Scenarios for El Aissami's Future

On Monday, 20 March 2023, Venezuela’s oil minister resigned over Twitter. The resignation ended Tareck El Aissami’s long and storied career as a Venezuelan public official, but it has not ended his relationship with the Maduro regime. At least not yet.

Mr. El Aissami’s resignation surfaced in the wake of a much more aggressive Maduro move on 17 March to arrest Joselit Ramírez, the former head of Venezuela’s cryptocurrency agency, the National Superintendency of Crypto Assets and Related Activities (SUNACRIP). Ramírez’s arrest triggered an anti-corruption dragnet that saw him and many of the management staff at SUNACRIP rolled up in one anti-corruption sweep. Many have referred to Ramírez as El Aissami’s “right hand man”.

Today, three days after El Aissami’s resignation, the dust has yet to settle. As we wait for the other shoe to drop, I spoke this morning with a Southern Pulse Venezuela analyst, who is Venezuelan, still lives there, and is old enough to remember when El Aissami was a student leader at University of Los Andes, where he met Adán Chávez, the brother of former president and Maduro king-maker, Hugo Chávez.

We see three scenarios, based on how El Aissami will “land” now that he has left the public-facing side of the Maduro regime.

The soft landing sees El Aissami no longer a public-facing official but very much an engaged operator. Given Maduro’s public reception of El Aissami’s Twitter resignation, calling him a “true revolutionary”, it’s safe to conclude that, today, this soft landing scenario is the most likely. But we suspect it will not last.

The hard landing sees Al Aissami arrested and removed from the game all together. The calculus here is that he knows too much. Trust between the El Aissami camp and other power brokers within the Maduro regime has eroded over the past few years. It is possible that El Aissami’s enemies within the regime convince Maduro that the man needs to go. But we think that El Aissami is too connected, too informed to let that happen. If the pressure ratchets up, he may push the red button. The hard landing is a possible scenario, but currently not likely.

The “red button” scenario is the wild card here, but it’s not too far fetched. It sees the former Maduro insider reach out to cut a deal with the US government. We’ve seen it before. We know the USG can be powerfully persuasive. There is a USD10MM reward on his head, one that El Aissami would likely love to remove before moving on with his life after his decades-long run as a Venezuelan political power broker. As one DC analyst told the Financial Times, “he knows where the bodies are buried.” This is true. It is a fact that works for and against the former oil minister. And it could be a powerful negotiation tool to reduce his sentence and cut a deal for a relatively comfortable prison sentence.?

As our friends at Caracas Chronicles stated earlier this week, we’re all still in a wait and see posture. I expect the Southern Pulse team will share more once we have a clearer view of which scenario looks most likely in the mid- to longer-term.