Relatives of a FARC victim seek to collect USD 42 million in compensation from a US account linked to Venezuelan oil company PDVSA

The son of a Colombian ambassador assassinated by the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) in 1999 managed to get the US Justice to give him access to $190 million that organizations associated with the Colombian guerrilla have kept in the United States as compensation for damages. About $42 million of that total is trying to collect from a financial account that Alba Petroleos of El Salvador, a subsidiary of PDVSA, has in Connecticut. A judge from that state has already authorized the procedure, but Salvadoran lawyers and the Venezuelan government try to prevent it.

The case of Antonio Caballero, the son of the man killed by the FARC, paved the way for judicial action that considers Alba Petróleos of El Salvador (APES) and its parent company, Petroleos de Venezuela (PDVSA), as “agencies or instruments of the FARC,” according to official US justice documents to which Infobae has had access.

On October 16, 2020, Caballero filed legal action in a district court in Connecticut, a small state in the northeastern United States, to recover the money. Based on a 2014 trial that he won in Florida and granted him access to the funds and assets of the FARC and the “instruments or agencies” of the terrorist organization, the plaintiff “acted to secure a financial account managed in favor of Alba Petroleos of El Salvador SEM de CV by Interactive Brokers, LLC of Greenwich, Connecticut.”

On September 4, 2020, a Florida court sent its counterpart in Connecticut certification of the ruling in favor of Antonio Caballero to claim some US$41 million from a financial account managed in the name of Alba Petroleos of El Salvador.

U.S. federal legislation known as the Terrorism Risk Assurance Act of 2002 (TRIA) allows victims of international terrorist organizations that have obtained favorable judgments in U.S. courts to compensate themselves with assets of those organizations and their associates. After conducting a search in U.S. financial instances for a decade and a half, Caballero's lawyers found Alba Petroleos' financial account in Connecticut containing $41,734.153.93, according to court documents held by Infobae.

In 2020, when Caballero took legal action in Connecticut, the FARC was still considered a terrorist organization by the U.S. State Department. A year earlier, in January 2019, the Treasury Department imposed sanctions against PDVSA. Three months later, in March of that year, sanctions were extended to the Central American subsidiaries of the Venezuelan state company, such as Alba Petróleos in El Salvador and Albanisa in Nicaragua.

The ruling in favor of Caballero was one of those that opened the doors for the link between the FARC and Venezuelan oil operators to be established in US court records and to a dozen similar claims for compensation starting in 2019. Caballero is the only one who, so far, has found assets of Alba Petroleos in the United States.

Alba Petróleos is one of the business and financial conglomerates through which the Venezuelan state oil company and its partners in Central America moved at least US$1 billion, according to financial audits conducted by prosecutors in El Salvador and the United States, where Alba has been investigated for money laundering.

In El Salvador, Alba Petróleos has been, in addition to a powerful financial conglomerate, a center of political power that has been linked to the last three governments of the country, including the current one of President Nayib Bukele, whose political career was partly financed by PDVSA's money. The current attorney general of El Salvador, Rodolfo Delgado, was employed by Alba Petróleos in 2019, before Bukele-controlled deputies in congress appointed him head of the Attorney General's Office of the Republic.

On January 19, 2021, an official from Hartford County, Connecticut sent Interactive Brokers by certified mail a copy of the court ruling allowing Antonio Caballero to claim US$41 million from Alba Petroleos. A copy of the resolution and the judicial statement was also sent to the headquarters of Alba Petróleos in San Salvador on January 15, 2021.

A decade and a half later, the judicial demand that links Alba Petróleos to the FARC in the United States echoes the first information that linked the Colombian guerrilla with the Salvadoran conglomerate in 2008 through José Luis Merino, a former Salvadoran guerrilla member of the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN) who became a State official and one of the most influential political and financial operators in El Salvador since the late 2000s.

Merino, also known as “Comandante Ramiro”, forged much of his power thanks to the control he had, through Alba Petróleos, over funds from the preferential import of Venezuelan oil. Merino, his brother Sigfredo Merino, a lawyer named Mauricio Cortez Avelar and a doctor named Erick Vega were the main operators of money in El Salvador, which served, among other things, to finance political campaigns of FMLN candidates, including that of Nayib Bukele, in 2012 the young mayor of Nuevo Cuscatlan, a small suburb of San Salvador, the capital. Commander Ramiro was everyone's boss.

In 2006, Merino created Alba Petróleos as a joint company of which 60% owned PDVSA subsidiary PDV Caribe S.A., while the rest belonged to ENEPASA, a public association formed by FMLN mayors. For a decade, Alba Petroleos moved nearly US$1 billion through the financial systems of El Salvador, Panama, Honduras, Guatemala, Colombia, and, it is now known after Caballero's court complaint in Connecticut, United States.

Investigators had previously detected undetermined amounts of funds in Nevada and Miami, but that money has not been the subject of legal claims, according to an investigator who is familiar with the case of Alba Petroleos in the United States.

