Maduro and His Crony Made Millions While Venezuelan Children Starved
Growing up in Venezuela, I saw how the country’s socialist economic policies made it a struggle to survive. Every day, I would look out my dad’s car window and see people rummaging in the trash for food—a reminder that it could be much worse.
In 2016, while some Venezuelans were literally starving to death, President Nicolás Maduro announced that he was launching a new program called CLAP. Maduro claimed that this would be the “beginning of a new economic revolution in the Venezuelan food economy.”
Through this program, every Venezuelan family was supposed to receive a box of essential food items on a regular basis, but they rarely arrived. When they did arrive, the food inside was often inedible—especially the powdered milk.
Juan Andrés Ravell uncovered this massive corruption scandal for PBS’s Frontline in a recent documentary titled “A Dangerous Assignment.” The film is told through the eyes of the investigative reporter Roberto Deniz as he follows where the money allocated for the CLAP program really went. Deniz’s investigation led him to Alex Saab, a close associate of Nicólas Maduro, who received the contracts to import food for the CLAP program. Saab became a multimillionaire practically overnight. He built a sprawling mansion in Colombia, married a former Italian supermodel, and bought a lavish property in one of Rome’s wealthiest neighborhoods. Ravell told Reason that, “From 2013 on, Alex Saab was Maduro’s favorite contractor, but he never talked about him. He was operating in the shadows.”
Deniz reported that Saab, as a contractor, was responsible for the inedible food Venezuelan families received through the CLAP program. And that he was paying kickbacks to Maduro. So Saab sued for defamation and libel. For his safety, Deniz fled the country and continued his investigation.
In 2019, Saab was indicted on money-laundering charges and sanctioned by the Treasury Department. The following year, he was en route to Iran when his plane stopped in Cape Verde to refuel and he was captured by the U.S. Then the Venezuelan regime launched a campaign to rehabilitate his image. They were helped by leftist activists, who echoed Maduro’s claim that Saab was a hero of the poor, bravely standing up
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