Last week, Venezuelan Carlos Orense Azócar was sentenced in a federal court in the Southern District of New York to life in prison, plus an additional 30 years, for drug trafficking and arms trafficking offenses. The case file reveals that “El Gordo” Orense Azócar utilized the commercial structure of Citgo, the U.S. subsidiary of the state oil company Pdvsa, to launder money obtained from cocaine sales.
Orense created fake drilling contracts through front companies like Venro, based in Rockefeller Center, Manhattan. These companies billed for supposed services that were never rendered, and the cash payments were actually sourced from drug trafficking rather than the resources of the Venezuelan oil holding. The contract served as a cover for the influx of illicit dollars into the U.S. banking system, according to the accusations made by prosecutors in New York.
“Over the phone, he said he had some money held up in the United States and he was going to try and get it out through Citgo,” testified Antonio Arveláiz, not only a bodyguard but also a nephew of Orense, in federal court on November 30, 2023. His testimony supported the prosecutors’ account that the cash was delivered in the U.S. to Luis Marín, then CEO of Citgo, or intermediaries linked to him, who were attempting to move that money through fictitious contracts with Orense’s contacts or associates to funnel it into the financial system.
Years before Carlos Orense Azócar was convicted in the United States, his name had already appeared in another case in the federal court of the Southern District of New York. It was not a criminal case but a civil lawsuit between Vencell Corporation and Eres N.V. In that litigation, which pitted the two companies against each other over oil commission payments, testimonies and documents were recorded that indicated Orense as an intermediary and placed Citgo within the contractual framework of this web. For the prosecution, this case acted as a precursor, a preliminary mapping of relationships, shell companies, and money flows that would later resurface in the criminal charge.
Conspiracy in Los Garañones
Around 2004, Luis Marín, then CEO of Citgo, accessed the position through an arrangement coordinated by Orense Azócar and a high-ranking Venezuelan official identified in the records as CC-2, described as the head of military intelligence. This profile matches that of Hugo El Pollo Carvajal Barrios, former director of the Military Intelligence Directorate (DIM), extradited to the United States from Spain in 2023 and convicted in 2025 on drug trafficking charges.
Once installed as the president of the U.S. oil subsidiary, the executive assumed a functional role within the scheme; Orense soon came to collect the favor.
“He was telling Luis Marín that the ball was now in his court and that he needed to do his part,” recalled Antonio Arveláiz in court, referring to a face-to-face meeting between the two at the Los Garañones estate near Zaraza in Guárico state, in the central Llanos region of Venezuela. This property, according to allegations presented by the prosecution on December 5, 2025, served as one of Orense’s main operational centers, featuring makeshift landing strips, underground tanks for storing drugs, and an arsenal of military weapons.
In the scheme, as mentioned, Citgo, the largest asset that Petróleos de Venezuela had abroad and currently undergoing a judicial sale in Delaware, acted as a conduit for legitimizing money derived from drug trafficking.
“It’s a tragedy, but it’s not the only case,” laments opposition leader Yon Goicochea, a member of the Asset Protection Council appointed by the National Assembly, predominantly opposition-led, in 2015.
Following legal protocols and confidentiality agreements, Goicochea claims to know no additional details. However, he remarks that the company has continued operating thanks to avoiding intervention in several cases by declaring itself as a victim and cooperating in investigating a money laundering scheme. He emphasizes that this is separate from the civil lawsuits and liens currently threatening the company due to debts incurred by the Republic during the Chávez years. “It could be the largest case in the history of the Justice Department; hundreds of people were investigated and, in fact, dozens were prosecuted for this.”
With all this magnitude, Citgo’s relationship with the asset laundering scheme represents merely a footnote compared to what court records and U.S. authorities describe regarding the operation of Carlos Orense Azócar. The drug trafficker operated in Venezuela for years with institutional support, in alliance with military personnel, civilian officials, and structures of the Chavista power, which allowed him to move at least 100 tons of cocaine, according to the prosecution’s calculations—an estimate that falls short of what his own nephew, Antonio Arveláiz, testified after being arrested in Italy in 2021: that he had moved up to 40 tons a year since 2003.
