Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro has accused former Colombian President Iván Duque of ordering the assassination of Venezuela's alleged money-laundering mastermind, Alex Saab — yet another bizarre move by a Venezuelan leader whose corrupt and dictatorial regime is feeling mounting pressure at home and abroad.
Duque, who was Colombia's president when Maduro claims the murder attempt on Saab was carried out in 2020, has responded by calling Maduro "an imbecile."
Critics say Maduro is indeed best known these days for erratic ploys that he hopes will help deflect attention from the severe humanitarian crisis he's engineered — which has driven millions of people out of the country, most of them over the U.S. southern border.
Last month, for example, Maduro held a referendum asking Venezuelans to approve the annexation of two-thirds of neighboring Guyana's territory — which Venezuela has for over a century claimed it should have — and ordered military exercises near the two countries' border.
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But his chief means of nationalist diversion now, it seems, is Saab — the Colombian businessman whom the U.S. and much of the international community accuse of being the maestro behind epic embezzlement and laundering schemes for Venezuela's regime, but whom Maduro claims is one of his country's globally persecuted heroes.
In 2020, Saab was arrested during a stopover in Cap Verde, off Africa's west coast, because he'd been indicted in the U.S. The following year Saab was extradited to the U.S. — and last month he was awaiting trial here in Miami.
But five days before Christmas, the U.S. released Saab and sent him back to Venezuela in exchange for the release of 10 Americans in prison there.
Since then, Maduro has embarked on a propaganda mission insisting Saab is a noble martyr and not an international criminal. Now that includes declaring Saab was the target of an assassination attempt back in 2020 in Caracas, not long before he was detained in Cape Verde — and that Duque ordered the hit and hired the "delinquents" who supposedly carried it out.
Maduro tells the Mexican newspaper La Jornada this week that Saab fought off his attackers — but he offers little or no evidence it ever actually happened.
Duque strongly denies the accusation.
Maduro faces re-election later this year. The U.S. and international community are pressing him to allow popular opposition leader María Corina Machado — who won a resounding primary election victory in October with some 93% of the vote — to run against him. Maduro is so far keeping Machado off the ballot — mainly, say critics, because polls indicate she would defeat him.
Maduro was first elected president in 2013 after the death of his socialist mentor, President Hugo Chávez, and won re-election in 2018 in a vote that was widely condemned as illegitimate.
Thanks largely to his ill-advised economic policies, his regime's multi-billion-dollar corruption and its authoritarian brutality — the U.N. accuses Maduro and his security forces of crimes against humanity — Venezuela today is experiencing the worst humanitarian crisis in modern South American history.
