Three days of controversy were enough for Jorge Rodríguez to deliver the final thrust. The president of Venezuela’s National Assembly dealt Alex Saab — Nicolás Maduro’s front man — a coup de grâce on Tuesday. Saab was deported to Miami on Saturday, where he faces charges of money laundering and bribing senior officials. “Since 2019, Alex Saab’s case has been his business with U.S. agencies [...] Soon all of you will find out what kind of relationship he had and has with those agencies,” Rodríguez said. It was the final nail in the coffin for one of the major symbols of Maduro’s era of power, a figure once defended and praised by many, including Rodríguez himself, who led the negotiation to bring him back from a U.S. prison. Saab’s case is perhaps the episode that best illustrates, so far, the new strategy of power in Caracas.

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Less than a month ago, a trial began in Venezuela that once seemed impossible. Tareck El Aissami — just three years ago, the most powerful man in the Venezuelan regime, a former vice president, former oil minister, and an inseparable figure in the governments of Hugo Chávez and Nicolás Maduro — arrived at the first hearing in a wheelchair, visibly thinner, wearing the light‑blue prison uniform. He is the central figure in the largest corruption case opened in Venezuela in two decades: 64 defendants, billions of dollars missing, and a criminal system built from within the state to evade U.S. sanctions.

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