little is known about the heritage of the Venezuelan diplomat. She has not proven that this fortune comes from the side of the Maneiro González family. Nor does it seem likely that it is another legacy left by her brother Alfredo Maneiro, who never held official positions, who as a trade unionist had an intense and notably public political life, and when he died he was a professor at the Central University of Venezuela (UCV).

The surname of the paternal family is connected with two heroes of the Independence, Manuel and José Joaquín Maneiro, who were from the island of Margarita, in the east of the country. Rocío was the only woman of four brothers and the youngest in the house. Her parents were married on February 14, 1922 in the central parish of Altagracia, in Caracas.

Even if she wanted to forget excerpts from his life, the history and the Bolivarian revolution have been in charge of documenting all possible aspects of Alfredo Maneiro. Even his brother's thesis on Philosophy at UCV is in the Central Library, but there is no indication of the professional career she pursued.

Socialist centrifuge

Edmée Betancourt earned Hugo Chávez's trust. At the comandante's side, she would let go of her characteristic sobriety and let herself be embraced by him.

Chávez's protection of Betancourt lasted as long as his life. When Maduro became president, Betancourt was discarded. She served as a convenient scapegoat for one of Maduro's many U-turns. Although those close to her admit that she has since been asked to return to the ranks of the revolution, she decided to keep a low profile at home in her native Valencia, 'close to her grandchildren'.

Maneiro remains in the UK as Maduro’s representative. Her recent travails includedher host country refusing to  recognise Maduro's authority to handle the US$1.1 billion in gold stored at the Bank of England.

The “Chinese ladies” obeyed both the governmental and financial rules of the game, entrusted with key roles in Venezuela’s growing indebtedness to China.

During Chávez's second presidency, Betancourt and Maneiro were experts on China. There was only one option : socialist homeland or nothing. They were strategists and bureaucratic operators, who manoeuvred according to the decisions "from above". Both women stood out as authorities on the future of bilateral cooperation; they were the visible faces of the deals worth many billions of dollars - or yuan. They took on the sometimes unenviable responsibilities that the revolution assigned them.

*This investigation is based on a trove of documents obtained by Armando.info (Venezuela), which were processed and analysed in partnership with the Latin American Centre for Investigative Journalism (CLIP) and with additional reporting by Diálogo Chino.

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