How much money has Chavismo stolen in Venezuela?

A few days after the decision of the Supreme Court of Venezuela that on January 26 confirmed the disqualification of the opposition leader Maria Corina Machado as a presidential candidate against the re-election of Nicolas Maduroa journalistic investigation by Armando.info, a digital portal critical of the regime, It uncovered the scope of the looting carried out for decades under the governments of Hugo Chávez and Maduro.

At a time when the regime is toughening repression not only against Machado and the opponents, but also against the teachers' union and against officers and non-commissioned officers whom, without any evidence, it links to an alleged destabilizing plan, Armando.info estimates the amount of part of the money that has disappeared at $56 billion.

The money circulated through a series of freely allocated funds created by Chávez since the end of the last century to administer, without any fiscal control, the resources of the oil bonanza that produced the country's income for more than 700,000 million dollars, a gigantic amount that was not reflected in an improvement in the life of ordinary Venezuelans.

The exact figure is 56,036,854,000 dollarscalculated based on official reports on the management of dozens of special funds. These are documents from the Ministry of Planning and Finance, the National Treasury Office and the Economic and Social Development Bank (Bandes), among others.

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The documents were shared by the Organized Corruption and Crime Reporting Project (OCCRP), an international network of investigative journalists that pursues and exposes links between criminal organizations, corrupt practices and politicians. and government officials in dozens of countries around the world.

The fundamental task was carried out by Venezuelan investigative reporters Valentina Lares – who was a correspondent for this newspaper in Caracas – and Marcos David Valverde.

Armando.info has participated in high-profile investigations such as the Panama Papers. In Venezuela, their complaints about the 'Alacrán' operation and the 'Pdvsa-cripto' case stand out, which has cost them harsh persecution of their journalists, a series of massive computer attacks, and judicial censorship measures such as the prohibition of publishing reports on the Colombian businessman considered a key ally of President Nicolás Maduro, Álex Saab.

The special funds

Uncomfortable with the rigidity of budget management established by law, in 1999 Hugo Chávez created the Single Social Fund, which he himself announced as “an extraordinary measure” to distribute resources to social programs. Two years later, the Investment Fund for Macroeconomic Stabilization was born, which sought to save a good part of the resources from the oil bonanza and which, over time, became a gigantic petty cash – not so small – of the regime.

The objective of the Stabilization Fund was, in principle, to prevent the enormous flow of dollars from oil revenues from entering directly into circulation in the economy and causing acute inflation, in the style of what economists call the “Dutch disease” for what happened in the sixties in the Netherlands, when an oil boom skyrocketed prices.

But soon the purpose of the Stabilization Fund changed. Chávez himself hinted at it in February 2002, when he warned: “We have that piggy bank” and “the time has come to use those resources…”. From then on, money went to the different funds that Chávez created, with various and pompous names.

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As the economist Asdrúbal Oliveros, director of Ecoanalítico, told the Venezuelan journalist Ludmila Vinogradoff, of the Madrid newspaper ABC, who has covered the issue in detail, the regime created “a pernicious structure to manage the resources of the Venezuelan State with discretion. and, above all, extraordinary resources”, and in this way “the structure of the Nation's budget led to disorder, corruption and inefficiency…”.

In the files of the different government entities linked to the creation and management of these funds, there is no record of the destination of such a flow of resources. “They simply disappeared,” one of the researchers told EL TIEMPO.
From the documents used as the basis for Armando.info's complaints, it is deduced that, despite the name of the original fund (Social Single Fund), it was not the only one. Between 2007 and 2012 alone, the Chavista government created more than 40 discretionary management funds, completely unrelated to fiscal control.

The figure of 56 billion dollars missing may be much higher, since it corresponds to the management of 30 of those funds. Of the other ten, there are not even accounting records.

