Venezuela’s authoritarian leader, Nicolás Maduro, has managed to free a key collaborator from US custody after agreeing to release 10 Americans and 20 Venezuelan citizens from jail.
The Colombian-born businessman Alex Saab – a close Maduro ally whom US prosecutors accused of pilfering hundreds of millions of dollars from Venezuelan social programs as part of a vast money-laundering scheme – was extradited to the US in 2021 after being detained while transiting through Cape Verde.
But on Thursday, the 51-year-old Saab – who denies those claims – unexpectedly landed back in Caracas after a deal was struck with the US.
Maduro’s administration issued a triumphant statement that said: “The government of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela rejoices at the release and homecoming of our diplomat Alex Saab, who had been unjustly kidnapped in a US prison.”
Venezuelan state TV broadcast live from the Maiquetía airport as Saab was welcomed by the country’s first lady, Cilia Flores, his family, and other top Chavistas such as Jorge Rodríguez. The government channel Telesur sent its president, Patricia Villegas, out on to the ramp to anchor its coverage. “[This is] a transcendental moment,” she gushed as Saab emerged from a business jet.
In a televised address soon after, Maduro stood beside Saab at the Miraflores presidential palace and thanked the government of Qatar for being a “brilliant facilitator” in the talks that lead to the deal. “You have reached a free, dignified land, Alex,” Maduro told his guest.
“Life is a constant miracle and today the miracle of freedom, the miracle of justice, has become a reality. Thank you, Mr President, for your perseverance,” Saab replied. “Thank you people of Venezuela – I feel proud to serve the people of Venezuela and to serve this government. A humane and loyal government that does not abandon [people].”
The US president, Joe Biden, said 10 US citizens, six of them considered “wrongfully detained”, were on their way home as part of the agreement. Four of the released prisoners were named as Joseph Cristella, Eyvin Hernandez, Jerrel Kenemore and Savoi Wright.
Hernandez, a 44-year-old lawyer and criminal justice advocate from Los Angeles, was detained near the Colombia-Venezuela border last March and accused of “criminal association” and “conspiracy” – claims his family rejected. “We’re really excited. Eyvin is a fierce advocate for our clients and has been deeply missed,” colleague Garrett Miller, the president of the public defenders union, said after reports of his release.
Urging US citizens not to travel to Venezuela, Biden said: “These individuals have lost far too much precious time with their loved ones, and their families have suffered every day in their absence. I am grateful that their ordeal is finally over, and that these families are being made whole once more.”
A senior US administration official said: “This [deal] is the culmination of extraordinary efforts and perseverance across the US government for many, many months.”
The deal also included the return and arrest of a fugitive called Leonard Francis who fled to Venezuela via Mexico and Cuba last year after cutting off his electronic tagging device. He had been implicated in what Biden called “a brazen bribery and corruption case”. Reporting on the so-called “Fat Leonard scandal” in 2016, the Washington Post wrote: “In perhaps the worst national-security breach of its kind to hit the navy since the end of the cold war, Francis doled out sex and money to a shocking number of people in uniform who fed him classified material about US warship and submarine movements.”
Luis Vicente León, a political pundit who runs the Caracas-based pollster Datanalisis, described the prisoner release as a victory for the presidents of both countries.
For Biden, returning US citizens he considered hostages to their families just before Christmas “without firing a shot” was a major victory. For Maduro, the deal was also a triumph since it highlighted his determination “not to abandon his own people” and, in doing so, helped unite the Chavismo movement around him.
León argued that the greatest threat to Maduro’s Chavismo movement and its Bolivarian revolution was neither a foreign invasion nor its political opponents – it was an internal “implosion”. Saab’s release helped Maduro signal that only he could hold the movement together and that he would stick by his allies, whatever the cost.
The prisoner swap comes amid a broader thawing of relations between Washington and Caracas that follows a toxic spell that reached a crescendo with the 2019 attempt to topple Maduro and replace him with a young congressman called Juan Guaidó. Guaidó’s bid to spark an uprising failed, however, and last April he flew into exile in the US. A conservative opposition politician called María Corina Machado has since filled Guaidó’s shoes as Maduro’s main rival.
Machado is hoping to challenge Maduro in a presidential election scheduled for 2024 – and the US hopes its negotiations with Venezuela’s current rulers, which have included the loosening of sanctions, will allow some semblance of a “competitive and inclusive” contest to take place.
Biden’s decision to grant Saab clemency had been an “extremely difficult” one, a senior administration official admitted. “[But] the consequences of this difficult decision will be to reunite parents, with their children and grandchildren, with their parents, family and friends.”
Venezuela’s opposition celebrated the release of several important figures as part of the deal. One was Roberto Abdul, who had been involved in organizing the recent opposition primary for next year’s election and was later arrested for alleged treason.
But there was also anger about the release of Saab, a highly controversial figure whom one local journalist once called “one of the most loathed men in Venezuela”. A 2021 book about Saab’s life is called: Alex Saab: The Truth About the Businessman Who Became a Multimillionaire in the Shadows of Nicolás Maduro.
Writing on X, Marshall Billingslea, a Trump-era US treasury official who investigated Saab, called the move “a heavy blow to US credibility in the fight against corruption, particularly in Latin America”.
“Worse, it is a ‘gut-punch’ to the Venezuelan opposition,” Billingslea said, denouncing Saab as a vile “hunger-profiteer and Maduro bag-man”. “We are supposedly their friends, but we just let one of the worst Boligarch thieves walk free,” Billingslea wrote.
