Albanisa: The Anatomy of a Heist
There are robberies that, due to their magnitude, cease to be common crimes and become chapters in the history of a continent. The case of Albanisa — Alba de Nicaragua, S.A. — belongs to that sinister category. It is not a minor episode of embezzlement, the kind that fills the judicial chronicles of any poor country in the global South. It is one of the largest and most brazen money laundering schemes in the history of Latin America, carried out with the active complicity of a family dictatorship that turned an entire country into a laundry at the service of Chavismo. And what we are witnessing today — surgical arrests, internal purges, calculated silences — is not justice: it is cosmetic surgery on a gangrenous wound.
