Rodolfo Marco TorresVenezuela’s legacy as one of the wealthiest and most-stable democracies in the region began to change on Feb. 4, 1992, when Chávez, then a disaffected army officer, led a failed coup attempt. Once out of prison, he rose to fame and was elected president in 1998 on an anti-establishment platform.
Despite his official designation as a director, Jiménez says he “personally never worked with Mission Identity” and that the directorate had “no decision-making authority.” He resigned from the Interior Ministry after about a year and a half, “due to frustration with the government’s unwillingness to fairly and justly apply the rule of law.
In October 2006, at the peak of his career in the Chávez regime, Jiménez also started an import-export food company in Venezuela, Agropecuario Ravigg C.A. It imported food to Venezuela from Brazil, Argentina and other countries, generating a net profit of 8,897,246 bolívares in 2013, according to the Registry of National Contractors . Ravigg shipments from January to May of 2014 alone totaled $7.9 million in value, according to Venezuela’s National Center for Foreign Commerce .
In an email, Jiménez says no funds from Rialfi were invested in Rimas and notes that with the “year-to-year devaluation of the bolívar, those proceeds would have had very little value if they were ever converted to dollars.” He made his first foray into the music industry in Caracas in 2011, when he started managing and fundingLos de la Nazza