COMMENTARY Cape Verde's stunning draw with Spain in the World Cup is a reminder of how the country stood firm five years ago in the extradition of alleged Venezuelan corruption mastermind Alex Saab.
I now have two reasons to root for Cape Verde.
The tiny archipelago nation (population 530,000) off the west coast of Africa is playing in its first soccer World Cup right now. It’s one of the underdog teams, like Haiti and Curaçao, providing feel-good fodder on the planet’s largest sports stage.
Few players have made the planet feel as good in this first week of the Cup than Cape Verde’s heroic goalkeeper, Josimar José Evora Dias, known as Vozinha.
On Monday, in one of the tournament’s first David-vs.-Goliath matches, Vozinha shut out powerhouse Spain, making seven big saves to secure a stunning 0-0 draw.
Some feel-good details: Vozinha is 40 years old — a relative geriatric in international soccer, considering the oldest player ever in a World Cup was 45 — and uses the Vozinha moniker, meaning “Granny” in Portuguese, in honor of the grandmother who raised him.
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But as I mentioned, Vozinha is just my most recent rationale for backing Cape Verde.
One of the gratifying things about the expanded World Cup is that folks get introduced to more obscure countries besides the usual juggernauts like Brazil and Germany.
Cape Verde, which technically sits in the western hemisphere, is definitely a hidden gem we should know in the Americas — not so much for the goalkeeper saves of 2026, but for the geopolitical saves of 2020 and 2021.
Six years ago this month, in fact, one of the world’s smallest republics had the character and cojones to arrest one of the world’s biggest reprobates — alleged international bribery, embezzlement and money-laundering criminal Alex Saab.
Despite pressure from Trump — and global leftists who swallowed Maduro’s b.s. that Saab was a "diplomat" — Cape Verde stuck to its procedural guns.
Saab is the Colombian-born profiteer who is charged in the U.S. and around the world with engineering corruption schemes for the mafia regime of former Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro — the dictator whom U.S. special forces nabbed in Caracas in January and flew to New York to face a drug-trafficking indictment.
Saab’s alleged plots didn’t just rake in potentially billions of dirty dollars; they ruined potentially millions of innocent lives.
The plunder of resources he directed, from food subsidy programs to the oil industry, helped create the worst humanitarian crisis in modern South American history, and has forced a quarter of Venezuela’s population to emigrate over the past decade.
Toxic cash
Six years ago this month, Saab was on his way to Iran, a kindred criminal regime where Venezuela filtered some of its toxic cash, when his private jet stopped in Cape Verde to refuel.
Because the U.S. had indicted Saab in 2019 — he’d allegedly scrubbed some $350 million through U.S.-related banking accounts — Saab’s layover lit the Interpol red light for Cape Verde officials, who arrested him.
That’s when things got rough for Cape Verde.
Venezuelan investigative journalist Roberto Deniz — who first exposed Saab’s alleged monstrosities — points out in the 2024 documentary A Dangerous Assignment: Uncovering Corruption in Maduro’s Venezuela, that Cape Verde’s government at first seemed overwhelmed by the size of the fish it had caught.
It probably would have preferred throwing it back.
But its judicial system instead took Sea Creature Saab to port and started scaling, cleaning and weighing it according to Cape Verde and international law — including its extradition treaty with the U.S.
Pressure came from then President Donald Trump — who in typical brute-diplomacy fashion sent a U.S. missile cruiser off Cape Verde — and from looney leftists the world over who swallowed Maduro’s shameless b.s. that Saab was on a “humanitarian” mission for Venezuela and had diplomatic immunity.
But Cape Verde stuck to its procedural guns for 16 months.
In October 2021, Saab was finally — but more important, properly — extradited to the U.S. to stand trial.
The Saab story took a controversial turn two years later, when then President Joe Biden pardoned and returned him to Venezuela in exchange for American prisoners held there.
Still, that U.S. lapse was simply a reminder of Cape Verde’s stalwart performance — and why former President Barack Obama, in 2013, had declared the country “a model of democratic governance.”
Last month, Venezuela’s acting president, Delcy Rodríguez — who once loudly defended Saab — sent him back to the U.S. to face justice.
So as he sits in a Miami cell, here’s to the vozinhas of Cape Verde — who raised its goalkeeper, and its government, to guard the net.
Cape Verde's next World Cup game is Sunday at 6 pm vs. Uruguay — in Miami.
