Alex Saab's name reappears. The Colombian entrepreneur, linked to the contractor Global Construction Fund, seems to reinvent himself. Thanks to a company registered in Hong Kong, he has managed to sell food to Venezuela for over 200 million dollars in a negotiation approved with Nicolás Maduro’s signature and the intermediation of the State Government of Táchira, led by José Gregorio Vielma Mora. The products, paid with preferential dollars but billed with a surcharge, have been directed to the Local Committees for Supply and Production (CLAP), the flagship program whereby the Venezuelan authorities intend to mitigate hunger.

Wilmer José Brizuela became the epitome of 'pran' or leader of the Venezuelan prisons. He imposed its law over the state laws in a prison in the south of the country, in the midst of fierce fighting between clans and a badly perpetrated vengeance, episodes of a medieval saga. His legend, already known in the confines of the penitentiary system, has just gained national effect when a shooting on the island of Margarita showed that he was released with official permission, despite serving a sentence for complicity in a murder. He still has power. The following text is an abbreviated version of a profile originally prepared by the author for the anthology 'Los Malos' (The Bad Ones), published in 2015 by Universidad Diego Portales of Chile, under the editing of Argentinean chronicler Leila Guerriero.

The Sole Authority of the southern states of Monagas and Anzoátegui acknowledges that it received several transfers from the Brazilian construction company, but for issuing a book. Anyway, his is just a footnote in the list of payments without invoice made by the Brazilians. Where are the big shots? In the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela, silence is also a message.

The inclusion of the Venezuelan businessman in the list of drug traffickers and money launderers in the United States of America reveals the plot of his business with Nicolás Maduro’s regime. First, he sold kits for the government's housing building programs. Then, he benefited from the massive sale of food and even Christmas decorations; all this through a structure that has found, to date, shelter in the jurisdiction of Barbados. The small Caribbean island acts as the lair that hides some of its assets to the U.S. Department of the Treasury.

The porous border has loaded the inhabitants of the Colombian Amazon with the cases of its Venezuelan neighbors. Shortage and indifference has led patients to seek treatment even in Bogotá. Meanwhile in San Fernando de Atabapo, the transmitting mosquito has folded people back into their homes. But "God exists." So says a mural that receives visitors at the port.

The last months of 2016 and the beginning of this year report an increase in the diagnosis of malaria in the western margin of the Venezuelan jungle province. The economic crisis has caused Venezuelan, Colombian, and Brazilian inhabitants of the border - to regard the illegal exploitation of gold as a possibility of instant wealth. In addition to a security problem due to the control, the indiscriminate felling in the region has intensified the work of sanitary authorities. This is a trip to in the depths of Venezuela, the one that is not in the headlines of the media or the agenda of the political leadership.

The iceberg begins to emerge. Odebrecht admits to American authorities that it distributed bribes in twelve international markets, including Venezuela, where most bribes were paid: 98 million US dollars in bribes and kickbacks. At least 35 million of all that money was contributed by the civil engineering company to the last electoral campaign of Hugo Chávez. In court declarations, an informer speaks of under-the-table payments of at least US$ 600,000 in the name of company Andrade Gutierrez. This is just the beginning of the revelations.

The Government of Nicolás Maduro gave China the large-scale manufacture of the Venezuelan cuatro (four in English, as it has four strings). The policy of mass production of the instrument, with the purpose of adding it to the well-known National System of Children and Youth Orchestras, created by José Antonio Abreu, has prevailed over the quality entailed in its handcrafted frame. It is not, as it seems, just a cultural resignation or a contradiction with the nationalist discourse of the historical comrades of the self-styled Bolivarian revolution. Each unit manufactured in the Far East is a business for importers and ends up costing almost the same as the guitar manufactured in the country.

Without leaving a trace, José María Olazagasti, the obscure lieutenant of the Kirchnerist Minister of Planning, Julio De Vido, disappeared. Olazagasti, from the shadow, and De Vido, in public, both were the architects of the golden age of trade agreements between the Pink House and the Miraflores Palace. Most of these deals show no visible work, and some of them are the starting points of legal cases that begin to spread around in Argentina. The personal secretary was the one who managed with whom to meet and for what business.

A contagious disease has reappeared in Venezuela. After 24 years of being considered eradicated, the inhabitants of the south of the country are experiencing a diphtheria outbreak of hitherto incalculable scales. Minister of Health Luisana Melo has recognized as official medical report only two deaths out of the four cases confirmed by her office until October 11. But several death certificates, collected in situ by Armando.info, indicate that the number of deaths is higher.

The narrow victory of the No in the plebiscite called by the president of Colombia, Juan Manuel Santos, to endorse the peace agreement reached by FARC in Havana, Cuba, represents a stop along the way, perhaps the last stop, before the internal conflict ceases. With the imminent conversations that ELN will also initiate in Quito, the relatives of the persons disappeared in the state of Barinas wonder if their relatives, alive or dead, remain in the hands of FARC.

In November 2015, Efraín Campos Flores and Franqui Francisco Flores de Freitas, nephews of President Nicolás Maduro's wife, Cilia Flores, were arrested in Haiti while negotiating to send a shipment of 800 kilos of cocaine to the United States of America. At September 8 and 9 hearings, the party nights that they had with two informants of the DEA were evident. We went to the brothel they visited and we told the story from our point of view.

For three months, a reporter of Armando.info followed the lead of a seller exclusively engaged in diverting oncology medicines from state institutions to the black market, where they can be sold at 300 times higher prices. Her motivation was some basic questions: Are they angels or opportunists? How do they organize their networks? Still with unresolved doubts, she finds that it is a trade that has become possible only in the aftermath of the Bolivarian revolution in Venezuela, in the midst of chronic shortages and bureaucratic controls.

