This week the Biden Administration completed a prisoner swap with Venezuela that brought several jailed Americans home for the holidays — but also provoked controversy due to the handover of the Venezuelan regime’s alleged criminal mastermind, Alex Saab.
Saab, a Colombian businessman, is accused of running multi-million-dollar corruption schemes for Venezuela’s authoritarian regime. He's especially notorious as an alleged "poverty profiteer" — a swindler who helped Venezuelan officials and their business cronies embezzle and launder fortunes from food imports and public housing contracts.
Critics say those plots helped worsen the collapse of Venezuela's economy and its humanitarian crisis, the worst in modern South American history.
READ MORE: Venezuela's dark laundering loop: Saab nabbed, Bagley pleads guilty, Maduro sweats
Saab was arrested in Cape Verde three years ago, and in 2021 he was extradited to the U.S., where he was under indictment for international financial crimes.
"Saab is the master of trade-based money-laundering," former U.S. prosecutor Dick Gregorie, who was based in Miami and was involved in the early investigation of Saab, told WLRN in 2020 when Saab was detained in Cape Verde during a flight stopover, posing as a Venezuelan diplomat.
"And Venezuela has been robbed blind with every transaction that he does."
Saab was behind bars here in Miami awaiting trial — but this week the Biden Administration sent Saab back to Venezuela in return for 10 Americans who’d been imprisoned there.
Saab arrived in Venezuela on Wednesday. On Thursday, in a brash if not offensive gesture, Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro made him part of his diplomatic team in negotiations with the U.S. over democratic reform in Venezuela.
"It's incredible," says Roberto Deniz, a Venezuelan journalist in exile in Colombia who helped expose Saab’s allegedly crimes as part of the Armando.Info investigative reporting website.
"It's totally absurd," Deniz told WLRN, "and also insulting. Venezuela right now is a kleptocracy — and Alex Saab is the symbol of that kleptocracy. Because of our reporting on him, the Maduro regime forced us to flee the country."
READ MORE: How Venezuelan exiles helped expose 'perfect example' of Maduro regime corruption
Deniz says because Venezuela is such a dishonest "criminal state," the U.S. should not expect Saab’s release to help prod Maduro to agree to a fair presidential election next year — something President Biden said this week he believes Maduro is in fact moving toward as the U.S. loosens sanctions against the regime as part of the bilateral talks.
“In my opinion," says Deniz, "that is, uh — naive.”
Maduro, for example, has still not agreed to allow leading opposition candidate María Corina Machado to run against him next year.
Republicans like Miami Congressman Mario Diaz-Balart have publicly called the Saab swap ill-advised, as have some former U.S. officials. On X (formerly Twitter) this week, former Treasury Department assistant secretary Marshall Bilingslea, now a fellow at the conservative Hudson Institute, called Saab "thoroughly vile."
Still, Biden Administration officials insisted the Saab swap was a matter of "significant [U.S.] foreign policy interests."
