Documentary Unveils Corruption in Maduro’s Venezuela
“A Dangerous Assignment“
HAVANA TIMES – We bring you the full-length documentary film just released: A Dangerous Assignment: Uncovering Corruption in Maduro’s Venezuela. The film is mostly in Spanish with English subtitles.
PBS FRONTLINE and the Venezuelan news outlet ARMANDO INFO. investigate Alex Saab, a shadowy figure at the heart of a corruption scandal spanning from Venezuela to the US, and explore what has happened to the journalists who helped uncover the scandal.
In 2016, as Venezuela was in economic freefall, President Nicolás Maduro’s government responded with the CLAP program: a domestic aid initiative that was billed as providing high-quality, essential food items to Venezuelans impacted by the economic crisis. But as the FRONTLINE and Armando.info documentary shows, complaints about powdered milk in the CLAP boxes soon caught the attention of a team of journalists. Armando.info requested a chemical analysis of a few of the milk products, and a researcher they consulted noted some were so deficient in calcium and high in sodium they couldn’t be classified as milk at all.
Armando.info’s investigative journalist Roberto Deniz and his colleagues also uncovered that the CLAP initiative itself was enriching Saab, the biggest contractor for the food program and a close associate of Maduro’s. The Armando.info journalists’ reporting helped expose a vast corruption scandal, which ultimately made them targets of the Maduro government. Facing threats, harassment and possible jail time, Deniz made the difficult decision to flee Venezuela, and continued to follow the story from exile in Colombia.
As governments across the globe crack down on a free press and journalists face increased intimidation, “A Dangerous Assignment” is a stunning look at the price of journalism in Venezuela.
“A Dangerous Assignment: Uncovering Corruption in Maduro’s Venezuela” is an Assignment Film production for GBH/FRONTLINE in association with Armando.info. The director is Juan Ravell. The producer is Jeff Arak. The reporter is Roberto Deniz. The executive producer for Armando.info is Ewald Scharfenberg. The editor-in-chief and executive producer of FRONTLINE is Raney Aronson-Rath.