“Más vueltas que en la telenovela” a.k.a “The suitcase scandal”

The year is 2007. The Penguin King, also known as Nestor Kirchner, is President of Argentina, but elections are coming up, and instead of deciding to submit himself as a candidate, he decides to support the running of his wife, Greta the Gremlin, also known as Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner. What follows is the scandalous story of political manipulation, corruption, money laundering and crack-whore resembling women, known as the infamous suitcase scandal.

August 4th, 2007, 2.30am. A private charter plane, coming from Venezuela, arrives in Ezeiza airport, bringing into the country several Venezuelan businessmen and government officials, among them a man named Guido Antonini Wilson. Airport custom officials find 790,550 dollars in Wilson’s suitcase, which hadn’t been declared and were consequently confiscated. Because that’s what happens when you try to smuggle hundreds of thousands of dollars, in a suitcase. Has this man never flown before? Do x-ray machines ring a bell?

August 6th, 2007. Venezuelan President Hugo ‘the Delusional Revolutionary’ Chavez arrives in Argentina to sign several agreements related to petrol and the buying of 1000 million dollars in bonds. A day later Antonini Wilson, the hero of our tale, leaves Argentina for Uruguay without reclaiming the confiscated money (suspicious much?), almost 400 thousand dollars after the payment of the corresponding fine. I would personally like to know where those 400 thousand dollars ended up, and honourably submit myself to the arduous task of keeping the money. The Argentine government asked PDVSA, the Venezuelan oil company that some of the businessmen on the plane worked for, for an explanation since Antonini Wilson had taken the flight at the request of the son of the company’s president. PDVSA said they would start an internal investigation. And here is where things start going downhill…

The Venezuelan government, on the other hand, declared that Antonini Wilson wasn’t one of the government officials on the plane and wasn’t part of Chavez’s party, and that the case was of a personal nature pertaining solely to Antonini Wilson. One word: scapegoat. They also stated that the plane had stopped briefly in Bolivia before arriving in Argentina, casting doubt on the fact that the money came from Venezuela (where it is illegal to take more than 600 dollars in cash for trips and a bigger amount has to be approved by the government). Bolivia quickly answered that the plane had never stopped there, so the money must have come from Venezuela, making Chavez look like either a complete idiot, or a dirty liar, no?

16th August, 2007. The president of the PDVSA, Rafael Ramirez, resigns in lieu of the general protests and backlash the scandal had caused. But do not worry all you kind-hearted folk, he probably had enough money stored in the Caiman Islands for a nice retirement.

In Argentina, Antonini Wilson was accused of contraband, and by the end of the month the FBI found him in his home in Miami. Argentina asked for an extradition, but officials said it might take a whole year for the process to be approved and completed. The extradition was further complicated when Antonini Wilson decided to collaborate with the FBI in a cause against three Venezuelan citizens and a Uruguayan in the USA accused of being agents of Chavez’s party. Oh Chavez, what are we going to do with you?

October 28th, 2007. Cristina wins the presidential elections. Eyebrows are raised across the “choripan” nation and the consequences of botched facial plastic surgery are exposed by no less an icon than our dear president herself.

December 2007. The men accused of being Chavez’s agents in the USA were arrested by the FBI. Two of the accused were the owners of a Venezuelan company Venoco, which manufactures automobile lubricants (but nobody really cares about), and Antonini Wilson worked as an advisor for their company. According to the FBI, Antonini Wilson had been pressured in a series of meetings by the alleged agents into accepting two million dollars in exchange for not revealing the origin or the destination of the money, and the lives of Antonini Wilson’s two daughters were threatened. In the FBI interrogation tapes, Antonini Wilson declared that the two million dollars came from Chavez’s party, and were supposed to be used for Cristina’s presidential candidacy in Argentina. GASP! I am so shocked by this blatant corruption I might shake my fist in rage. But then again I remember what country I’m in and shrug my shoulders and go ‘oh well’.

December 12th, 2007. District Attorney Thomas Mulvihill stated that one of the men accused of being agents, Franklin Duran, had declared that the money was for Cristina’s candidacy, and that additional funds had been secured for her campaign. DOUBLE GASP.

December 13th, 2007. Cristina denounced the American statements as lies. Of course she did. She probably flicked her 500 dollar hair and snapped her 200 dollar manicured fingers and made some sort of grunting noise.

December 18th, 2007. Chavez states that the accused men were not agents and that the whole thing was a plot by Imperialist America wishing to hurt Venezuela and Argentina. Which is typical of him, bitching about his poor little country being bullied by the big superpowers.

December 20th, 2007. Victoria Bereziuk, ex-secretary of one of the men on the charter plane, claimed she had seen Antonini Wilson in the Pink House two days after he tried to get the money in, a claim backed up by a senator of the UCR party, Gerardo Morales, and a lawyer, Ricardo Monner Sans. The Argentine “Jefe de Gabinete”, Anibal Fernandez, denied that Antonini Wilson had visited the government house. How is this even debated? Do they not have security cameras in the pink house?

January 23rd, 2008. One of the arrested men, Moises Maionica, pleaded guilty to being a Venezuelan agent. Gotcha!

March 3rd, 2008. Another arrested Venezuelan, Carlos Kauffman, pleaded guilty to the federal charges of being an agent.

March 17th, 2009. Franklin Duran was sentenced to four years of jail for conspiring and acting as a Venezuelan agent and trying to cover up the origin of the confiscated money.

And they lived happily ever after… Though not really, because some guys went to jail, Chavez got of free and we got a crack-whore resembling president. If this were a movie, who would you cast? I’d get Arnold Schwarzenegger as a rambling revolutionary Chavez, Elijah Wood as Antonini Wilson (because he is the wearer of the One Suitcase. One Suitcase to rule them all, One Suitcase to find them, One Suitcase to bring them all and in the darkness bind them), and then probably Mikey Rourke as Cristina Kirchner.

El Pendejo Portenio