On March 17, 2021, New York lawyer Marcos Daniel Jimenez, acting on behalf of Alba Petróleos of El Salvador, confirmed to the Connecticut court the shareholding composition of his client's company: 60% owned by PDVSA and 40% owned by ENEPASA.

Two years after the founding of Alba Petróleos, the Colombian prosecutor's office launched the first formal investigation against José Luis Merino for crimes related to arms trafficking and drug trafficking. In 2008, the Colombian army found a laptop in a FARC guerrilla camp, from which it extracted thousands of electronic files describing criminal activities of the terrorist organization. There appeared the name of José Luis Merino, described as an operator involved in the purchase of weapons of war for the FARC and as a link with the officials of the Hugo Chávez regime in Venezuela.

Further investigations of Merino and Alba Petróleos, first for their relationship with the FARC and then for money-laundering crimes, were opened in El Salvador and the United States. In his native country, however, Commander Ramiro built, with Venezuelan money, a political safety net that has kept him safe until now.

Thanks to the political power that Venezuelan money gave him, Merino managed to get the last five attorneys general of El Salvador to pass through the investigations open to Alba Petróleos; he was also able to consolidate his power within the FMLN, until 2019 the most important political force in El Salvador; and, starting in 2012, allowed him to influence the political career of Nayib Bukele, the figure who today controls all power in El Salvador.

US federal agents, mostly from the departments of Justice and the Treasury, have been tracking Merino and Venezuelan money in El Salvador since at least 2015, as confirmed to Infobae by a former US diplomat who was stationed in Central America and a government contractor in Washington.

In 2021, Washington included Ramiro on a list of anti-democratic and corrupt actors in Central America, which also includes, in addition to half a dozen officials of Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele, the former president of Honduras, Juan Orlando Hernandez, recently extradited to the United States for drug trafficking and Consuelo Porras, the attorney general of Guatemala, accused of favoring political mafia groups in her country.

Carlos Caballero was kidnapped by the Colombian guerrilla in February 1999. Six months later and after being subjected to torture almost daily, the guerrillas killed this man, who was then 76 years old: they shot him in the back of the neck and left his body on the edge of a country road. Fifteen years later, in 2014, a Florida court granted Antonio, the son of the murdered man, the right to claim some $190 million as compensation. The sentence opened a path that today reaches Alba Petróleos, the Salvadoran subsidiary of Venezuelan state-owned oil company PDVSA.

After the 2014 ruling, Antonio Caballero's lawyers began looking for money in accounts that could be related to the FARC's criminal activities.

The first blow came shortly after, when the plaintiff managed to get the US justice to give him access to $2 million seized from the Mexican drug trafficking cartel known as Los Zetas. The reasoning in favor of Caballero was that Los Zetas acted as an instrument in the service of the FARC, which also engaged in cocaine trafficking from Colombia to the United States with a stopover in Mexico.

It was in 2020 that his lawyers found the $42 million in a financial account that the company called Interactive Brokers has in the name of Alba Petroleos of El Salvador.

The Interactive Brokers headquarters is a three-story building located at Number 2 Pickwick Plaza in Greenwich, a medium-sized city in the state of Connecticut, an hour's drive from New York. It is a company of financial intermediaries, whose main focus is, according to an advertising pamphlet, the placement of funds in international markets.

On January 15, 2021, Timothy Bennett, sheriff of Hartford County, to which Greenwich belongs, arrived at the Pickwick Plaza building to hand over to Interactive Brokers the court report authorizing Antonio Caballero access to Alba Petroleos funds. A security guard told him that no one was there because, due to the Covid-19 lockdown, everyone was still working from home. Bennett sent the package by certified mail on January 19.

On the same day 15, Sheriff Bennett sent the judicial notice, also by registered mail, to Boulevard Order of Malta Sur Block “A”, House number 1 of the El Boquerón Industrial Park in Antiguo Cuscatlan, the suburb of San Salvador where Alba Petroleos has one of its headquarters.

What it says in the documents sent by Bennett is that on September 4, 2020, the court presiding over Judge K. Michael Moore in Connecticut received certificate that a Florida district court ruled in favor of plaintiff Antonio Caballero to claim $46,729,667 plus interest generated at 0.15% per month since May 2020 of the funds managed by Interactive Brokers for Alba Petroleos from Greenwich.

From that notification, a litigation began that has not yet ended. The lawsuit that has held, until now, the delivery of the funds is not the one opened by Caballero against Alba Petróleos, but between the lawyers of the Salvadoran conglomerate and those who have shown themselves as part of this civil trial as representatives of PDVSA. Both Salvadorans and Venezuelans want control over the $42 million.

Milton Jimenez was the first lawyer to appear as representative of Alba Petroleos. Jimenez has acted on behalf of Jaime Alberto Recinos Crespín, legal representative of the conglomerate in San Salvador. Recinos was FMLN leader and mayor of Cuscatancigo, a working-class suburb of the Salvadoran capital, and is still vice president of Alba Petróleos. Infobae searched for the former mayor at his home twice to get his comments, but there was no response.

