Clara Zid and Dan Brown, March 2024
A joke spreads through Caracas (Venezuela) warning the new bourgeoisie that does business with the government: they need not worry if the prosecutor’s office calls; after all, the prosecution is part of the state apparatus and won’t harm them. Their true concern should arise if a journalist from Armando.info contacts them.
“We are the site where people don’t want to appear; our archive portrays the elite that has engaged in business at the expense of hunger and human rights violations,” explains Joseph Poliszuk, founder and director of Armando.info. This Venezuelan media outlet has just been awarded the Global Shining Light Award by the Global Investigative Journalism Network (GIJN), the most prestigious award in global investigative journalism.
“If organized crime has become sophisticated, we must too,” says Joseph, describing the use of advanced technology in the award-winning report, “Corredor Furtivo”. With the help of Artificial Intelligence and satellite imagery, reporters identified 3,718 points of mining activity, mostly illegal, in the states of Bolívar and the Amazon rainforest. They also uncovered clandestine runways serving transborder organized crime for dispatching shipments of gold and drugs.
Technology was a compass that showed them where to go and who to interview, in a very dangerous jungle territory with natural accidents and where the gasoline to move around the area is in the hands of the guerrillas.
“Through Alex Saab, we determined Maduro’s indirect involvement in the government’s subsidized food program”
Adding to the complexity, part of the “Corredor Furtivo” investigation took place from exile, as Armando.info’s editorial team hastily left Venezuela in early 2018, due to a criminal lawsuit filed by Colombian businessman Alex Saab. Saab had close ties to President Nicolás Maduro, a connection closely monitored by Armando.info.
“Through Alex Saab, we determined Maduro’s indirect involvement in the government’s subsidized food program,” explains Joseph. Saab sued them for defamation and slander, offenses that carry up to six years in prison in Venezuela, coupled with a ban on further reporting. “It was a clear censorship mechanism; they didn’t want us referring to the program where they were doing business with the country’s most impoverished.”
This led to the exile of Armando.info’s editorial team, initially to Colombia, invited by the magazine “Semana”. Joseph recalls the contrast, after the food shortage in Venezuela, of “finishing work at night, going to the supermarket in Colombia, and finding meat.” They now live dispersed across different Latin American countries. “Some journalists face legal proceedings, others have canceled passports; if we return to Venezuela, we would probably be in a disadvantageous situation, if not in prison.”
During their escape, they obtained evidence linking Maduro to Alex Saab. Their website was subsequently blocked, and they had to publish it in Colombian media. Attacks on social media and bombardments against Armando.info escalated. Today, they are hosted on the secure platform Qurium, shielding them from attacks and providing a mirror to circumvent censorship.
Yet, they continue to face censorship attacks. “There’s people that copy our notes, paste them on unknown blogs, put an earlier date on the publication than Armando.info, and then claim copyright and ask Google to remove our article.”
When Alex Saab was deported in 2021, Chavismo responded by raiding the home of the journalist who had conducted the investigation, Roberto Deniz, with his parents inside. Saab had been threatening Armando.info’s journalists for months, publishing their addresses and ID cards on social media and sending greetings to their families.
However, the greatest challenge for Armando.info has not been the attacks but exile itself. Establishing a structure to continue their work was not easy. “There wasn’t as much awareness as now about working remotely or having sources attend interviews through a computer, especially in a country with limited connectivity,” explains Joseph.
Over time, they secured sources within the country. According to Joseph, “people trust our work, knowing that we paid for it with exile.” Another advantage, says Joseph, is that “in Venezuela, we probably couldn’t do the work we are doing now.”
Armando.info was founded in 2014, born out of the need for investigative journalism amid protests against Nicolás Maduro’s regime. “Armando.info marked a new era in the media, not only in Venezuela but in these small ventures where we fund ourselves without advertising. We started with crowdfunding,” explains Joseph. They also implemented a paywall, but it proved unsuccessful. “If it’s challenging, imagine in a country with the world’s highest hyperinflation.” Finally, they found international cooperation donations to be the most successful financing method.
At the same time, Armando.info was betting heavily on data journalism, curiously in a dictatorship that does not offer data. “We have three major methodologies. The first is traditional journalism, even with much fear both inside and outside the country, here we found the power of people providing us information,” says Joseph.
“If information isn’t inside, it might be outside in a globalized world”
The second methodology involves formal and informal networks of information: “If information isn’t inside, it might be outside in a globalized world, from customs records to judicial cases or the Panama Papers.”
Lastly, data journalism: “We have scraped the national public contractor registry, which wasn’t open, but we decided to open it, systematize it, and cross-reference it with other records inside and outside the country.”
Through these methods, they produced compelling work, such as cross-referencing the national gazette with the Miami public company registry, revealing connections between government party militants, officials, military personnel, judges, and owners of companies and properties in Miami.
Armando.info’s list of investigations is extensive, covering not only corruption but also social issues. Notable is the case of Odebrecht bribes, particularly opaque in Venezuela, as well as human rights violations against political prisoners and their families.
Another investigation, dating back further, led to the removal of Venezuela’s treasurer, Carlos Erik Malpica Flores. “There was no information about him, not even a photo. He was an almost secret official, and the first rumor was that he was the nephew of Venezuela’s first lady,” explains the journalist. Rumors proved true, and Armando.info found some of his companies in Panama. In collaboration with other Venezuelan media, they obtained a photo and published it, exposing his irregularities.
“We’re talking about a level of opacity where even the face is a secret,” denounces the journalist. Figures on COVID and inflation rates were never made public. “We have shifted to an authoritarian system where everything is secret, there is even a notary office that guarantees the secrecy of the state, when notaries are supposed to be entities registering public documents.”
“Publishing alone is not the same as publishing with 400 journalists. It will be harder to sue us”
Armando.info’s collaborations with other journalists culminated internationally in Panama Papers, Swiss Leaks, Paradise Papers, Pandora Papers, or FinCEN Files. “It’s crucial to find both formal and informal allies, and what better allies than colleagues,” says Joseph, for whom this new form of journalism has benefited. “Publishing alone is not the same as publishing with 400 journalists. It will be harder to sue us, and the consequences will be greater than if we publish something alone in Venezuela.”
Joseph particularly remembers the first collaboration, Panama Papers, during Easter 2016: “I remember Caracas was very dry, with no water.” It marked a turning point: “We were no longer alone and felt that we had grown because we entered the axis of an entire community of transnational investigative journalists.”
While the world moves forward, Venezuela is still in the 20th century, according to Joseph. Today, Venezuela’s largest export is not oil but the brain drain: “More than 7 million Venezuelans are abroad, many of them university-educated, although the government does not acknowledge that figure.” For the journalist, one of Venezuela’s main future challenges will be integrating those who return to participate in its reconstruction.
But Joseph doesn’t want to dwell on the future; instead, he wants to delve into the present: “I see a system becoming kleptocratic; they have trafficked basic things like rice and meat.” Recently, Armando.info uncovered an illegal gold trafficking route from southern Venezuela to northern Brazil. “They paid for gold with food exports to Venezuela; the food was gold“.
These investigations, he says, have led to attempts to “corner us, make us invisible, belittle us.” However, Armando.info can now proudly showcase not only the numerous awards it has won but also its significant service to the Venezuelan people: “Humbly, in our archive, you can understand what happened in Venezuela and explain a system that has corrupted the entire country.”
Armando.info has been hosted on Virtualroad since 2021.