“As an example of how much larger the figure can be, suffice it to say that there are two enormous funds with no clarity on the destination of their resources. The Sino-Venezuelan Joint Fund, which managed some 68 billion dollars, and the National Development Fund, which had almost 180 billion dollars in its coffers,” the same source of the investigation detailed to EL TIEMPO.

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There is a veritable festival of funds with names ranging from bombastic to specificity. There are the Socialist Productive Bicentennial Fund, the Social Production Fund and the Financing Fund for the Promotion of Social Production Companies. And then, the Asphalt Fund, the Bolívar-Artigas Fund and the most striking of all: the Fund for Attention to Requests received through the X (then Twitter) account @chavezcandanga, used by the former president himself, who said that He would use that fund “to support many things that are needed and urgent.”

There is no record of how much money left there, or to what destination, but, as they say in Venezuela, “the real ones disappeared.” The same occurs with a dozen funds for agriculture and fishing, industrial credit, microfinance development, and others with striking names such as “Territorial Compensation” and “National Savings of the Working Class.”

“Deficit, discretionary and opaque”: this is how Transparencia Venezuela defined, in a 2011 report, the management given to these funds by the government of Chávez, who died two years later and left Maduro as successor and manager of those resources.

Ferrari and luxury coach

These years coincide with the emergence of the 'boliburgueses', the name given by Venezuelans to the then emerging class, the new rich of Chavismo. These are officials, contractors or beneficiaries of all types of dark businesses with the enormous resources missing from public coffers.

A good example, which is not linked to the case of the funds, is that of senior officials close to the oil company PDVSA. At the end of last year, the Madrid newspaper El País disclosed the details of an investigation into a series of bank accounts in Andorra, the small principality nestled in the Pyrenees, between Spain and France, and which was once classified as a tax haven.

The Andorran Financial Intelligence Unit, an elite group of judicial investigators created by the principality to combat the use of Andorran banks as a mechanism for laundering drug trafficking and corruption, tracked more than 2 billion dollars managed by companies. of paper – some of them based in Panama –, controlled by former Chavista vice ministers, PDVSA contractors and front men.

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The resources were used, among others, to buy a helicopter for 2.6 million dollars, twenty luxury vehicles for 5.7 million dollars, dozens of flights on high-end private jets, a coach that cost $120,000 and even a Ferrari GTB, for which $350,000 was allocated.

Everything indicates that the uncovering will continue, but, this time, in the United States, where the former general of the Venezuelan army Clíver Alcalá has provided the justice of that country with extensive and detailed information about another vein of corruption: the relationship of the Chavista leadership with the FARC and drug trafficking.

Alcalá was one of the officers who accompanied Chávez in the 1992 coup attempt. Between 2000 and 2002 he was his aide-de-camp at the Miraflores Palace and traveled with him on almost all of his tours. “He knows a lot,” a diplomatic source familiar with the investigation told EL TIEMPO.

Alcalá held half a dozen positions in the military structure. His name appeared in the computer files of 'Raúl Reyes', one of the leaders of the FARC. In 2020, Alcalá surrendered to the United States, which was prosecuting him for drug trafficking and terrorism for his business dealings with the FARC.

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Now that the Supreme Court, controlled by the Chavista regime, has confirmed the disqualification of María Corina Machado, elected candidate in the opposition primaries last October, Washington considers that Maduro has failed to comply with the spirit of the Barbados agreements between the Government and the opposition that led the United States to lift sanctions against Venezuela.

It is taken for granted that, along with the reactivation of sanctions, the information revealed by Alcalá will activate judicial proceedings against the leaders of the Caracas regime.

“Maduro has shown that he is incapable of opening himself up to a negotiated solution that could imply his abandonment of power, and he has no choice but to entrench himself, even if that means that he becomes an international pariah,” the diplomatic source mentioned told EL TIEMPO.

Aware of what awaits him, Maduro declared this Sunday, in a defiant tone, that he will win this year's presidential elections “by hook or by crook.”

MAURICIO VARGAS
ANALYST
TIME

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