Word: venezuelan
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Today, however, it's Duran whose legal skin that needs saving. Last December he and four other men, three Venezuelans and an Uruguayan, were charged in Miami with failing to register as foreign government agents. U.S. prosecutors say the men, at the behest of "high-level" Venezuelan government officials, cajoled and even threatened Antonini to keep mum about the real purpose of all that cash: an illegal contribution from Venezuela to the presidential campaign of then Argentine Senator and First Lady Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner, a Chavez ally. One of the men, Moises Maionica, pleaded guilty in January...
Both backers and critics of Chavez say the radical left-wing Venezuelan President is tacitly on trial himself. It's no secret that Chavez, who controls the hemisphere's largest oil reserves, lavishes billions of dollars in foreign aid on allies to promote his anti-U.S. Bolivarian Revolution. Foes have long groused that his largesse can also be as shadowy as the covert U.S. operations Chavez accuses agencies like the CIA of perpetrating. They contend that he has funneled cash to leftist candidates in presidential races from Bolivia to Mexico, and that he has helped fund Marxist guerrillas like...
...Attorney Thomas Mulvihill, has said in hearings that conversations recorded by an FBI wire that Antonini wore prove the suitcase money "was meant for the campaign of Cristina [Fernandez]." And according to court documents filed this summer, Kauffman is expected to testify they were told by high-level Venezuelan officials that Chavez was personally involved in the alleged suitcase affair and its aftermath...
...this does turn out to be a kind of Watergate for Chavez, it will have started under similarly clumsy circumstances. Antonini, 46, now claims the suitcase wasn't his - that he was carrying it for another Venezuelan passenger on the Cessna Citation that landed in the wee hours of Aug. 4, 2007, at Buenos Aires' Aeroparque Jorge Newberry - and that he wasn't aware of its contents. But Maria del Lujan Telpuk, the agent who stopped Antonini inside Newberry's VIP sector, says he became visibly nervous when she asked him to open the bag. "I had to insist," says...
...days later Antonini joined them at a reception in the Casa Rosada. Argentine officials dispute that. Either way, Antonini returned home to Key Biscayne, Florida, scared enough to cooperate with FBI agents. For the next four months they monitored his meetings and calls with Duran, 40; Kauffman, 35, a Venezuelan partner of Duran's in oil products and drilling equipment firms; Maionica, 36, a Venezuelan lawyer; Antonio Jose Canchica, 37, an agent of the Venezuelan intelligence service, DISIP; and Rodolfo Wanseele, 40, an Uruguayan and Canchica's driver. Maionica and Kauffman face a maximum five years each in prison; Canchica...