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Now, a report by the staunchly anti-Maduro PanAm Post editor-in-chief Orlando Avendaño has revealed a shocking scheme of fraud and embezzlement behind the aid imbroglio. According to Avendaño, Guaidó's lieutenants embezzled huge sums of money that had been promised to Venezuelan soldiers who deserted their positions and snuck across to the Colombian side at Guaido's urging.

[...]

It was apparent upon Branson's announcement of the February 23rd aid concert that the event had little to do with providing relief to hungry Venezuelans. It was a transparent propaganda stunt engineered to destabilize the Maduro government and achieve a long-standing US foreign policy goal.

As Father Sergei San Miguel, a Colombian government-affiliated priest responsible for guiding the deserting Venezuelan soldiers told me in Cucuta, the successful entrance of the meager amount of supplies into Venezuela was intended to demonstrate Maduro's loss of sovereignty in front of the global stage and foment an uprising across the country that would finally depose him.

Branson pledged that his event would rustle up 100 million dollars for humanitarian aid. But organizers had omitted how and to whom the funds would be distributed. On February 28th, Venezuela Aid Live organizers announced they had raised just 2.5 million dollars - a tiny fraction of the sum they had promised and likely less than the cost of staging a massive production on one week's notice.

The weekend of the concert offered a preview of this month's corruption revelations, with several embarrassing incidents involving Guaidó's confidantes. Early in the morning of February 23, Popular Will party members Freddy Superlano and his cousin and assistant Carlos José Salinas were found unconscious in a motel in Cúcuta. According to police reports, the two had been drugged with scopolamine and robbed by women, presumably prostitutes, they met in the red-light district. After the women made an early morning dash from the motel room, staff found the two men unconscious and called police. Salinas died shortly after being hospitalized.

Days later, another top Venezuelan opposition figure, Lorent Saleh, was arrested in Cúcuta after he allegedly attempted to sexually abuse two women. He was released after figures close to Guaidó mediated with Colombian authorities. Saleh - a recipient of funds from the US government under the guise of "democracy promotion" - had previously been deported by Colombia to Venezuela after plotting terrorist attacks and assassinations in the latter country.

[...]

At first, the turncoat soldiers were put up in nine hotels in Cúcuta at $30,000 per night, paid for by the Colombian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees and Juan Guaidó's ad hoc Humanitarian Aid Coalition.

However, just one day after they arrived, representatives from the Coalition for Humanitarian Aid in Cúcuta told soldiers to stop coming across the border because they were in "a complicated situation" with an insufficient budget.

Optimism soon turned to outrage as the benefits the soldiers had been promised failed to materialize. By mid-March, funds for the deserters had completely dried up. The UNHCR attempted to expel a group of soldiers from one shelter, giving each a stipend of 350,000 Colombian pesos ($106) a mat, and a sheet to sleep on.

"We are desperate. We do not want to stay in Colombia, we want to return to Venezuela, but not in the conditions that are being lived now. We do not know what to do," one deserter complained.

The soldiers' families paid an especially heavy toll. Several of their wives were pregnant and were denied access to medical attention. One woman was forced to give birth in an emergency room and could not pay for a taxi to leave. The 130 children of the deserters were so poorly fed that twenty percent were assessed to be suffering from malnutrition.

[...]

While the money intended for defecting soldiers padded the pockets of Popular Will leaders, hundreds of tons of food donated by the USAID and other countries that was stored in Cúcuta wound up rotting. The figure Guaidó had appointed as his liaison USAID was Venezuelan businessman Miguel Sabal.

Sabal is the president of the Present Future Association, which was founded by Popular Will member Yon Goicoechea after he won $500,000 from the Koch Brothers through the Cato Institute's Milton Friedman Prize for Advancing Liberty. Back in 2010, Sabal participated in the Mexican Fiesta plot along with Guaidó and others where they received training from the CANVAS regime change group and plotted the assassination of Maduro.

After the February 23 aid operation floundered, Sabal let the food rot in the steaming tropical heat. "Everything [Chilean] President Piñera sent is no longer useful," a source told Avendaño. "It's there. They do not know what to do with it [the rotten food] so that a scandal is not created. They will burn it, I imagine."

[...]

For exposing the corruption in Guaidó's inner circle, Avendaño has received an onslaught of hatred and harassment from opposition figures. The pushback has forced the anti-Maduro journalist into a defensive crouch.

"It has cost me, it has deeply hurt me, to publish something that, I knew, would have immense consequences," he wrote. "But I would never have forgiven myself that I had known that some traded in the misery of others, and not published it."

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