On November 27, 2024 – just over a year before the US invaded Caracas to arrest him – Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro was eager to bolster his government’s law-and-order credentials.
The United States that day had sanctioned 21 Venezuelan officials, including members of the security forces, in response to a campaign of repression Maduro had overseen since fraudulently declaring victory in presidential elections held in July of that year.
*This article is the third in a six-part investigation, “Cocaine and Venezuela’s Cartel of the Suns Post-Maduro,” exploring the current drug trafficking dynamics in Venezuela, the nature of the Cartel of the Suns, and their future without Maduro. Read the full investigation here.
Hundreds of kilometers from Caracas, in the southern state of Amazonas, ten soldiers – including a general and three senior officers from Venezuela’s Bolivarian National Guard (Guardia Nacional Bolivariana – GNB) – were arrested for treason. Authorities accused them of allowing unauthorized aircraft to enter Venezuela from Brazil.
Military corruption in southern Venezuela, the heart of the country’s illegal mining activity, facilitates aerial trafficking of gold, fuel, drugs, and other illicit cargo using dozens of clandestine airstrips cutting into the Amazon jungle.
But enforcement against that corruption is selective. The November 2024 bust may have stemmed from a failure to pay off the right military higher-ups – and it came with the added benefit of burnishing Maduro’s tarnished anti-crime record.
For many members of Venezuela’s armed forces, drug trafficking, illegal mining and other criminal rents have become a parallel source of income that offset meager wages.
A former soldier who spoke with InSight Crime said a colonel in the National Bolivarian Armed Forces (Fuerza Armada Nacional Bolivariana – FANB) earns roughly $170 a month, including bonuses; a lieutenant earns around $150; and a sergeant, about $140. By contrast, a single gram of gold can sell for about $125 on the local market, and the fees that some soldiers charge to authorize mining operations or irregular flights can amount to several months’ salary.
“With thousands of young people earning that salary, with a badge and a gun, you’re generating an entire criminogenic structure within the institution,” said a professor who researches corruption in Venezuela, who asked to speak anonymously for security reasons.
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The economic crisis that deepened after Maduro took office in 2013 — marked by the collapse of the oil sector and unprecedented hyperinflation — weakened the state’s ability to pay its armed forces wages adequate to ensure their loyalty. Maduro’s predecessor Hugo Chávez had already permitted drug trade-related corruption to fill the gaps.
Under Maduro, other illegal economies increasingly became a financial lifeline for thousands of soldiers who have expanded their role in Venezuela’s criminal ecosystem with the state’s blessing.
From Oil to Gold
As oil production came under greater sanctions, gold increasingly contributed to government coffers. In the country’s south, the military went from guarding mines to directly controlling them, charging tolls, overseeing operations, and negotiating with criminal groups. The armed forces’ involvement in the business intensified after Maduro took office in 2013. Mining became an important source of financing for the armed forces and helped guarantee the loyalty system that sustains the regime.
According to a report by the Financial Accountability and Corporate Transparency Coalition (FACT), an estimated 86% to 91% of the gold extracted in Venezuela is illegally sourced, much of it controlled by military elites, guerrilla groups, and transnational criminal networks. Up to 70% of this production — valued at more than $4.4 billion in 2021 — is trafficked and laundered abroad through shell companies and with the collaboration of military actors.
In 2016, the government created the Military Company for Mining, Oil and Gas Industries (Compañía Anónima Militar de Industrias Mineras, Petrolíferas y de Gas – CAMIMPEG), placed under the Defense Ministry and authorized to operate across all stages of the extractive sector. That same year, the government launched the Orinoco Mining Arc (Arco Minero del Orinoco – AMO), a zone spanning more than 111,000 square kilometers that further consolidated military control over each step of the gold trade.
In the states of Bolívar, Amazonas, and Delta Amacuro — the epicenters of mining deposits — soldiers collect taxes known locally as vacunas, or vaccines, to allow access to the mines. Fuel, machinery, food, and other cargo transporters must also pay fees to move their goods along rivers and trails controlled by military units.
Beyond controlling corridors and access to the mines, higher-ranking officers also act as wholesalers, purchasing large volumes of gold and sending it abroad along clandestine routes into Colombia and Brazil. Much of the country’s contraband gold flow is controlled by military and other security forces, who may not transport the mineral flows themselves but collect payments from trafficking networks to let them move without interference.
With gold trading at about $165,000 per kilogram today, selling even a small amount can represent a large revenue stream.
“While a minister earns 5 kilograms of gold a month (around $825,000), a general earns 2 kilograms ($330,000),” an Indigenous leader from Amazonas told InSight Crime, withholding his name out of fear of political retaliation.
The military also maintains close relations with so-called mining sindicatos — local armed groups that control extraction areas and determine who can work and sell minerals in mining towns such as Tumeremo, Las Claritas, or El Callao in Bolívar.
