He remembers what he calls an unwelcome surprise on his first day in
July of 2013. His new boss was Venezuelan Ambassador Jonathan Velasco. The Ambassador handed him a special envelope, he said.
``He gave me an envelope full of visas and passports,''
Lopez recalled. ``He told me, `Get this, this is one million
U.S. dollars.' I thought it was like a joke. Then he told me
here people pay a lot of money to get a visa or a passport to
leave this country.''
Meaning Iraq. About a month later, Lopez said he realized it was no joke. An Iraqi employee of the Embassy who was hired to be an interpreter
told him that she, the interpreter, had made thousands of dollars
selling Venezuelan passports and visas and that he could make a lot of
money too. He says he told her it was wrong and he refused. The
employee pressed the issue, telling him that there were thousands of
dollars to be made, even discussing an offer to sell visas to 13
Syrians for $10,000 each. Lopez said that he was stunned when he found the document inside the
Embassy. It was a list of 21 Arabic names with corresponding Venezuelan
passport numbers and Venezuelan identification numbers. A Venezuelan
immigration official told CNN that a crosscheck of the passport numbers
indicated that the passports are valid and that those passports, given
to these people with the 21 Arabic names--when he ran the crosscheck,
they actually matched the names on the list Lopez found, meaning the
people on the list could be able to travel using those Venezuelan
passports. But here is what is incredible: A publicly available database in
Venezuela examined by CNN shows that 20 of the 21 identification
numbers of the people with the Arabic names that match the passports
are actually registered to people with Hispanic names, not the Arabic
names listed on the passports. So basically CNN has uncovered evidence that at least on 21
occasions, the Venezuelan Government--the Venezuelan Embassy has sold
passports to someone from the Middle East but assigned them a Hispanic
surname or a Hispanic name.
Keywords matched
immigration visa visas