The dispute in the United States began in April 2021, when the White and Case law firm filed a motion in the Connecticut court to register them as the legal representatives of Alba Petroleos. White and Castle acts on behalf of PDVSA and alleges that, because she is the Venezuelan majority shareholder, she is responsible for taking care of the funds in Connecticut. The US justice understands that PDVSA is part of the Venezuelan government that Washington recognizes, that of Juan Guaido.

It was until January 13, 2022 that Jeffrey Alker Meyer, an appeals judge in New Haven, also in Connecticut, ended the contest by ruling in favor of Jimenez and Recinos Crespín and determining that it is up to Salvadorans to dispute money with Antonio Caballero. In the end, Connecticut seems to be another chapter in a lawsuit between Venezuelans and Salvadorans for oil money that began in the middle of the last decade.

Alba Petróleos from El Salvador was, for more than a decade, a machine to disappear money. At least until 2020, according to its balance sheet, the company had more than $1 billion in accounts receivable. This is due to a policy of expending loans with hardly any guarantees, many given to societies created by men of the trust of the one who had real power within the company, José Luis Merino.

And it was all done thanks to the lack of supervision of its Venezuelan counterpart, despite the fact that the company's boards of directors included citizens of that country, many of them important government officials, such as Asdrúbal Chávez, cousin of the late Hugo Chavez, who participated from its inception until 2012. Apparently, the clash between their functions in their country and those of their position in the Central American nation made it impossible for them to exercise real control over the activities of Alba Petróleos in El Salvador.

These Venezuelans include, for example, Bernardo Álvarez, director president between May 2015 and November 2016, a position he held at the same time as his country's permanent ambassador to the OAS. He was also the president of PDV Caribe and Petrocaribe and, in addition, the executive secretary of the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America (ALBA-TCP). A similar case is that of the general manager of Alba from March 2016 to the present day, Luis Sauce Navarro, who since September 2015 has been the Minister of Transport and Public Works of Venezuela.

The lack of control of Venezuelans and their interests in the finances of Alba Petróleos of El Salvador was also not balanced by the increased participation of Salvadoran politicians on its boards of directors. According to former employees and current workers of the mixed economy company, real power fell, rather, to the trusted men of José Luis Merino, such as his assistant Érick Vega or Miguel Ángel Hernández Ventura, former mayor of San Pedro Perulapán, who for years was empowered by societies with broad administrative powers and legal.

“The decisions were really made by people like them,” says a former employee, who places men who trust Merino in different activities, such as in the decision to grant loans, in which some took advantage of it to carry funds into their pockets.

“It was a common good thing to see that someone, who was not a party member (FMLN), came to apply for credit and give as collateral a land that, for example, was worth $150,000. However, they lent him $200,000. And that's because in that disbursement there was a cut (a percentage) for someone on the inside,” commented one former employee, who spoke on condition of anonymity.

Erick Vega, one of the men to whom former employees of Alba Petróleos attribute the most power, is currently a commercial advisor to Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele. The names of both adviser and president appear in several documents that the Salvadoran prosecutor's office seized in companies associated with Alba Petróleos that were raided in May 2021, just as the litigation began in Connecticut. These seizures occurred as part of a massive money-laundering investigation opened by the Salvadoran Attorney General's Office that year, which, however, has been buried by Rodolfo Delgado, the bukelite prosecutor and former employee of Alba Petroleos.

Vega appears on at least two boards of directors of these companies, including one that served to channel some US$15 million from Alba Petroleos, which served, in part, to finance Bukele's political campaigns.

The use of Alba Petróleos' money to favor Merino's appointees, such as the current Salvadoran president, created cracks inside the FMLN, whose board demanded the delivery of accounts on Venezuelan money in 2018, something that had not happened before. An internal audit determined, that year, that there was a financial hole of between $600 million and $900 million that Merino could not account for. A former member of the FMLN Political Commission told Infobae on condition of anonymity that Venezuelan agents of PDVSA have also claimed Merino for that money.

According to the investigation by the Salvadoran Prosecutor's Office, Alba Petróleos' money laundering scheme operated in different ways. One was bad loans such as those described by former employees of the conglomerate, which Alba ultimately never received; one of the beneficiaries of those loans was Nayib Bukele, who personally received at least US$1.9 million. Another form of laundering was the transfer of funds to financial accounts abroad.

Salvadoran investigations and U.S. agents stationed in San Salvador had detected some of that money in Panama, where Alba Petróleos opened front companies to send some of the Venezuelan money from San Salvador. The case of Colombian Antonio Caballero and the US$42 million in Connecticut proves that the money from this conglomerate designated to launder nearly $1 billion also flowed to the United States.

Lithium in Connecticut is still open. An appeals judge has already given Alba Petróleos' lawyers in El Salvador the right to fight the $42 Umillions with Antonio Caballero, the son of the Colombian ambassador killed by the FARC. There is a path of appeals and counterarguments that paints for a long time. One thing is certain: US researchers who have tracked Alba Petróleos already know that Salvadorans linked to PDVSA, FARC and President Bukele used the US financial system to move millions of dollars.

With the collaboration of Moisés Alvarado.

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