The paradisiacal tourist island of the Venezuelan Caribbean became, shortly after the death of President Hugo Chávez, in the place of a plot linked to tax havens. A leader of the far-left coalition Syriza and today powerful minister of the Greek Government, together with a Cypriot lawyer specializing in offshore business, who appeared in the Panama Papers traveled to the island. Nobody known with whom did they meet, but it is known that they completed their mysterious odyssey aboard a private jet of Majed Khalil, an entrepreneur linked to the Caracas regime.

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.

It is one of the so-called "rare earth elements" and a strategic material for high-tech industry. It abounds in the south of Venezuela, next to the border with Colombia. And although the Venezuelan government announced in 2009 measures for the military control of the deposits, since then, international smuggling routes have flourished, in which drug trafficking and informal traders participate. In a climate of mystery, now the Venezuelan coltan also threatens to become a source of geopolitical conflicts.

The network of intermediaries contracting with the Venezuelan Foreign Trade Corporation (Corpovex) to bring CLAP boxes seems infinite. In Sabadell, a town near Barcelona, a virtually cash shell company got 70 million dollars for outsourcing the shipment of food to Venezuela thanks to the administration of Nicolás Maduro, which buys the contents of the boxes at discretionary prices and without control. Last year alone, the government spent 2,500 to 3,500 million dollars, but only the leaders of the "Bolivarian revolution" know the actual figure.

When Vice President Delcy Rodríguez turned to a group of Mexican friends and partners to lessen the new electricity emergency in Venezuela, she laid the foundation stone of a shortcut through which Chavismo and its commercial allies have dodged the sanctions imposed by Washington on PDVSA’s exports of crude oil. Since then, with Alex Saab, Joaquín Leal and Alessandro Bazzoni as key figures, the circuit has spread to some thirty countries to trade other Venezuelan commodities. This is part of the revelations of this joint investigative series between the newspaper El País and Armando.info, developed from a leak of thousands of documents.

Leaked documents on Libre Abordo and the rest of the shady network that Joaquín Leal managed from Mexico, with tentacles reaching 30 countries, ―aimed to trade PDVSA crude oil and other raw materials that the Caracas regime needed to place in international markets in spite of the sanctions― show that the businessman claimed to have the approval of the Mexican government and supplies from Segalmex, an official entity. Beyond this smoking gun, there is evidence that Leal had privileged access to the vice foreign minister for Latin America and the Caribbean, Maximiliano Reyes.

The business structure that Alex Saab had registered in Turkey—revealed in 2018 in an article by Armando.info—was merely a false start for his plans to export Venezuelan coal. Almost simultaneously, the Colombian merchant made contact with his Mexican counterpart, Joaquín Leal, to plot a network that would not only market crude oil from Venezuelan state oil company PDVSA, as part of a maneuver to bypass the sanctions imposed by Washington, but would also take charge of a scheme to export coal from the mines of Zulia, in western Venezuela. The dirty play allowed that thousands of tons, valued in millions of dollars, ended up in ports in Mexico and Central America.

As part of their business network based in Mexico, with one foot in Dubai, the two traders devised a way to replace the operation of the large international credit card franchises if they were to abandon the Venezuelan market because of Washington’s sanctions. The developed electronic payment system, “Paquete Alcance,” aimed to get hundreds of millions of dollars in remittances sent by expatriates and use them to finance purchases at CLAP stores.