The thousand faces of corruption in Nicolás Maduro’s Venezuela

The largest anti-corruption operation in Venezuela has been underway for a month, during which 58 people, most of them state officials, were put behind bars for its alleged connection with a colossal embezzlement that the prosecutor tries to understand and quantify, discovering new ramifications every day.

On March 17, the anti-corruption police, a body that the country had only just heard of until then, issued a statement asking the public prosecutor’s office to investigate some officialswithout specifying how many or who, for “having been involved in serious acts of administrative corruption and embezzlement”.

The short text produced a domino effect of corruption allegations that brought down the oil minister, Tareck ElAissami, who resigned from office. After him fell magistrates, entrepreneurs and public leaders who ended up in prison, along with a deputy, a mayor and a former minister also noted.

Once the first names involved were announced, state channel VTV showed these people dressed in orange dungarees listening to the allegations against them, a gesture that mimics the American style of introducing new inmatessomething that had never been seen before in the Caribbean country.

at dawn

The dynamic has been repeated several times in the last four weeks, always close to midnight, after which the Public Prosecutor’s Office updates via Twitter the number of detainees, wanted persons and searches carried out, the balance which does not include the number of confiscated assets or the amount stolen .

At dawn, justice added elaborate in this crusade he leads, according to himself, President Nicolás Maduro, who has promised to apply “all punishments” to the dozens of officials indicated. “There will be no coexistence or complicity, I swear,” he underlined.

And, although the Attorney General, Tarek William Saab, has offered several statements on the matter, he refuses to estimate the losses that these illicit enrichments leave the country.

The same silence is maintained by Saab and Maduro on El Aissami, who until a month ago was vice president of the economic area and at the end of last year signed contracts with Chevron, despite being designated by the United States as one of the most sought after by international drug trafficking.

The ex-minister resigned from the oil portfolio three days after the anti-corruption operation began. With a short message posted on Twitter, he announced that he would collaborate with the authorities, which Maduro ratified the same day, the only time he has spoken of officiality.

They’ve been around ever since endless rumors about the fate of El Aissami without the Government confirming anything, an information vacuum that accelerates the proliferation of unofficial versions due, also, to the delay of the Public Prosecutor’s Office in communicating the progress of the operation, many of which announced hours and days before by the local media.

plots of power

The investigations discovered several heads in the corruption monster, which confirms, among other things, the complaints of recent years by trade unions and opponents on the mismanagement of public resources in various companies and state institutions, where the majority of workers earn less than $50 a month.

Within the state-owned Petróleos de Venezuela (PDVSA) and the Crypto Assets Superintendence, the largest plot has been hatched -which has so far left 99 raids-, while the authorities have detected other corrupt practices in the Venezuelan Corporation of Guayana (CVG) -a conglomerate of mining, forestry and electricity companies and in the state-owned Cartoons de Venezuela.

In addition, the Anti-Corruption Police also raised stones in the Judiciary, where it found out a plot that so far leaves six arrest warrants and six raids, procedures that have been replicated in at least two town halls.

Given this scenario, unofficial estimates of the stolen amount are estimated at several billion dollars, and while there are no confirmed amounts, Maduro has ordered that “everything that has been confiscated” from corrupt people and drug traffickers be handed over to the police for their use. work to ensure the safety of citizens.

EFE Agency