Disgraced Venezuela official once close to Maduro ran drug trade, kept ties with Hezbollah

Tareck El Aissami, the former Venezuelan vice president who was paraded as a trophy this week in the country’s latest anti-corruption drive, was until recently one of the most powerful and influential men in the country, playing multiple roles for ruler Nicolas Maduro that went from oil czar and liaison to Middle East extremists to faction chieftain in the regime’s drug cartel.

Rising quickly through the regime’s ranks by attaching himself to Maduro’s rising star during the turbulent years that followed the illness and death of former president Hugo Chávez, El Aissami was seen as the regime’s number three man until he fell from grace early last year amid charges that a corrupt cabal stole billions of dollars in oil revenues under his nose while he served as oil minister.

El Aissami immediately resigned and was not seen in public since, while Attorney General Tarek William Saab proceeded to arrest dozens of his closest associates, a few of whom died in police custody.

On Tuesday, Saab announced that accounts from five of those arrested claimed El Aissami was the leader of the corruption scheme and that he sought to promote social unrest by bankrupting the Venezuelan economy.

“These scoundrels... used the positions that the State entrusted to them... to ally themselves with shell company businessmen seeking... to destroy the economy,” Saab said Tuesday in a press conference in which he accused El Aissami of running a criminal organization from inside Petroleos de Venezuela.

El Aissami was shown on Tuesday being taken into a jail cell by masked policemen. His business partner, Samark López, and former Finance Minister Alejandro Zerpa were also charged. That brought to 57 the number of former regime officials and businessmen charged with corruption for their alleged roles in the scheme, in which participants pocketed oil revenues that were supposed to go into the state’s coffers.

While the oil revenue allegedly lost in the scheme has been calculated at more than $5 billion, embezzlement of public funds is only one of a long list of crimes long attributed to El Aissami.

U.S. officials believe he is one of the founding members of the so-called Cartel de los Soles, or Suns Cartel, an organization run by military officers and other regime officials that took over drug operations inside the South American country.

The U.S. detected his involvement during his tenure as interior minister from 2008-12 and later as governor of the state Aragua from 2012-17. From those positions he “facilitated shipments of narcotics from Venezuela” on flights departing from a Venezuelan air base, while also controlling routes through Venezuela ports, the U.S. Treasury Department said in 2017.

“He oversaw or partially owned narcotics shipments of over 1,000 kilograms from Venezuela on multiple occasions, including those with the final destinations of Mexico and the United States”, Treasury added, saying it was levying sanctions against El Aissami..

The Treasury announcement also made public sanctions against Samark Lopez for providing material assistance and financial support to El Aissami’s narcotics trafficking.

According to U.S. officials, El Aissami oversaw drug shipments to Mexican cartels, including Los Zetas, an organization known for its violence, while also providing protection to Colombian drug lord Daniel Barrera Barrera and Venezuelan drug trafficker Hermagoras Gonzalez Polanco.

In a report prepared for a U.S. law enforcement agency, IBI Consultants, a security firm specializing in transnational organized crime in Latin America, said that El Aissami headed one of the two main branches of the Soles cartel, while the other was headed by the regime’s number-two man, Diosdado Cabello.

This two-prong structure was formed during the final days of Chavez’s presidency and eventually took control of the country’s security apparatus.

“Before his death Chávez named Maduro as his successor, while Cabello and El Aissami focused on building drug trafficking structures, placing trusted cadres in key government, military and intelligence positions. These cadres rotate so each can get rich, but none can build an independent base of support,” the report said.

“The Cartel, once in complete control of the military and intelligence structures, moved to displace Colombian traffickers operating inside Venezuela and consolidate their integrated cocaine trafficking structures. With Chávez weakened by cancer and absent for long periods of time for treatment in Cuba, cartel factions led by Diosdado Cabello and Tareck El Aissami maneuvered more freely to consolidate power,” the report added.

While most investigations of the cartel’s creation point to a proposal made by Chavez to his top lieutenants to use cocaine exports as a weapon against the United States, there was another aspect of El Aissami’s activities that worried the U.S.

“El Aissami represented a very dangerous cocktail for the national security of the United States, which is the mixture of classical drug trafficking with a connection to Hezbollah,” the Lebanese militant group that has been designated as a terrorist organization by the U..S., said Martín Rodil, an expert who is frequently consulted by different agencies in Washington on security issues linked to Venezuela.

Investigations by U.S. agencies showed that the criminal organization headed by El Aissami was one of the main suppliers of the drug network that Hezbollah operates in Europe, Rodil told the Miami Herald.

“The money derived from the sales of these drugs ends up becoming part of the financing that Hezbollah has in Lebanon, and is used in activities that range from terrorist attacks to attacks on the State of Israel,” Rodil said.

Before falling from grace, El Aissami had become an indispensable ally of Maduro’s, which allowed him to rise quickly within the political movement created by Chávez. But over the past decade El Aissami began to differentiate himself from his colleagues in government because of the gigantic fortune that he was buidling, and because of a money-laundering network that operated through fictitious companies, said Joseph Humire, executive director of the Center for a Secure Free Society.

In a report the center prepared, Humire said El Aissami used his political prominence to establish intelligence and financial channels with Islamic countries, particularly Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Iraq and Iran.

El Aissami, the report said, “developed a sophisticated, multi-layered financial network that functions as a criminal-terrorist pipeline to bring Islamic militants to Venezuela and neighboring countries, and to send illicit funds from Latin America to the East.”