In addition to the sindicatos, the FANB have forged operational arrangements with the National Liberation Army (Ejército de Liberación Nacional – ELN), a Colombian rebel group, in several parts of the state of Bolívar, where military units expel groups that refuse to pay and allow the guerrillas to seize control of mines. The ELN regulates rival actors, imposes order, and ensures uninterrupted extraction, while military commanders and political figures benefit from mining profits and additional muscle to help maintain control.
“The guerrillas and the army work together. They’re a dynamic duo. The army secures the mine or the operation, and the guerrilla handles the dirty work to push out the criminal groups that oppose the regime,” said Venezuelan opposition figure Américo de Grazia, who previously served as mayor of a mining municipality and as a congressman from Bolívar, and who was arbitrarily detained in 2024 and released in mid-2025.
Farther south, in Amazonas state, the military controls part of the gold economy in protected areas such as Yapacana National Park. Miners and Indigenous community members told InSight Crime that sergeants and lieutenants regulate the entry of machinery, set fuel and transport fees, and negotiate with armed groups operating in the region.
Although the army has led several mass eviction operations in recent years, Indigenous communities and environmental organizations say the criminal networks and corrupt structures behind the business have not only persisted but strengthened their foothold.
Multiple sources told InSight Crime that the military often warns miners in advance of anti-mining operations, allowing them to remove their dredges. The soldiers destroy a few machines for the cameras and then authorize their return.
But this model is not limited to gold. Security forces use their role as defenders of Venezuela’s borders to apply similar schemes in fuel smuggling, extortion, and other illicit economies, where they act as regulators, fee collectors, and informal protectors.
Patrolling the Border
Along Venezuela’s land and maritime borders, the military has become an intermediary in a contraband ecosystem that moves everything from drugs to gasoline, cattle, medicine, and other goods. Scattered bribery schemes that started a decade ago have evolved into a systemic corruption model.
The system functions like a pyramid: low-ranking soldiers operate roadside checkpoints and collect small tolls; mid-ranking officers coordinate safe routes and schedules; and senior commanders negotiate with external actors and receive payments tied to volume.
For more than a decade, gasoline smuggling was one of the main pillars of illicit financing for the military. Between 2003 and 2017, state subsidies made Venezuelan fuel the cheapest in the hemisphere, creating a highly profitable business for clandestine networks that moved large volumes into Colombia and Brazil with the complicity — and in many cases the supervision — of military units stationed along the border.
Beginning in 2015, the collapse of the oil industry transformed that system. Plummeting production and paralyzed refineries drastically reduced domestic supply. By 2020, Venezuela no longer produced enough gasoline to meet its own demand, and the traditional business ceased to be profitable. In some areas, the flow even reversed — fuel began entering Venezuela from Colombia.
With the decline of gasoline smuggling, military networks along the borders diversified their criminal portfolios. Food, medicine, livestock, and other high-volume goods replaced fuel as primary income sources. These flows rely on the complicity of military units that control border posts and decide which goods move forward, at what price, and in what quantity.
The mass exodus of millions of Venezuelans fleeing economic and political crises created fertile ground for soldiers stationed along the border to profit from migrant transit. GNB officials charge bribes to allow passage through informal corridors called trochas, reinforcing a system that persists even now, despite declining migration numbers.
The trochas have allowed migrants to bypass official checkpoints, where documentation requirements, long waits, or additional fees have often make legal crossings impossible. Their informal nature gives soldiers significant control, and units stationed near these trails charge migrants for each person who crosses and for each piece of luggage they carry.
The military’s presence in ports, highways, and border zones gives them power to authorize or block high-value shipments, offering another opportunity for illicit gain.
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For example, the nationalization of the scrap metal industry in 2021 created a system of permits and controls that was quickly captured by corrupt state actors, including senior military officers. Scrap metal traders told InSight Crime that high-ranking army officials charged for signing safe-conducts required to move shipments without risking seizure at checkpoints.
Venezuela has also become a hub in Latin America’s arms trafficking market, functioning as a source, transit zone, and destination for illegal weaponry – some of which has been traced back to the FANB, as soldiers sell ammunition and inventory for cash.
In January 2025, during a Colombian army operation, authorities seized weapons of various calibers whose origin was traced back to Venezuela’s armed forces. In October, a major police operation against the Red Command (Comando Vermelho) gang in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, uncovered two FN FAL rifles identified as FANB property.
Although the military’s illicit activities are largely decentralized, the expansion of corruption far beyond drug trafficking has given the armed forces stronger incentives to remain loyal to the regime in order to continue receiving protection for its broader and more lucrative portfolio. While desertion is rife, the opportunities for extra income through corruption make the military an attractive employer.
But at the heart of the corruption of the military, dating back to Hugo Chávez (president from 1999 until his death in 2013), has been the cocaine trade. And it solidified during the early years of the Chavista regime into what has become known as the Cartel of the Suns.