The government of acting Venezuelan President Delcy Rodríguez has handed Álvaro Pulido — Álex Saab’s Colombian-born associate who had been held in Caracas since 2023 — over to the United States. The transfer was announced Sunday on X by U.S. Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, while the Venezuelan government has remained silent on the case.
Pulido, 62, is the second key figure from one of the most significant corruption schemes of the Nicolás Maduro era to be turned over by Caracas to Washington. The move comes five months after the government handed over Saab, who has been accused of serving as Maduro’s front man. For Gerardo Reyes, a Univision journalist and author of a book on Saab, the handover tightens the pressure on Maduro’s inner circle, but not only that: “He must know a great deal about everyone.”
Pulido is due to appear Tuesday before a federal court in Miami, where he faces two criminal cases dating from 2019 and 2021. In the first, prosecutors accuse him and Saab of laundering about $350 million through fictitious imports linked to a social housing contract. In the second, he and four others are accused of laundering bribes tied to $1.6 billion in contracts for the importation of food and medicine. According to U.S. prosecutors, he laundered more than $2 billion obtained through bribery and fraud.
Roberto Deniz, a journalist with Armando.info who has investigated both men for years, describes a partnership with clearly divided roles. “Saab had the political relationship, almost a family-like connection, with Maduro, while Pulido was the one who structured the companies through which the money flowed,” he explains. Unlike Saab, Pulido never enjoyed political backing or held positions that could shield him. He operated in the shadows, and his legal future appears far more uncertain than that of his partner.
“He is no longer a fugitive from justice,” Tysen Duva, deputy chief of the Criminal Division of the U.S. Department of Justice, said after Pulido’s transfer.
The developments come as prosecutors in the Southern District of New York last Thursday expanded the narcoterrorism case against Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, adding a charge of conspiracy to torture opposition figures, military officers and U.S. citizens detained in Venezuela.
Turning the page
Behind both handovers are Delcy Rodríguez and her brother, Jorge Rodríguez, the head of the National Assembly, as well as the necessary cooperation of Interior Minister Diosdado Cabello. Through them, they are trying to turn the page on one of the darkest chapters of the Maduro era.
“The handover of Saab was a relief, a way to shed that era,” a source close to Miraflores Palace, the seat of the Venezuelan government, told EL PAÍS at the time. Saab had amassed so much power that he had begun to threaten the political survival even of the Rodríguez siblings. With the political landscape turned upside down and Maduro in a New York prison, the new directive, according to that source, was to cooperate and provide all the information the United States had not been able to obtain until now.
“This looks more like a political bargain than a genuine will to pursue justice. If it were, both would be tried in Venezuela, where they committed the crimes,” says Deniz, who has been exiled since 2018 for his investigations into Saab. Instead, the Venezuelan government, the journalist argues, “is getting rid of a problem without addressing the root of it.”
Saab’s deportation on May 16 stirred extraordinary controversy. The man whose release the Maduro government had campaigned for ever since his detention in Cabo Verde in 2020 now appeared escorted by DEA agents at a Miami airport. This was after Caracas presented him as a diplomat in an effort to claim immunity on his behalf.
The handover raised numerous questions because Saab, who was born in Colombia, also held Venezuelan citizenship, and the Constitution prohibits the extradition of Venezuelan nationals. In defending the decision, Cabello claimed that the businessman was not Venezuelan, that he had obtained “a fraudulent identity card,” and that he was under investigation for “all kinds of fraud.” On September 15, Saab pleaded guilty in a federal court in Miami to conspiracy to launder money. His sentence will be announced in January.
Pulido was arrested in Caracas in April 2023 and became one of the first casualties of the Chavista government’s anti-corruption purge. That same year, in December, Saab returned to Venezuela as a hero under a prisoner exchange negotiated with the administration of U.S. president Joe Biden: Caracas freed 10 Americans, and Washington returned the Maduro government’s chief financial operator, a key figure in helping it circumvent sanctions. When Saab was welcomed at Miraflores Palace, his longtime business partner had already been behind bars for eight months.
Saab would meet the same fate in February of this year, a month after Nicolás Maduro’s capture, when he was arrested in Caracas in a joint operation with Washington.
Pulido had been ensnared in the investigation known as PDVSA-Crypto, the same corruption case that brought down former oil minister Tareck El Aissami, with whom he shared a prison cell at El Rodeo. The case involves more than 60 defendants accused in what Venezuelan prosecutors say was a $21 billion embezzlement scheme tied to oil sales that circumvented U.S. sanctions.
The trial is being held behind closed doors, and several of the defendants, including El Aissami, have alleged due-process violations, torture, and mistreatment in prison.
Compulsive gambler
But the man due to appear before a judge on Tuesday is not actually named Álvaro Pulido. That was the name of a Colombian man who died in a Miami hospital in 2005. His ID card, canceled after his death, was later revived for use by another man: Germán Enrique Rubio Salas.
Under that name, he was convicted in absentia in Italy in 1997 as one of the masterminds behind a network that smuggled cocaine into Europe hidden inside aluminum tubes. Three years later, he was arrested in Bogotá as the head of the so-called Bogotá cartel and was released in 2007. A senior official at Colombia’s civil registry told journalist Gerardo Reyes that appropriating the identity card of a deceased person is a common practice among drug traffickers seeking a new “alias.”
Pulido, or Rubio, rebuilt his life in Caracas. Reserved by nature and a compulsive gambler, he would bet on virtually anything, from whether it would rain that afternoon to who would walk through the door, and could wager between $3,000 and $5,000 at a domino table.
When Reyes confronted him in 2016 about his true identity, Pulido claimed that his passport had been stolen. Asked why his children carried the surname Rubio, he replied that he was not their biological father. He promised to provide a DNA test, but it never materialized.
According to Reyes, it was Pulido who ultimately led the DEA to Álex Saab. The agency had been tracking him over suspected drug-trafficking links and, while investigating his circle, came across his business partner.
For Mercedes De Freitas, director of Transparencia Venezuela, what Pulido and Saab can reveal goes far beyond Maduro and the business dealings carried out during his administration, which ranged from food and medicine imports to construction, oil and mining.
“This reaches his former ministers and vice presidents. There are many people who must face justice,” she says. “Álvaro Pulido is a partner who knows where all the money from the network is. He will likely confirm everything Saab has reported as a cooperating witness. He has tremendous power, and those who saw him imprisoned in El Rodeo say he was the king of the jail.”
Reyes believes Caracas had kept him imprisoned since 2023 out of fear that he might escape and end up testifying in the United States. One of his FBI sources told him that Pulido was already cooperating, much as the Venezuelan government suggested about Saab since his arrest.
In the journalist’s view, the handover does more than strengthen the case against Maduro. Prosecutors, he says, are looking for witnesses who can provide the names of other corrupt officials who have so far escaped punishment, and in cases like these they like to recruit as many cooperators as possible to “throw mud at the wall and see what sticks.”
For the FBI, he adds, such witnesses are valuable assets in its efforts to combat corruption and money laundering in Venezuela. According to speculation in U.S. media and political circles in Caracas, other figures implicated in the scheme could soon be transferred to the United States.
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