Venezuela’s socialist regime announced this weekend that Colombian businessman Alex Saab, widely considered to be Nicolás Maduro’s top money launderer, was deported to the United States — nearly two and a half years after former President Joe Biden pardoned Saab.
The Venezuelan regime announced Saab’s May 16 deportation in a brief statement issued by its SAIME migration and identity services agency informing that Venezuelan authorities decided to deport him “in light of the fact that the aforementioned Colombian citizen is accused of committing various crimes in the United States, as is widely known and reported in the media.”
At press time, no other institution or member of the Venezuelan socialist regime has publicly disclosed any details on Saab’s deportation.
While SAIME’s statement lacks any additional information on Saab’s deportation, his description as a “Colombian citizen” marks a notable change in how the Venezuelan socialists had described Saab in the past — a man once hailed by the ruling socialists as a “hero” for allegedly helping Maduro overcome a Untied States “blockade” on Venezuela.
Footage published by local and international media show Saab arriving in the United States handcuffed and in the custody of Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) agents.
For years, Alex Saab, a 54-year-old Colombian national, has been widely described as Nicolás Maduro’s “financial brain.” He has been accused of building his fortune on the suffering of the Venezuelan people through multiple corruption and money laundering schemes during the years that he formed part of Maduro’s inner circle. Most notably, Saab was instrumental in helping Maduro build CLAP — a highly corrupt socialist food program launched in the mid-2010s that saw the regime sell low-quality, often rotten food products to Venezuelans.
The Associated Press reported on Monday that U.S. federal prosecutors have been probing Saab’s role into a bribery conspiracy involving the CLAP program. An indictment against one of Saab’s business partners, Alvaro Pulido, lists Saab as a co-conspirator who allegedly helped set up a web of companies to bribe a pro-Maduro governor into helping business partners import food boxes from Mexico at an inflated price.
“Beneficiaries” of the CLAP food kits were Venezuelans who had no choice but to rely on the program and its items of questionable quality just to have something to eat. Communal Councils, neighborhood-based groups that exert local social control and directly answer to the socialist regime, were tasked with determining who would receive CLAP kits. Reports published by local outlets indicate that CLAP has seemingly “disappeared” from parts of Caracas with no official explanation as of February.
U.S. authorities originally arrested Saab in Cape Verde in 2020, roughly a year after the Department of Justice indicted him on charges of using the U.S. financial system to launder $350 million from Venezuela’s state coffers via a shady bribery construction contract scheme. Saab was undergoing trial proceedings when former President Joe Biden released Saab and sent him back to Venezuela in December 2023. Maduro received Saab as a “hero” upon his return and later appointed him to serve as his new Industries Minister, a position he held from October 2024 until days after Maduro was arrested by U.S. forces in Caracas on January 3.
In early February, roughly a month after U.S. forces arrested Maduro, reports published by international outlets claimed that Saab was arrested in Caracas in a joint operation between the FBI and Venezuelan officials. The Venezuelan socialist regime, now led by “acting President” Delcy Rodríguez, never confirmed or denied that Saab had been arrested. Delcy’s brother and the head of the National Assembly, Jorge Rodríguez, refrained from commenting on Saab’s capture at the time.
After his original arrest in 2020, Maduro and the Venezuelan regime claimed that Saab was allegedly a “Venezuelan diplomat” and denounced his arrest by U.S. forces in Cape Verde on the grounds that he had “diplomatic immunity.” The Maduro regime launched a years-long national and international mass media campaign demanding Saab’s release. The campaign reportedly saw the use of social media “influencers” and bots to artificially boost the campaign’s reach. At the time, pro-Maduro influencers claimed that Saab was the Venezuelan “Oskar Schindler,” referencing the German hero who saved roughly 1,200 Jewish people from Nazi Germany during World War II.
The Venezuelan outlet Runrunes reported that both Delcy and Jorge Rodríguez were among the leading figures of the pro-Saab campaign, with the now “acting president” accusing the United States in 2021 of “kidnapping an innocent Venezuelan diplomat” and later celebrating his return in 2023 as a “triumph of Bolivarian diplomacy” in now-deleted social media posts.
Although Saab is a Colombian national born in Colombia, his status as a possible dual-Venezuelan citizen remains unclear at press time. The Venezuelan socialist claimed in the past that Saab had allegedly obtained Venezuelan citizenship through naturalization and presented a purported “Venezuelan diplomatic passport” in 2020 as evidence to demand his release.
Runrunes pointed out that the “naturalization” claim could mean that Nicolás Maduro violated the Venezuelan constitution when he appointed Saab as industries minister. Article 41 of the Venezuelan constitution states that you must be a Venezuelan born in Venezuela to be president, vice president, minister, or hold other top-ranking government positions.
Christian K. Caruzo is a Venezuelan writer and documents life under socialism. You can follow him on Twitter here.