Time: Chávez and the Cash-Filled Suitcase

[Zorro]

Sitting in a Florida steakhouse a year ago this month, millionaire Venezuelan oilman Frank Duran allegedly gave his friend Guido Antonini Wilson a dark warning. "A moment might come," Duran said, "when nobody can save Antonini's skin."

Antonini, a Venezuelan businessman with U.S. citizenship, was indeed in a jam. A month earlier, he'd arrived in Buenos Aires on a chartered flight with Argentine energy officials and executives of Venezuela's state-run oil company, Petroleos de Venezuela (PDVSA). Argentine customs agents then caught him with a suitcase stuffed with $800,000 in cash. Antonini was allowed to return to the U.S. — but it seemed the entire hemisphere wanted to know if he'd been carrying the money for Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez as some sort of bribe for the Argentine government.

Today, however, it's Duran whose legal skin that needs saving. Last December he and four other men, three Venezuelans and an Uruguayan, were charged in Miami with failing to register as foreign government agents. U.S. prosecutors say the men, at the behest of "high-level" Venezuelan government officials, cajoled and even threatened Antonini to keep mum about the real purpose of all that cash: an illegal contribution from Venezuela to the presidential campaign of then Argentine Senator and First Lady Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner, a Chavez ally. One of the men, Moises Maionica, pleaded guilty in January; one is at large and another — Carlos Kauffman, a close Duran pal — pleaded guilty in March, leaving Duran all but alone to face trial in Miami that began this week.

Both backers and critics of Chavez say the radical left-wing Venezuelan President is tacitly on trial himself. It's no secret that Chavez, who controls the hemisphere's largest oil reserves, lavishes billions of dollars in foreign aid on allies to promote his anti-U.S. Bolivarian Revolution. Foes have long groused that his largesse can also be as shadowy as the covert U.S. operations Chavez accuses agencies like the CIA of perpetrating. They contend that he has funneled cash to leftist candidates in presidential races from Bolivia to Mexico, and that he has helped fund Marxist guerrillas like the FARC in Colombia. Chavez has just as adamantly denied those charges, as have his supposed beneficiaries...

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