Since the borders to Colombia and Brazil are packed and there is minimal access to foreign currency to reach other desirable destinations, crossing to Trinidad and Tobago is one of the most accessible routes for those in distress seeking to flee Venezuela. Relocating them is the business of the 'coyotes' who are based in the states of Sucre or Delta Amacuro, while cheating them is that of the boatmen, fishermen, smugglers and security forces that haunt them.

Without human rights officers at the ports of entry or legal system that protects the refugee, Venezuelans migrating to the Caribbean island find relief from hunger and shortages. In return, they are exposed to labor exploitation and the constant persecution of corrupt authorities. On many occasions they end up in detention centers with inhumane conditions, from which only those who pay large amounts of money in fines are saved. The asylum request is a weak shield that hardly helps in case of arrest. Yet, the number of those who try their luck to earn a few dollars grows.

Beyond the names of political figures and Government officials involved, the corruption plot deployed by the Brazilian construction company in Venezuela brought huge amounts of money in irregular payments into circulation. In Swiss banks, the transit of at least 235 million dollars was detected, mostly bribes linked to the Tocoma hydroelectric project, which after feeding the accounts of intermediaries reached their destination. For now, investigations determine that the capillarity through which the funds flowed led to art merchants, patriarchs of civil engineering dynasties, and even sports managers.

Euzenando Azevedo had the doors of the Miraflores Palace open with Chávez and at the same time, he had a direct line with CEO Marcelo Odebrecht. Then, he became a key witness in the parade of plea bargains of the Lava Jato case. However, despite the many privileges, his testimony fell short. He failed to inform about some bank accounts in Switzerland that reveal that he kept money with one of the commissioners he had reported, Venezuelan lawyer Héctor Dáger.

Mexican authorities blame Venezuelan authorities for not verifying the quality of the products included in the combos for the Local Supply and Production Committee (CLAP). Even though the companies provided false information on the packaging, they wash their hands with bureaucratic technicalities and continue granting export permits. In Venezuela, no official wants to talk about it. For months, the Government of Nicolás Maduro bought and distributed among the poorest several powdered milk brands of the lowest quality.

The Hong Kong-registered company, linked to Colombian entrepreneurs Alex Nain Saab Morán and Álvaro Enrique Pulido Vargas, seems to be the great ally of Nicolás Maduro Government. Millionaire contracts for the supply of millions of CLAP boxes, the flagship program of Hugo Chávez's successor, were just the beginning. The company, with a foggy trail in Venezuela, also acts as the intermediary of the Ministry of Health in the purchase of the highly-scarce medicines in hospitals and pharmacies in the country.     

Kept under lock and key in Brazil since late 2016, the videos of the Odebrecht trial on Venezuela finally appear. As of today, Armando.info begins to publish a string of clips that show the faces of the witnesses who documented the case. Some of their statements had already been published on this platform, but here they go with the voice and tone of their protagonists.

New documents show that the Hong Kong-registered company is one of Nicolás Maduro’s favorite to do business. While there are companies in the Venezuelan private sector that wait years for the payment of foreign currencies, in 2017, this company obtained at least two contracts for the supply of over 20 million of the boxes that the Government sells at subsidized prices, and it invoiced 113 million dollars to the Ministry of Food in just one day. The papers also confirm the connection of this company with Fondo Global de Construcción (Global Construction Fund), a network built by Colombian entrepreneurs Alex Nain Saab Morán and Álvaro Enrique Pulido Vargas, through which they obtained contracts under Hugo Chávez for the construction of prefabricated houses.

The judicial authorities of Switzerland found a connection between the wife and the mother-in-law of the former Venezuelan minister with at least 40 million dollars deposited in eight bank accounts, one of which was shared with one of the main negotiators of bribes and kickbacks between Odebrecht and the governments of Chávez and Maduro. Although they asked the Venezuelan justice to investigate the matter, the courts denied any possibility of addressing the case and the Venezuelan Prosecutor's Office, led by Tarek William Saab, acts as if not aware.

The tension between the governments of Nicolás Maduro and Juan Carlos Varela is nonstop. But the surge of trade retaliations from both capitals peculiarly leaves some of the companies that since 2017 provide merchandise to Chávez’s flagship program (the Local Supply and Production Committees - Clap) unharmed. Two of these companies show the profile of opportunistic shell companies.