Maiquetía and the Air Bridge
Orense’s profile outlines a logistical machine capable of establishing air, maritime, and land routes for nearly two decades, always with complicity embedded at various levels of the state. For instance, in 2006, he coordinated the reception and transfer of $16 million in cash that arrived at Maiquetía International Airport on commercial flights and was then transported to Caracas aboard private helicopters, with the support of Bolivarian National Guard (GNB) military personnel, to evade customs controls and checkpoints.
The money was moved by air because “in 2006, a bridge collapsed on the highway connecting Maiquetía airport to Caracas” and the only land alternative involved “a mountain route, which was too dangerous and could take up to nine hours,” testified Roberto López Perdigón, a Venezuelan pilot and logistics operator who participated in the operation and later became a cooperating witness for the U.S. government.
López Perdigón recalled in that Manhattan courtroom the collapse of Viaduct 1 of the Caracas–La Guaira highway, built in the 1950s, part of which fell on March 19, 2006. The highway remains the main artery connecting the capital to the international airport. As the rest of the standing structure was demolished and another viaduct was constructed, intense traffic between Caracas and the central coast had to divert either to an improvised trail or to an old, narrow, winding road dating back to the Juan Vicente Gómez dictatorship in the early 20th century. While the infrastructure emergency disrupted daily life and impeded commercial activity, Orense managed to navigate the bottleneck and organize an air bridge between Caracas and La Guaira. In this context, court records also reflect meetings with emissaries of Colombian drug trafficking to unblock seized shipments and negotiate new air and maritime export routes under the promise of protection by state security bodies.
The file does not stop there. The U.S. Attorney’s Office documents how the organization expanded and diversified its operations in subsequent years. In 2009, it managed the departure of aircraft loaded with drugs from clandestine airstrips that used military transponder codes to cross airspace without being intercepted. This aerial logistics added maritime shipments by speedboats departing from the shores of Falcón state in northwestern Venezuela toward the Caribbean—at least one of these vessels was captured in international waters by the U.S. Coast Guard—and land operations protected by the Bolivarian National Armed Forces (FANB).
The Convoy and the Three Generals
An emblematic case occurred on December 15, 2016, when “police agents,” according to the accusation, detained a convoy of more than 15 vehicles loaded with seven tons of cocaine that had entered from Colombia under the protection of armed security personnel wielding AK-47 and AK-103 rifles, in an unidentified location near the population of El Guayabo in southeastern Zulia state. The episode left no public records and did not lead to judicial investigations in Venezuela, due to the intervention of high-ranking military officials. However, years later, U.S. authorities were able to reconstruct the incident based on testimonies from protected witnesses included in the court files against Carlos Orense Azócar. These testimonies name, outright, three generals of the Republic.
“The individuals inside the vehicles presented various credentials identifying themselves to an official (‘Witness-1’), including, among others, the accused, General Castor Pérez Leal, General Tito Urbano Meleán, and General Enrique Núñez Hernández, as well as credentials from the Bolivarian National Intelligence Service (Sebin) in the name of the accused,” states a memorandum from the prosecution dated November 4, 2023, which forms part of the case file United States v. Carlos Orense Azócar, 21 Cr. 379 (VSB). The document adds that they were all armed and wearing bulletproof vests with Sebin insignia, and that Pérez Leal claimed to belong to the National Anti-Drug Office (ONA). When Witness-1 indicated that he would inspect the convoy, “Pérez Leal stated that only Witness-1 and his second-in-command could carry out the inspection, due to the involvement of a high-ranking Sebin official.”
