Alex Saab’s latest downfall: Rescued by Maduro and handed over by Delcy Rodríguez

On December 20, 2023, Nicolás Maduro, cheerful and emotional, embraced Alex Saab in Miraflores and told him he had always known the day of his freedom would come. The Colombian businessman — accused of being Maduro’s front man and of playing a key role in the financial operations of Chavismo — had spent three years detained between Cape Verde and the United States. Today, the two men in that embrace are both imprisoned in jails in New York and Miami.

Saab landed on Saturday at an airport in Florida wearing a gray jumpsuit, his signature long dark hair, and a graying several‑week beard, after the very government that rescued him from a U.S. money‑laundering case less than three years ago handed him back to U.S. authorities.

Saab’s downfall has marked the end of one of the last symbols of the power wielded by Nicolás Maduro and his wife Cilia Flores — a power they were stripped of on January 3, when a U.S. special‑forces unit captured them in a military operation. Since then, his vice president and economic right hand, Delcy Rodríguez, has installed an interim government overseen from Washington.

The Colombian financier was one of the first pieces of Maduro’s inner circle that Rodríguez moved to topple, barely two weeks after the U.S. intervention. She dismissed him on social media with a message thanking him for his work. The two had worked together directly when Rodríguez was vice president for the economic sector.

Saab had been the minister of national production and was also in charge of food imports. One of the first tasks he performed when he began working behind the scenes for Maduro more than a decade ago was orchestrating the underground economy that allowed Chavismo to stay afloat amid U.S. sanctions. In Rodríguez’s messages dismissing Saab — which she deleted on Saturday — she said that he would be assigned new responsibilities.

But after leaving the executive branch, his fall from grace accelerated. One month after Maduro’s arrest, he and Raúl Gorrín — another businessman linked to Chavismo and under investigation in the United States — were also detained. Their arrest was surrounded by rumors and secrecy. Even their lawyers and senior officials denied it. Within the Chavista establishment, the reasons for their detention seemed to be one of the best‑kept secrets.

Saab’s fate exposes the shifting balance within Chavismo, which has held together under a fragile equilibrium since Maduro’s downfall. And his handover to the U.S. raises questions about the man himself — his nationality, the charges against him, and Maduro’s maneuvers to keep him so powerful for so long. What became clear this Saturday is a contradiction that Chavismo itself created.

Maduro’s government publicly acknowledged its ties to Saab in 2020, when he was arrested at the Cape Verde airport during a trip to Tehran to negotiate fuel supplies amid Venezuela’s shortages. From operating in the shadows, he was turned into a political symbol: the government deployed resources and lawyers to defend him from what it called a “kidnapping.” Among the documents submitted in his defense were claims that Saab, born in Barranquilla, had been naturalized as a Venezuelan citizen and also held a diplomatic passport as a special envoy. Jorge Arreaza — now a lawmaker, then Maduro’s foreign minister— was a staunch defender of his diplomatic immunity.

His Venezuelan nationality had allowed him not only to serve as a minister but also to vote in the 2024 presidential election, as he himself showed on social media on July 28 in photos with his wife and daughters. What’s more, being a Venezuelan citizen should also have shielded him from extradition: the Venezuelan Constitution explicitly prohibits it in Article 69.

But Saab is now being treated as a Colombian citizen, as a foreigner. Venezuela’s immigration authority made that clear when announcing his deportation. It did not cite any court rulings supporting the measure, nor did it explain when or through what procedure he lost his Venezuelan nationality. The offenses invoked to justify his deportation are those committed in the United States, described as “public, notorious and widely reported,” a category that Venezuelan immigration law does not recognize as grounds for such a measure. The use of deportation instead of extradition has raised many questions about the process, which in reality appears to be yet another negotiation with Washington.

Saab not only faces legal proceedings in the United States, but also in Colombia and Italy, where he recently reached an agreement with a court. His main business partner, Álvaro Pulido, is imprisoned in Venezuela as part of the crypto corruption scheme with Venezuela’s state-owned oil company PDVSA led by former oil minister Tareck El Aissami —a case uncovered months after Saab’s return in 2023.

Years earlier, the investigative journalists of the outlet Armando.info —Ewald Scharfenberg, Roberto Deniz, Alfredo Meza, and Joseph Poliszuk— were forced into exile after Saab filed a defamation lawsuit against them over reports documenting his murky dealings with the government in housing construction, food imports, oil, gold, coal, and nearly every major economic sector. At the time, the Colombian businessman denied any relationship with the government — a relationship that later became impossible to hide.

Saab managed to get out of prison in 2023 through a negotiation much like the one now turning against him. National Assembly president Jorge Rodríguez — Maduro’s political operator and today the second most powerful figure of the “new political moment” — made Saab’s inclusion as a delegate a condition for continuing the talks with the Venezuelan opposition in Mexico. That demand stalled the negotiations, which later resumed secretly in Doha, this time only between the Chavista government and the United States, until they reached Barbados, where an agreement was struck on the conditions for the 2024 elections —conditions the Maduro government ultimately failed to meet.

Within that framework, then U.S. president Joe Biden granted Saab a presidential pardon, and Venezuela handed over 10 U.S. prisoners. In the scene of the embrace, Maduro thanked Jorge Rodríguez in particular for his efforts: “You did it,” he told him.

How the new U.S. judicial process will unfold remains to be seen. The December 2023 pardon shields him from prosecution in the case that first landed him in jail, though other investigations against him remain active. This arrest follows those of other senior Chavista figures —including Maduro himself — and expands the U.S. probes into corruption, money laundering and drug‑trafficking links that U.S. authorities have pursued for years. Saab himself cooperated with the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) in 2018 before breaking his agreements.

In Caracas and other cities, murals with the message #FreeAlexSaab still remain — a campaign led by his wife, Italian model Camilla Fabri, to demand his release. Days after the capture of Maduro and Flores, Fabri was included in the commission — alongside the couple’s children — tasked with fighting for their freedom, and she repeated what she had done for her husband: she called marches and launched an intense communications campaign.

Until February, she also coordinated deportation flights of Venezuelans from the United States as head of the “Return to the Homeland” Mission. Her last post on X was on February 3, one month after the U.S. intervention: she wrote “Cilia and Nicolás will return” and shared photos of supporters’ demonstrations. Days earlier, she had reposted messages from her husband with the hashtag #DelcyPorLaPaz — Delcy for peace.

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