These far ends of glaciers and fjords, that once enchanted Darwin and Chatwin, Theroux and Hudson, have become the setting for postapocalyptic sceneries in which packs of feral dogs not only prey the local fauna and the cattle but also attack people. These dogs’ fangs have contributed, as much as the crisis, to decimate the traditional sheep cattle sector both sides of the international border between Argentina and Chile across Tierra del Fuego, the southernmost land ever colonized by man.

Odebrecht was not the only one. Four companies were awarded a dozen works to build large infrastructures in Argentina, nearly always using the gimmick of an attractive quote and the accompanying financing by a Brazilian state development bank. However, they subcontracted other providers afterward and, with the projects already in progress, the costs increased and the Argentine State ended up providing the funds, over US$ 9,000 million, of which an average of 300 million per work corresponded to surcharges. In addition, today many of the projects remain unfinished. The pattern would be used by Brazilian construction companies in other Latin American markets.

Aside from ethical questions, the logic of a private entity opening an offshore company seems elementary —to declare its profits in a territory where it can pay less tax than it should in its place of origin. But when it comes to a state-owned company like Petróleos de Venezuela, which is not obliged to pay taxes - and therefore does not need to evade them - it is difficult to understand why within its business scheme there is contracting with companies established in tax havens and there is even the creation of their own subsidiaries in these places. What does the Venezuelan public treasury gain from this?

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.

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.