Expert on security and former attaché of the U.S. anti-narcotics agency DEA at the U.S. embassy in Caracas, Wesley Tabor, interviewed for this report, believes these cases reveal the moment when Venezuela ceased to be merely a route and became a bridge, supported by a state that provided securities to drug trafficking on land, air, and sea.
The Mexican Connection
From 2002 to 2007, cocaine trafficking through Venezuela surged from 51 to 255 tons annually, according to estimates published by the Venezuelan press and attributed to the Joint Interagency Task Force of the U.S. Southern Command. This marked an increase close to 400%. The government of then-President Hugo Chávez questioned these figures but did not provide alternative estimates or official statistics on the phenomenon. In contrast, the economy grew at a much slower pace: indicators from the Central Bank of Venezuela (BCV) showed accumulated growth of 31% during that same period, far below the rate at which, according to those estimates, the flow of cocaine was increasing through the country.
Headline from El Universal newspaper in Caracas, from its July 20, 2008 edition: “Cocaine trafficking through Venezuela increased by 400%.”
It was in the mid-2000s when Mexican cartels began operating directly in Venezuela, not just as commercial partners but as actors on the ground. One of the first signs was using Maiquetía International Airport as a base for their air bridge, a story that could later be reconstructed based on judicial files in Mexico. These records revealed that Fernando Blengio Ceseña, trusted pilot of Joaquín El Chapo Guzmán Loera, landed and took off aircraft at Maiquetía right under the nose of Casa Militar, before being prosecuted and convicted in the United States.
The scheme also involved Arturo Beltrán Leyva, one of the historical drug trafficking leaders in Mexico and head of the Beltrán Leyva cartel, whose operations were linked to cash payments sent to Orense Azócar as part of the drug trafficking circuit, including the $16 million that arrived in Caracas by helicopters in 2006. This was mentioned by Roberto López Perdigón in a federal court in New York: “Drugs that he sent to Mexico, and Arturo Beltrán was paying him the money.”
Maduro & Co
This connection with Mexican cartels has now reemerged with greater clarity following Nicolás Maduro’s extraction to the United States, when the Federal Prosecutor’s Office of the Southern District of New York expanded the charges against him and accused him of new acts that occurred between 2006 and 2008 in his then role as Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela. According to that legal document, “Maduro Moros called the Venezuelan embassy in Mexico to announce that a diplomatic mission would arrive by private plane. Then, while traffickers met with the Venezuelan ambassador in Mexico under the auspices of a diplomatic mission from Maduro Moros, their plane was loaded with drug profits. The plane then returned to Venezuela under diplomatic cover.”
Maduro is accused not only of specific acts—such as selling passports to facilitate the movement of these gangs under diplomatic cover—but also of a central role as the head of a state that facilitated drug trafficking as a power policy. The legal files include references to him being accompanied by high government officials: Cilia Flores, accused of meeting and negotiating agreements with traffickers; Diosdado Cabello Rondón, described as an articulator of cartel activities such as Los Zetas; Hugo Carvajal Barrios, accused of supplying weapons to the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC); and Néstor Reverol, accused of receiving bribes from criminal networks.
This logic appears in one of the incidents mentioned in September 2013, when authorities at Charles de Gaulle Airport in Paris found 1.3 tons of cocaine on a commercial flight that had arrived from Venezuela. According to the accusation, Maduro then called a meeting in which he “told Cabello Rondón and Carvajal Barrios that they should not have used Maiquetía Airport for drug trafficking after the 2006 seizure in Mexico, and that instead they should use other routes and well-established locations to dispatch cocaine.”
Many of these episodes are beginning to be understood now, as judicial files, testimonies from cooperating witnesses, and previously classified documents start to be declassified. What is now appearing in the archives is just a delayed snapshot of processes that began decades ago. “First it was air routes, then we began to detect maritime vessels,” explains Tabor. “These are mechanisms and patterns that adapt; they don’t remain static and abandon vertical schemes for horizontal structures, without a single visible head.”