Neither the revolutionary commander of Venezuela, nor the charismatic president Lula of Brazil, but the senior staff of the construction company turned into the Major Elector when the Brazilian Senate had to vote on the incorporation of Caracas into the trading bloc. Based on the transcripts of the Lava Jato case, Marcelo Odebrecht personally led the lobbying campaign aimed to break the three-year blockage that prevented the entry of the Chavista regime into the club. The operation included the recruitment of three key Senators from the Workers' Party, as allies.  

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.

The Venezuelan government has resorted to a myriad of trading intermediaries to provide imported merchandise for the Claps, its star food aid program. With massive purchases in international markets, it poorly satisfies the hunger of popular sectors while safely feeding the financial flows that end in bank accounts in Hong Kong or Switzerland.

In Mexico, there is a long tradition of cheating in the supply of dairy products packaged for social programs. Hence, it should not be surprising that the Venezuelan corruption had found in that country the perfect formula to include in the so-called CLAP Boxes a paste purchased at auction price as cow's powdered milk. For a mysterious reason, ghostly or barely known companies are the ones monopolizing purchase orders from Venezuela.

Former combatants of what was the largest guerrilla in Latin America - who separated from the peace agreement signed in 2016 - are in a process of transition and rearrangement of criminal structures, where illicit drug trafficking and illegal mining continue to be the main focal points, now in Venezuelan territory. They have met with indigenous peoples and communities in Amazonas to formalize their presence in the territory, affirming that they have the support of the Venezuelan Government. But they also move to lands of the Orinoco Mining Arc, where they even control coltan mines.

As if they were pieces of a broken mirror scattered in many islands around the world, several offshore companies form an oil-trading business network that reveals the trajectory of Alessandro Bazzoni and Francisco D'Agostino. Both of them, together with the Venezuelan telecommunications magnate Oswaldo Cisneros, landed in 2016 in the Orinoco Belt to fill the vacancy of the original partner, Harvest Natural Resources.

Even Diosdado Cabello has false followers. The Government of Venezuela has been able to measure itself in political cyberspace. Hence, it has created an authentic machinery of robots at the service of the governing party in social media that is mainly controlled by public officials and coordinated from ministries. This is the result of several studies, testimonials and applications that measure the "Twitterzuela" convulsion.

From 2012 to 2015, the truck company Kamaz led the shipment records from Russia to Venezuela. Chassis, engines and a range of spare parts entered the country continuously through the local intermediary J.C. International 2004, C.A., a company where the latest partners are also engaged in the business of meat distribution. For years, the Venezuelan government and Kamaz have promised the construction of a car assembly plant in the country but it never materialized, as well as the idea of filling the roads of Venezuela with vehicles of this make.

Five Trinitarian Muslims lived a nightmare in the coolest destination in the world. When they traveled to Caracas to process the visa required to go on pilgrimage to Mecca, they were detained by the political police on terrorism charges. They spent two years, six months and 25 days in the cells of Sebin (Bolivarian National Intelligence Service). Then, and to not acknowledge the error of imputing five innocent persons, the judge issued a penalty equal to the time they were locked up. The solution does not return the lost time to five foreigners who lived through the tragedy of dealing with the perverse and ineffective Judiciary created by chavismo.

Their faces have not appeared in any public manifestation portrayed in any banner, or brochures, or in social media. Their names were sentenced by someone with "revolutionary authority" that involved them in a case without conclusive evidence, even with assumptions that even though they were dismantled, that was worth little or nothing to reverse the aim, i.e. to criminalize the protest, frighten the protesters, leave someone behind bars. The official discourse that is determined to ensure that there are only political prisoners in Venezuela does not fit to them. These are ordinary Venezuelans who have ended up as political prisoners, particularly as forgotten political prisoners.

Hurried by the drop of oil prices and the collapse of oil production, Nicolás Maduro bets on the Orinoco Mining Arc as a formula to increase the resources that are so scarce in the national coffers. Under the "joint venture" system, the Government has ended up agreeing with companies insufficiently known in the extra-activist industry, like Corporación Faoz. Among the beneficiaries is Gold Reserve, the Canadian mining company that Hugo Chávez expelled from Venezuela years ago. The Paradise Papers filtering shows that both have registered companies in that tax haven called Barbados.