Two US citizens arrived in Venezuela this year on closed dates, and both were left in prison to face terrorism charges. Since then, their destinations began to diverge. Deportation is expected for one of them; a long season in Venezuelan dungeons for the other. But, above all, it is an exercise to test the definitions of 'terrorism' and 'news' for the propaganda apparatus of the chavista government, archrival of Washington. While the capture of one of them deserved a press conference by the Minister of Interior, the other went unnoticed. Why? Who is who in these parallel stories?

The last two major global investigations conducted by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists revealed the offshore business of Eligio Cedeño, a former Venezuelan banker considered a fugitive from justice by some and politically persecuted by others. Company Cedel International Investment, owner of Bolívar Banco and Banpro, also requested the services of Mossack Fonseca to operate in the British Virgin Islands.

The name of the former head of the Venezuelan oil company in Colombia appears in the papers of Mossack Fonseca with 100% of the shares of a company created in June 2011, of which she requested to be dissolved six months later. She is unemployed since August 2015, when she was replaced by the ex-sister-in-law of President Nicolás Maduro

The so-called "insurance tsar" opened four offshore companies in a Caribbean island through the Panamanian law firm Mossack Fonseca. Corporación OFL, which consists of about 20 companies in his name, makes him one of the entrepreneurs in the insurance sector that has grown the most during the chavista government.

The ex-banker used the services of the Panamanian law firm Mossack Fonseca to register companies in tax havens while he was being tried in Venezuela by his ex-colleagues from the Stanford Group. He said he was a victim of chavism to be accepted as a client and thus protect his fortune.

The former Vice President of Finance and director of the state oil company was one of the executives in the industry with more charges and accusations. In 2006, the Office of the Comptroller opened a proceeding against him for not filing the sworn statement of assets. In 2011, he became noticeable for his alleged participation in the Ponzi scheme of Francisco Illaramendi. In 2009, four years after having him as a client, Mossack Fonseca learned that he was a Politically Exposed Person, but maintained the business relationship because no "links to illegal activities" were found.

After making friends with chavista and opposition politicians, the brothers Leopoldo and Andrés Castillo Bozo were charged in 2009 by the Venezuelan Prosecutor for the crime of identity theft to buy public debt bonds. The Panama Papers revealed that at the time, the owners of Grupo Banvalor had three companies in the Virgin Islands, in addition to 22 more companies distributed in the United States of America, Aruba, the Dominican Republic, and Panama. Never had a flight been so well secured.

The investor, now exiled in the United States, seized the company in the vertiginous 2009, the year of the banking mini-crisis. By an intricate operation of legal and financial engineering through Panama, with Spanish advisers and some 'shelf companies', he made sure that the purchase would produce profits even if his property was expropriated and he was forced to flee abroad.

Sometimes intermediary, others, supplier, but always omnipresent, this Venezuelan is one of the most active and unknown person in the registration of companies in tax havens of the Caribbean. Many of these companies were incorporated ad hoc to do business with Corporación Casa, a food import state entity.

The leader of the Maranatha Church in Venezuela is also an entrepreneur who has seen in the dynamics of the Venezuelan economy an opportunity to grow his private wealth. Without a clear purpose, according to the documentation of the law firm Mossack Fonseca, the pastor weighted up the possibility of chairing a company in a tax haven.

In socialist Cuba waste is recycled but not as an ecological practice but as a means of survival. In one of the largest landfills in the capital you can see the so-called 'divers' digging in the dumps to feed the black market circuits, where authorities and traffickers have a slice, until the products -mayonnaise or meat, grains or soft drinks- arrive at the domestic pantries. With this work, Armando.info begins to publish in-depth reports made in the largest of the Antilles.

Facing the innovations of Pope Francis, the Church in Venezuela is not monolithic. The only Venezuelan Cardinal, Jorge Urosa Savino, has been exposed as a dissident of the reforms coming from Rome. His stance divides the clergy and leaves the conservative side in bad position for his succession as Archbishop of Caracas. At the same time, paradoxically, they reinforce the progressive sector of a church that until now has acted as a containment wall against Chavismo.

In the menu of Squire Patton Boggs, the powerful firm that brings together a law firm and public relations bureau, the Bolivarian revolution in Venezuela found several options to its liking: from lobbying against adverse laws to suing a web portal. Now, the company, which at the time has equally served a bloody Guatemalan dictator or the Palestinian Authority, is responsible for assisting Efraín Campos, nephew of the Venezuelan 'First Combatant', accused of drug trafficking in a court in New York.

The indicators of the Orinoco Delta surpass the world average. Doctors believe these indigenous people are facing a much more aggressive strain that threatens the survival of an entire population. The authorities, meanwhile, have kept silence about this case. Here is the first installment of this investigative report.

It’s been a while since Venezuela’s anti-narcotics organisms have been having their alarms ringing. Now that the drug has been connected once again to the Bolivarian Government elites, it’s good to remember that the main airport in Caracas served as an aerial bridge for the largest Cartel in the hemisphere, the Chapo Guzmán’s. And it did it, surprising as it is, next to the presidential hangar.

The Aboriginal resistance celebrated on October 12 has had for the last four years a new expression in Musukpa, on the banks of the Paragua river, state of Bolívar. Natives of various ethnic groups, led by the Pemones, organized themselves to disarm the military forces and confront criminal gangs that seek to control the gold deposits in the area, which is now practically liberated territory. But not a utopia.

There is a legend in the mountain chain Sierra de Perijá that blames its felling on a transnational company. A journalist traveled the route of taro (locally known as ocumo) and after a trip through western Venezuela, he found that - contrary to official complaints - the root of discord is served in Bolivarian government markets.