Chavista leadership throws Maduro’s strongman Alex Saab to the lions

Three days of controversy were enough for Jorge Rodríguez to deliver the final thrust. The president of Venezuela’s National Assembly dealt Alex Saab — Nicolás Maduro’s front man — a coup de grâce on Tuesday. Saab was deported to Miami on Saturday, where he faces charges of money laundering and bribing senior officials. “Since 2019, Alex Saab’s case has been his business with U.S. agencies [...] Soon all of you will find out what kind of relationship he had and has with those agencies,” Rodríguez said. It was the final nail in the coffin for one of the major symbols of Maduro’s era of power, a figure once defended and praised by many, including Rodríguez himself, who led the negotiation to bring him back from a U.S. prison. Saab’s case is perhaps the episode that best illustrates, so far, the new strategy of power in Caracas.

In a long speech, Rodríguez not only accused Saab of retaining links to U.S. agencies — a cooperation revealed as episodic in 2022 — but also left numerous questions open about the businessman, as if what is already known — corruption, embezzlement, or the alleged fraud surrounding his Venezuelan nationality — were only part of his criminal record. “Could there have been other criminal acts?” he asked.

The answer, according to judicial sources, is yes. Since his arrest in February, the narrative has grown that Saab, beyond any friendship he may have had with Maduro, pursued his own agenda and had enough power to carry it out. Over whoever was necessary.

The questions about Saab’s handover, raised by both loyal Chavistas and the opposition, stirred a huge cloud of dust. Why was Saab treated as a foreign national when for years it was proudly asserted that he was Venezuelan? Was the deportation legal? Why did Delcy Rodríguez hand over such a key piece of Chavista power until just a few months ago? What did they stand to gain by raising the profile of someone who had already been forgotten? The new Chavista leadership allowed almost two days for the tide to subside and then struck back: Saab’s excesses were no longer their concern.

The first to speak was Diosdado Cabello, who on Monday said Saab had obtained Venezuelan nationality fraudulently. Then Delcy Rodríguez said everything done since January 3 had been in Venezuela’s interest, including handing over Saab. And then Jorge Rodríguez, the same man who rescued him in 2023 from his first extradition. The president of the National Assembly invoked the case of Cuban general Arnaldo Ochoa — a revolutionary hero, executed by Fidel Castro in 1989 for drug trafficking — to build his argument: that one person’s betrayal does not stain the one who trusted them.

None of them seems to mourn the loss of Maduro’s close ally; rather, they seem relieved to have shed a burden. For almost three years the entire Chavista apparatus mobilized for his liberation after he was detained in Cape Verde in 2020 with a Venezuelan diplomatic passport. Then-foreign minister Jorge Arreaza, Delcy Rodríguez, and her brother Jorge turned his “kidnapping” into a matter of state. Maduro welcomed him at the Miraflores presidential palace, called him a national hero, and appointed him minister. Three years later, with Maduro behind bars, part of that cast has let him fall over the cliff.

Saab’s case is the most obvious example, but the dismantling of Maduro’s power structure has been underway for months. One of the problems Delcy Rodríguez faces, precisely, is how to pull down part of the structure her former boss built without wounding internal sensitivities, which are currently raw.

The displacement of power from Maduro’s inner circle has been evident these past months, but the government has framed it as a search for more technical profiles. Delcy Rodríguez has replaced 40% of her ministers and the top brass of the armed forces without calling it a purge. This Tuesday, her brother Jorge was somewhat less subtle and spoke directly of criminal and thieving judges and of “cleaning the country of vermin.”

Before Alex Saab, the dramatic saga of another Saab — the poetic prosecutor — closed. Tarek William Saab, the former attorney general who for a decade embodied the regime’s punitive arm, also lost all influence after Maduro’s fall. His flair for the stage and narcissistic temperament are now put to use in an irrelevant post in the new era: head of the Viva Venezuela program to promote the country’s traditional music, dance, and cultural values. From the man who put opponents in jail... to head of a folkloric charm offensive.

A large part of the Supreme Tribunal of Justice’s magistrates have also fallen, an institution systematically colonized by relatives and loyalists of Cilia Flores — the wife and deputy who, alongside Maduro, effectively controlled the state — and which Delcy Rodríguez herself has pointed to as part of the corruption network she says she wants to dismantle. The president of the Central Bank of Venezuela, Laura Guerra, Maduro’s former sister-in-law and aunt of his son Nicolás Maduro Guerra, suffered the same fate and was removed from an institution that was also part of that system.

With his speech, Rodríguez set the roadmap. He executed Saab symbolically, absolved himself as negotiator, and warned both Chavistas and the opposition that the purge is not over: “And whoever steals, whoever betrays the trust placed in them by the people of Venezuela, must be prosecuted.”

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