Next March will mark one year since the PDVSA-Crypto scandal, the last fraud against the nation during the times of Chavismo, which resulted in the defenestration of Tareck El Aissami, vice president of the economic area and minister of Energy and Petroleum. Nothing is known about the former plenipotentiary El Aissami. Or almost nothing. Periodically, opposition politicians and activists on social media wonder about his whereabouts and call for justice, criticizing the astonishing official silence on his case. It was never known if charges were brought against him. There is no news about his legal status. He has not testified or been seen again. The attorney general has not alluded to it again. In the PSUV the issue is forgotten. The revolutionary leadership avoids referring to him personally. El Aissami seems to have been swallowed by the earth.
The million-dollar corruption scheme in the diversion of income from Petróleos de Venezuela in times of international sanctions was dismantled – the property losses are estimated at more than 21,000 million dollars – and its members prosecuted, including officials so important to the management. of Madurista Government such as Pedro Maldonado, Hugbel Roa or Hugo Cabezas, all with important responsibilities since the times of Hugo Chávez. In total, 40 bureaucrats, civil and military, some of great importance and power, all of them very close to El Aissami personally and politically, also fell into disgrace and were struck down.
According to close sources, El Aissami, a vegan, has lost more than ten kilos in this time. Some well-founded journalistic versions have published information leaked from the depths of Chavismo, and report that El Aissami is in a state of semi-residential confinement, in a kind of house arrest in one of the citadels built in recent years for the ruling elite in the area. of Conejo Blanco, in Fuerte Tiuna, the most important military plaza in Caracas. Furthermore, before and after his public disappearance, there has been cyclical speculation about the health of El Aissami, a criminal lawyer who graduated from the University of Los Andes, son of Syrian emigrants from revolutionary Baathist nationalism.
Versions circulated on social networks about the treatment of cancer, treatable and detected in time, which was affecting his performance at the end of 2022. The political leader himself took it upon himself to deny this when he was in office. But now he has not been able to deny them again either. The silence is total.
“By virtue of the investigations that have been initiated into serious acts of corruption in Petróleos de Venezuela, I have made the decision to present my resignation as Minister of Petroleum, with the purpose of supporting, accompanying and fully backing this process,” said El Aissami. in March 2023, in what was his last public statement, shortly before a sequence of arrests of people close to him began, in an investigation that was ordered by the Miraflores Palace itself, the presidential residence.
It has been commented since then that the reasons for El Aissami's fall could also be political. Although it is a source of controversy, this version is considered true by many informed people in Venezuela. Maduro himself, in one of his televised broadcasts, once made an allusion, without naming him, talking about the existence of a group of people who were secretly working to replace him in power.
“I have never believed that,” says consultant and political analyst Carmen Beatriz Fernández, an academic at the University of Navarra and the Simón Bolívar University. “It has always seemed to me that El Aissami's problem with Maduro has to do with money, with business. Maduro needs cash to face electoral challenges and El Aisami did not know how to explain to him, a part was missing, a campaign without money is a condemnation. “That's where I think things are going.”
When the PDVSA-Crypto case was revealed, shortly afterwards several videos of Maduro's televised programs could be seen on social networks in which, impatiently, he summoned El Aissami, in front of the rest of the cabinet, to inform him about the collection of the PDVSA accounts, and the progress of the state oil company's cash flow.
“It is not easy to analyze the El Aissami case, it has few visible elements. There is debate about whether there is a power struggle, or if the difference with Maduro is because money was lost. It is a rather mysterious case, very opaque. The structure of internal power in the Chavista government remains intact, for the rest,” comments Luis Salamanca, doctor in Political Science at the Central University of Venezuela.
In general terms, government ministers and deputies avoid talking about the El Aissami case. Occasionally, some of them have had to escape questions with allusions and sophistry. “I don't know anything about El Aissami, I don't know his whereabouts,” Jesús Faría, deputy of the United Socialist Party of Venezuela, had evasively declared in an opinion program weeks ago. “His possible prosecution of him is a task that the Prosecutor's Office and the security agencies have,” he added.
“It is a case that shows how far the factions of Chavismo can go in their internal struggles,” says Luis Peche Artega, consultant and political analyst. “Two people died in the trials of this scandal, very little is said about that. A very clear message is sent to the rest of the Chavismo actors about the preponderance of Maduro's leadership. A year ago there was talk of alternate leaders, of potential substitutes, all that ended. A very clear message has been sent here.”
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