On Sunday, U.S. federal agents confirmed that Alvaro Pulido Vargas a 62-year-old Colombian businessman, is now in federal custody in Miami. Pulido, who has been a longtime associate of Alex Saab, was reportedly removed from a Venezuelan prison with the consent of the acting Venezuelan president, Delcy Rodríguez. The handover follows a two-year investigation by the DEAFBI and Homeland Security Investigations that targeted a sprawling bribery and money-laundering network linked to Venezuela’s state-run oil company PDVSA.
Transfer from Venezuela to the United States
The exact legal mechanism behind Pulido’s relocation has not been disclosed. He had been detained at El Rodeo I prison outside Caracas since 2023, where he was facing charges in a separate PDVSA-related corruption probe led by Rodríguez while she served as vice-president. According to Colombian newspaper El Tiempo DEA agents escorted Pulido to Florida after receiving approval from Rodríguez’s interim government, mirroring the earlier deportation of Alex Saab in May.
Alleged corruption schemes
Prosecutors allege that Pulido and Saab built a network of offshore shell companies, using entities in Hong Kong, the United Arab Emirates and Turkey to funnel bribes to senior Maduro allies. The scheme allegedly secured more than $2 billion in Venezuelan contracts for food, medicine and low-cost housing during a period of acute hardship. The first indictment, filed in 2019, accuses the pair of laundering roughly $350 million through U.S. banks to obtain a low-income housing contract that never materialized. The second indictment, filed in 2021, focuses on the CLAP food-box program, alleging that a company controlled by Pulido earned about $340 million from a contract to supply ten million subsidized food parcels, while inflating prices to pay bribes to officials such as former Táchira governor José Gregorio Vielma-Mora.
Financial fallout and forfeiture demands
The Justice Department is seeking forfeiture of approximately $1.6 billion connected to the CLAP case and has offered a reward of up to $10 million for information leading to Pulido’s arrest. Across both indictments, Pulido faces thirteen money-laundering counts, each carrying a possible sentence of up to twenty years in prison.
Prior criminal record and Saab’s cooperation
Before the Venezuelan investigations, Pulido served a 1997 sentence in Italy for drug trafficking under the alias German Enrique Rubio. His criminal résumé also includes arrests related to cocaine and heroin shipments to Europe in the late 1990s. In September, Alex Saab pleaded guilty to a single count of conspiracy to commit money laundering, forfeited $195 million and agreed to cooperate with federal prosecutors. Saab’s plea statement explicitly identifies Pulido as the chief architect of the bribery network, describing how the duo used Swiss financial advisors to open accounts in Bulgaria and Liechtenstein for the sole purpose of moving illicit funds.
With Saab now a key witness, U.S. authorities are poised to present his testimony at Pulido’s upcoming first appearance in Miami Federal court, scheduled for Tuesday. The case underscores a growing pattern of cooperation between Washington and the interim Venezuelan government, despite ongoing tensions over Maduro’s ouster earlier this year.