The Mayas, who in the classical era of their civilization mysteriously depopulated large stone cities in Mesoamerica, now, a millennium later, abandon their adobe and thatched roof villages in the Yucatán peninsula at a rate that could be comparable. Every year, over a thousand cross the border into the United States. This time their motives are not a mystery: local poverty and the promise of a better life, especially in California, push them to exodus. The traffic is bidirectional, in any case. While the people march north, back to the south come remittances of money, hopes and new cultural patterns. However, life for those who stay at home is not easy, especially for married women, who submit not only to an endless wait, but also to asphyxiating social norms.

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 city of San Francisco, in California, is the most expensive in the United States of America and one of the most sophisticated. Birthplace of the hippie movement in the 60's and the current revolution in computers and the Internet, it now can pay a millenarian anachronism, as it is surrounded by a string of Mayan communities. More than 70,000 immigrants from Yucatán -5,000 kilometers (3,106 miles) away- swarm in suburbs like San Rafael or the Mission district. Attracted by what seems to be like a new gold rush, most arrive without knowing a word in English and just a few in Spanish to work as dishwashers and kitchen assistants in restaurants. However, the journey is not only through distance, but through culture, and the clash between ancestral customs and the demands of the post-industrial society, like alcoholism and drug addiction, arises.

The Venezuelan businessman quietly established a complex corporate structure until last February the US Treasury Department accused him of being the "front man" of the Vice President of the Republic, Tareck El Aissami. The Paradise Papers leak now reveals that his business assets are broader than those initially blocked by the US authorities and that the island of Barbados was chosen to create a sort of holding that groups the companies with which he participated in the oil and food business, among others, and whereby he was awarded millionaire contracts with the Venezuelan government.

Venezuelan Álvaro Gorrín escaped on his yacht in 2009 after the intervention of Banco Canarias, but he and his board members did not resign themselves to losing everything to the Venezuelan government. Between the support of an influential New York law firm and the expertise of Appleby to create companies in tax havens, the then fugitive from the Venezuelan justice drew a strategy to rescue something from the ruins.

The member of the US Cabinet, Wilbur Ross, is one of the owners of a company that provides maritime transport services to Pdvsa, a client that in 2015 contributed over 11 percent of the profits to his shipping company. Although the official had to get rid of his mercantile properties to hold his position, he kept a participation in that line of business through a complex offshore structure in the Cayman Islands. Thus, he did not only do business with chavista Venezuela, but also with an associate of Russian President Vladimir Putin. Both countries are subject to economic sanctions by Washington.

More than 550 million U.S. dollars went through the cliff in some Pdvsa Agrícola (PDVSA Agriculture) facilities, which were partly built in four provinces of Venezuela. A new file of judicial documents and bank deposits of the Lava Jato operation -leaked for this report- involve Egly Ramírez (uncle of the former president of the state oil company and current ambassador of Venezuela to the United Nations, Rafael Ramírez) and other former officials in the biggest corruption scandal of recent years that established a systematic payment of bribes to people with responsibilities in the governments of Latin America, so that the Brazilian multinational could win the tenders.

In business, the entrepreneurs who have amassed fortunes to the rhythm of the schizophrenic chavista economy stand out. A Peruvian-Spanish citizen has developed a real emporium in the last 13 years. Once pointed out as the potential financial channel between the Venezuelan government and the Spanish political party Podemos, it could only be confirmed that he works shoulder to shoulder with the military and every day incorporates new businesses to his emporium. Atahualpa Fernández continues to gain ground among the entrepreneurs protected by the ruling party.

In two countries of "Bolivarian" regimes, Ecuador and Venezuela, Chinese investment has found avid business partners over the last ten years. The Asian giant has injected vast financial resources and resources for infrastructure works into both nations, many of them unfinished. But the other side of the coin is the conditions imposed on the partners in draconian contracts that the Chinese entities and companies have subscribed by their local counterparts. In the height of the 21st Century, the foreseeable power of the future imposes terms and conditions of the 19th Century, like the suspension of labor laws, importation of labor, exclusive use rights, more expensive financing, payments in foreign currency, among other nineteenth-century privileges.