<\/p>\n
BY JIM WYSS<\/span><\/p>\n BOGOTA, COLOMBIA <\/span><\/p>\n Venezuela\u2019s former top prosecutor on Tuesday accused President Nicol\u00e1s Maduro of \u201corchestrating\u201d massive acts of corruption, including delivering bags full of cash and receiving at least $35 million in bribes as he helped Brazilian construction firms fleece the nation for hundreds of millions of dollars. <\/span><\/p>\n Luisa Ortega \u2014 a one-time ally of the Venezuelan president \u2014 also said that Maduro had personally handled tens of millions of dollars<\/span> in illicit campaign contributions for the 2012 reelection of his former mentor and boss, Hugo Ch\u00e1vez, who died from an undisclosed form of cancer.<\/span><\/p>\n Ortega made her case in a surreal setting: in neighboring Colombia, before a panel of judges who consider themselves Venezuela\u2019s legitimate Supreme Court. Adding realism to the proceedings, the \u201cpretrial hearing\u201d was held in Colombia\u2019s ornate and vaulted congressional building, and when Maduro didn\u2019t appear for the session, he was assigned a public defender.<\/span><\/p>\n Ortega said she was providing the judges with bank documents, immigration records and audio recordings to prove her sweeping claims. Those files, however, are under seal, and weren\u2019t provided to the press. And the court said it would decide on<\/span> April 9 if a trial is merited. <\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n Read More: Venezuela\u2019s rebel prosecutor flees<\/b><\/a><\/p>\n In a fiery speech, Ortega also asked Venezuela\u2019s armed forces to detain Maduro and urged Interpol to issue an arrest warrant due to the \u201cseriousness of the charges.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n By most accounts, none of that will happen. The Maduro administration considers Ortega and the judges criminals and usurpers, and all are facing arrest warrants<\/span> in Venezuela. <\/span><\/p>\n Ever since she fled Venezuela in August, Ortega has accused Maduro of being complicit in the Odebrecht scandal, but this was her most detailed account of the alleged crimes. <\/span><\/p>\n According to Ortega, starting as far back as 2007, the construction giant paid at least $98 million in bribes to Venezuelan officials in exchange for more than $3 billion in potential contracts. Among those deals was a bridge that was supposed to span Lake Maracaibo in western Venezuela. Although she said the country paid $407 million toward the project, the only work done was placing several pylons. <\/span><\/p>\n While she was still the nation\u2019s top prosecutor, Ortega said she investigated the Odebrecht allegations in 2011 and 2014. During that time, she learned that Odebrecht and another Brazilian conglomerate called Andrade Gutierrez had offered to pay at least $8 million to political consultant Joao Santana, who was the chief strategist for Ch\u00e1vez\u2019s 2012 reelection. <\/span><\/p>\n Read More: A measles outbreak in Venezuela threatens the region<\/b><\/a><\/p>\n The middle man for that and other cash handoffs was Maduro, then Venezuela\u2019s foreign minister, Ortega said. The former prosecutor claimed she had interviewed members of the Ch\u00e1vez campaign in Brazil who testified that Maduro handed them bags stuffed with more than $10 million in cash as he sat in his foreign ministry office. <\/span><\/p>\n Just months later \u2014 after Ch\u00e1vez\u2019s death and as Maduro was facing a high-stakes presidential race against Henrique Capriles \u2014 Ortega claims Maduro asked Odebrecht for $50 million but was only given $35 million. In exchange for that campaign contribution, Ortega said Maduro offered to expedite money that was owed to the construction firm, largely for projects that had never been finished. <\/span><\/p>\n Days after Maduro was elected, the government began paying Odebrecht, she said, even as it was clear that those funds were desperately needed to import food and medicine amid a crushing economic crisis. <\/span><\/p>\n \u201cThey were paying for works that were either incomplete or paralyzed,\u201d Ortega said. They were \u201cmonuments to corruption.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n The disgraced company has already admitted to paying more than $800 million in bribes to government officials in 11 countries, in a scandal that has rattled the hemisphere. Last month, Peruvian President Pedro Pablo Kuczynski stepped down amid revelations that he\u2019d accepted Odebrecht cash before taking office.<\/span><\/p>\n Maduro\u2019s court-appointed attorney, Andres Felipe Lindo, started off his defense by saying that he had never met Maduro, and had no relationship with him, but was simply doing his \u201clegal duty.\u201d <\/span><\/p>\n Lindo questioned how his client could be held responsible for construction contracts signed by his predecessor, and he said there was no paper trail linking Maduro to the witnesses in Brazil, who are at the heart of Ortega\u2019s case.<\/span><\/p>\n Venezuelan opposition Deputy Gaby Arellano, who was at Tuesday\u2019s hearing, admitted the trial might not have immediate repercussions back home, but she said it\u2019s part of the broader international push to isolate the Maduro government. And other countries might consider the ruling as legally binding, she said.<\/span><\/p>\n \u201cThis could be the beginning of a regime transition,\u201d she suggested.<\/span><\/p>\n Outside of the hearing, a group of Venezuelan exiles remarked at how faithfully recreated the trial was, down to assigning Maduro a Venezuelan defense lawyer. <\/span><\/p>\n \u201cWhat if Maduro wins?\u201d they joked.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" BY JIM WYSS BOGOTA, COLOMBIA Venezuela\u2019s former top prosecutor on Tuesday accused President Nicol\u00e1s Maduro of \u201corchestrating\u201d massive acts of corruption, including delivering bags full of cash and receiving at least $35 million in bribes as he helped Brazilian construction firms fleece the nation for hundreds of millions of dollars. Luisa Ortega \u2014 a one-time ally of the Venezuelan… Read more »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":37,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1524","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-article"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/baileyonlineclassroom.com\/theamericasblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1524","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/baileyonlineclassroom.com\/theamericasblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/baileyonlineclassroom.com\/theamericasblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/baileyonlineclassroom.com\/theamericasblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/37"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/baileyonlineclassroom.com\/theamericasblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1524"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/baileyonlineclassroom.com\/theamericasblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1524\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1525,"href":"https:\/\/baileyonlineclassroom.com\/theamericasblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1524\/revisions\/1525"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/baileyonlineclassroom.com\/theamericasblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1524"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/baileyonlineclassroom.com\/theamericasblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1524"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/baileyonlineclassroom.com\/theamericasblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1524"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}