The attorney general, Tarek William Saab, took advantage of Palm Sunday to specify who are the 44 Chavista leaders, military personnel and Boliburgues businessmen who have so far fallen into the “anti-corruption” purge unleashed within Chavismo, which really hides a war of power in the revolution. Hours later, Juan Guaidó, who was president in charge of Venezuela for four years, denounced that the Bolivarian regime “would be about to issue an arrest warrant against me,” in an attempt to mitigate the effect of the carousel of arrests, until now all Chavistas. or linked to the power plots of the revolution.
“They sought to embezzle, in their criminal immorality, the national economy, damaging the community in general,” harangued the prosecutor, one of the many tentacles of the Venezuelan State that Nicolás Maduro manages from the Miraflores Palace. Saab himself demands the “maximum penalty” for the now imprisoned, fellow revolutionaries until very recently.
Those already known have been joined in recent days by the presidents of the country’s great emporiums, such as Pedro Maldonado, who was in charge of Corporación Venezolana de Guayana (CVG), made up of 14 companies that manage natural resources, gold, diamonds, iron, bauxite and other minerals. Maldonado served as a key player in the censorship of independent media during his time at Conatel, the state telecommunications entity.
Also included in the list of corrupt Néstor Astudillo, president of Siderúrgica del Orinoco (Sidor), as well as managers and vice presidents of these “strategic industries”, including the military of Petróleos de Venezuela (PDVSA), previously detained.
Almost all of them appeared before a provisional court, handcuffed and dressed in orange in the style imposed by the Salvadoran president, Nayib Bukele. Including the three judges accused of corruption, responsible for “terrorism” cases and who are the authors of illegal sentences against part of the 283 political prisoners who today remain in Maduro’s dungeons.
Two senior leaders stand out from the list, former minister Hugbel Roa and the superintendent of cryptocurrencies, Joselit Ramírez, main collaborators of the fallen oil czar, Tareck El Aissami. In recent days, different versions have been released, without officially confirming, that place the former all-powerful ally of Maduro in Fuerte Tiuna, the largest military headquarters in the country, under a kind of house arrest.
“The reason why El Aissami is under house arrest would be to avoid a possible escape abroad and thus become a bigger problem for the madurismo. That would not be a fan, but a turbine,” ironized Rafael Isea, former governor with Chávez and today exiled in the United States.
The fall of El Aissami, the main link with Iran, has meant a political victory for Vice President Delcy Rodríguez and her brother Jorge, head of the Chavista legislative body and head of the group of government negotiators at the Mexico table. The struggle between the two most powerful groups within Chavismo, along with the one led by the radical Diosdado Cabello, number two in the revolution, and the military, had been going on for several years.
According to the estimates of the propaganda media of the revolution, at least 3,000 million dollars, obtained from the sale of oil through intermediaries, would have fallen into the hands of this network of corruption. Independent calculations raise the amount that is still to be collected for the state coffers to over 20,000 million dollars.
“It has managed to capture a part of this wealth, mansions where they had terrible orgies. All this will have to be told and when we get past this first phase we will show the assets,” Maduro said on television.
The “people’s president” has publicly shown his supposed indignation at the imprisoned, despite the fact that corruption has been part of the revolution from the very beginning. According to Transparency International, Venezuela is the country with the most corruption on the planet, only surpassed by Somalia, Syria and South Sudan.
“The Law against Hate is to persecute journalists. The Anti-Society Law is to put an end to NGOs and human rights defenders. The Law against Corruption is to end up imprisoning anyone who opposes power. It is always that: get out of means to anyone who gets in the way. It’s a tyranny,” said political scientist Walter Molina Galdi.
In such a scenario and after receiving various confidences, Guaidó has alerted the international community. “They are trying to persecute me to calm their bases, to change the focus of attention in the face of the corruption they did. The country is bankrupt and it has nothing to do with the blockade. This was looting,” defended Guaidó, candidate for the opposition primaries, to be held in October.
At the head of Voluntad Popular (VP), the party of former political prisoner Leopoldo López, the former president of the National Assembly has added to his candidacy small political formations, including the Marxist and opposition Red Flag.
According to the criteria of The Trust Project
