While we have lost our ability to be outraged by the
corruption and the lack of ethics of the Chavez Government, few cases demonstrate how
putrid the Venezuelan State has become that the Maletagate scandal.
First of all, the facts of the case could not be denied, a
suitcase full of US$ 800,000 in cash, caught in a country friendly to Chavez,
arriving in an airplane chartered by PDVSA and filled with PDVSA employees and
Argentinean Government officials.
Despite this, the Venezuelan Government ignored the problem,
claimed there was no crime in Venezuela and only recently did the Prosecutor
move on the case.
But both Argentinean and US authorities did investigate the
case, leaving the Venezuelan Government totally naked in the case.
In Argentina, high-level Government officials resigned,
while in the US the FBI set up a sting operation that caught a bunch of the
leaders of the Chavista “boliburgeois” trying to extort the man with the
suitcase, Guido Antonini, into keeping silent.
Well, we heard little today again in the local press about the news revealed
in Miami that the lawyer of one of the defendants on the case told the paper that
the FBI had a taped conversation showing that the Venezuelan Government had offered to
pay Guido Antonini US$ 2 million to stay silent. The money, according to the taped
conversation, which will be revealed in the upcoming trial, was going to be
provided by none other than the county’s intelligence police DISIP.
Do you really think DISIP has the autonomy to make such a payment without approval from the highest levels of authority in Venezuela? Yes, including Hugo Chavez.
Of course, we will continue to get total denial and spinning
from the Venezuelan Government as all of the details of the case are quite
tangible and require little invention from US authorities.
But in the end, Antonini was part of the only suitcase that was caught
in a process where who knows how many suitcases filled of cash have traveled in
similar fashion. Billions, not millions of dollars to extend the reach of his
influence and popularity, while Venezuela decays morally and materially in the
name of Chavez' empty revolution.
In any country with moral reserves, the Maletagate case
would have made heads roll all the way to the top.
In the shameless robolution,
we are supposed to believe it was an evil plot by the Empire.
