Venezuela hands over to the United States former minister and Maduro frontman Alex Saab
The United States sanctioned him in 2019 for allegedly paying bribes to obtain no-bid contracts with the Venezuelan state
The Venezuelan government on Saturday deported to the United States the Colombian businessman Alex Saab, considered for years the main financial operator of former president Nicolás Maduro and minister of Industry and National Production until January 2026. The businessman landed at sunset at Opa-locka airport in Miami-Dade County, escorted by agents of the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), bringing to a close a judicial file that had turned Saab into one of the most visible symbols of the economic apparatus of Chavismo and into one of the most wanted figures by US justice over the past decade.
The Administrative Service for Identification, Migration, and Foreign Nationals (SAIME) announced the measure through an official communiqué stating that the decision had been taken in compliance with the provisions of Venezuelan migration legislation and citing as its rationale that Saab is engaged in the commission of various crimes in the United States of America, as is public, notorious, and a matter of media record. Official sources cited by the newspaper El País said the handover had already been planned and was completed once the appropriate circumstances for his deportation arose. The businessman had accumulated charges for several offenses not only in the United States but also in Colombia and Venezuela, and is accused of having been behind a defamation campaign against the Chavista leadership in recent months.
Saab’s downfall was marked by the US military operation of 3 January that captured Maduro in Caracas. Once protected by the regime, the businessman was dismissed from the Ministry of Industry on 16 January 2026 by acting President Delcy Rodríguez, in the framework of a merger of economic portfolios. He was detained under unclear circumstances in February, with neither his whereabouts nor the charges officially confirmed in the following months. His deportation fits the sustained pattern Rodríguez has followed to remove from the state apparatus figures personally linked to Maduro, a sequence that has already reached former Defense Minister Vladimir Padrino López and the businessman Wilmer Ruperti.
Saab’s judicial trajectory is one of the most turbulent in the Chavista orbit. The United States sanctioned him in 2019 for allegedly paying bribes to obtain no-bid contracts with the Venezuelan state. He was detained in Cape Verde in 2020 at Washington’s request and extradited to the United States in October 2021. Maduro responded with an unprecedented campaign for his release, declared him an official diplomat, and secured his release in December 2023 in exchange for the handover of US prisoners. Following his return, he was incorporated into the Venezuelan cabinet in October 2024, an appointment that drew sharp criticism from opposition sectors and international analysts.
Born in Barranquilla, Saab spent years building a shadow empire estimated at more than USD 1 billion, articulated through the triangulation of goods and the supply of Chavismo’s social programs. His handover symbolically closes a central chapter of the financial apparatus that sustained the regime through the cycle of international sanctions.