The “traitors” who spoke in the ear of Nicolás Maduro

In 2018 everything started to get worse for Nicolás Maduro. It was another year like this 2024, in which he had to hold presidential elections in Venezuela and the votes escaped him. The Chavista leader decided to call the elections early; He eliminated any competition that threatened to remove him from power by disqualifying candidates and other well-known judicial maneuvers; and he entered quicksand where his legitimacy was fractured. That year the international community crossed its arms as a sign of disapproval of his re-election, considered flawed. Relations were broken, ambassadors were demoted to chargé d’affaires.

The president reached that 2018, the end of the first period as a substitute that occurred after the death of the eternal commander of the revolution Hugo Chávez, after resisting months of intense days of protests that his security forces repressed with violence and today the Criminal Court International investigates possible crimes against humanity. He went through the fire of hyperinflation, the brutal shortages of food and medicine and the first peaks of mass migration of Venezuelans. But this week Maduro has rewinded the cassette from that year and has found something much more serious that occurred that year without raising suspicions: betrayal was speaking in his ear in every council of ministers.

The president has confessed on television that since January 2018, when everything began to get even more complicated, Tareck El Aissami, the bishop that he put at his side as his vice president for a year and a half, was plotting against him. Not only was he the second on board, but he also entrusted him with the still pending task of rebuilding the economy and waging the crusade against inflation, generated by the controls on the economy imposed since the time of Hugo Chávez—of whom both call themselves sons— , in which they tried from chasing the zeros that the bolivar was accumulating in its unstoppable devaluation to finally admitting the free circulation of the dollar, which they claimed was the enemy to be pulverized, and ended up adopting the pseudonym REF—for reference—, the abbreviation with the that today all prices are indicated in Venezuela, behind which hides the fear of the times when talking about dollars was a crime.

Maduro has begun to move pieces in the puzzle that prosecutor Tarek William Saab has been revealing for several weeks in press conferences that serve as episodes of an increasingly convoluted plot, which he has called PDVSA Cripto and in that 21,000 million dollars of the nation were lost, as a result of the sale of oil on the black market without anyone noticing at the time. The skein of this thread began to be pulled a year ago. El Aissami, as Minister of Petroleum, resigned from his position while other officials were arrested and disappeared from the map without giving further explanations. A few weeks ago he showed signs of life: prosecutor Saab released photos of one of the most powerful men in the Government in handcuffs entering court.

It is not known under what circumstances he was detained or how. After occupying almost all positions in the revolution and being a super minister, he now carries the title of traitor. In the latest revelations that the prosecutor always makes at noon, they ended up together in the same conspiracy, apparently concocted by Zoom video calls, accused of being frontmen of Chavismo, such as the businessman Samark López, now identified by Maduro as the right-hand man of who was his right hand in 2018, and staunch opponents of his Government such as Julio Borges and Leopoldo López, united in exile and in the arrest and extradition orders that have been issued to them this week, but politically opposed to each other for more than a decade.

The audios have begun to spread to give a twist to the corruption plot, one more of a pile of embezzlements that Chavismo accumulates in investigations in jurisdictions of other countries, towards an international political conspiracy. “I’m taking notes as if I were in the first semester of a career that I don’t know about,” Samark López tells Borges when he asks him what message he is going to convey to El Aissami about the conversation in which they apparently sought to establish a direct communication channel. with the Government in the midst of the pandemic.

Prosecutor Saab has presented recordings from 2020 and testimonies collected during the interrogations of Samark López dressed in the blue jumpsuit worn by prisoners. In one of the audios between Borges and the leader Carlos Ocariz, the businessman makes his analysis of what a political transition could be like in Venezuela in which the opposition leaders, El Aissami and López, would be involved—sanctioned and with assets blocked in the United States since 2017—and former US ambassador James Story. In another conversation with the leader of Voluntad Popular, Leopoldo López, released with cuts and without further context to understand the plans that are being orchestrated, the person involved allows himself a political reflection. “Sometimes, when we talk about dictatorship, the word seems very heavy to me, I question it, as a good democrat. But if anything is a dictatorship, it is this now,” says Samark López.

The prosecutor has assured that Julio Borges and Leopoldo López – a prisoner in Ramo Verde since 2014 and then at home in prison until 2017 – were part of PDVSA’s corrupt negotiations even before El Aissami. They are from the time of Rafael Ramírez, whom Chávez put in charge of the industry for almost a decade and was defenestrated in one of the first purges of Chavismo in Maduro’s time. The opponents, who have always been the usual suspects of any conspiracy denounced by the Government, would receive part of the oil revenue through contractors with whom they were close. “The story of these characters is vomiting,” he commented this week on television, between one alleged piece of evidence and another about the PDVSA Cripto case, which already has 67 detainees. “Leopoldo López actively participated in the coup d’état of April 2002, he is an active signatory of the Carmonazo (the decree issued by Pedro Carmona when he took power in 2002), as is María Corina Machado. “They don’t believe in the electoral route.”

Leopoldo López has responded to the revelations with a challenge. “You have also had conversations to explore Maduro’s departure. They also have you recorded,” he wrote in X, admiring the prosecutor. Thus, he has acknowledged having contacts with government officials and security forces to try to show the cracks that Maduro has in his own house. Ocariz has said that these are false accusations and explains that the meetings with Samark López were to build bridges with the Government to implement the social agreements negotiated to address the pandemic and seek better guarantees for the parliamentary elections that year. Borges, on the other hand, has alleged that the prosecutor is trying to divert attention from the elections that are less than three months away, enough for new unexpected twists in this plot to occur.

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