Invisible Trillions by Raymond Baker & Larry Diamond

Author:Raymond Baker & Larry Diamond [Raymond Baker]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Berrett-Koehler Publishers
Published: 2023-01-31T00:00:00+00:00

VENEZUELA

Once an example of strengthening democracy and growing prosperity, Venezuela has been reduced to penury. Every component of the financial secrecy system found use in transferring wealth from the hands of the poor to the lands of the rich.

Small-scale production had been going on for years when Royal Dutch Shell struck oil in the Maracaibo basin in 1922, hitting a reserve that blew out at the rate of 100,000 barrels a day with output peaking to 3.7 million B/D by 1970. Petroleos de Venezuela, S.A. (PDVSA), was formed in 1976, effectively nationalizing the industry, with foreign companies permitted to hold minority participations. The resource curse hit Venezuela hard as corruption exploded and inequality widened. Hugo Chavez, a charismatic populist, was elected president in 1998. With the world’s largest oil reserves still to this day, Chavez redirected PDVSA into political projects, along the way firing 19,000 skilled employees, nationalizing farming and manufacturing companies to give to his friends and supporters, and establishing multiple exchange rates so that the favored could convert bolivars to dollars at handsome profits. After Chavez’s death in 2013 Nicholas Maduro, trained in Cuba, came to power with neither popularity nor oil profits and promptly drove his country off a cliff.

Vast corruption schemes overlapped both the Chavez and Maduro regimes, often with roots in earlier administrations. Drug trafficking netted billions of dollars for cooperating government officials and cronies. Chavez broke relations with the US Drug Enforcement Administration in 2005. Then he allegedly met personally with senior commanders of the Colombian rebel group FARC in 2007 to confirm that Venezuela would pay for drugs received across the border, providing cash and weaponry aimed at weakening the president of that country, Alvaro Uribe.43

After Maduro came to power in 2013, officials of the Venezuela National Guard loaded 1.3 tons of cocaine onto a Paris-bound flight, stunning French authorities.44 Three years later the former head of the National Guard, General Nestor Reverol, was indicted in the United States on charges of drug trafficking along with General Edylberto Molina, senior director of the antidrug office.45 Former vice president Tareck El Aissami and his immediate associates allegedly ran a trafficking network of 40 front companies with properties and accounts spread across Florida and tax havens in the Caribbean valued at perhaps $3 billion.46 The ex-leader of the elected National Constituent Assembly, Diosdado Cabello, found his bank accounts and properties in the United States estimated at $800 million frozen, as he is accused of leading the “Cartel of the Suns” and still faces charges.47 Not to be left out, Maduro’s own family—two nephews of Maduro’s wife—were arrested in Haiti in a sting operation as they plotted to smuggle 800 kilograms of cocaine from the presidential jet hangar at Simón Bolívar International Airport through Honduras to the United States, garnering for themselves 18-year sentences in US prisons.48 Thus, under Maduro, Venezuela came to define the narco state, with trafficking conducted and protected at the highest levels and widest reaches of government.

An easier way to make money is stealing oil revenues.

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