Politics Venezuelan lawyer Moisés Maionica looked obedient, repentant, with the only hope that the US District Judge Joan Lenard decides to reduce the sentence for cooperating with the prosecution. Maionica returned on Thursday to sit on the bench at a trial court for six long hours to answer the questions made by attorneys Thomas Mulvihill and Edward Shohat.

Maionica summed up the suitcase scandal in one short statement. When Shohat, the leading defense lawyer of Venezuelan businessman Franklin Durán, asked Maionica: Do your conversations with the Director of Venezuela's intelligence service (Disip) and other officials deal with the fact that the government of Venezuela was going to help politically the Government of Argentina to bury the Antonini scandal?  Maionica replied:  "Yes." Guido Alejandro Antonini Wilson was the man found with the suitcase at a Buenos Aires airport.

Shohat questioned Maionica again: "From the beginning, your goal was that Antonini signed a power of attorney to the lawyer that would solve the problem in Argentina and, thanks to this strategy, the scandal in the media would be buried? Maonica answered again: "Yes". His responses to Durán's lawyer were much shorter than the answers to Thomas J. Mulvihill, an assistant United States attorney, whom he has been cooperating since last December, just days after his arrest in Florida with the rest of the defendants.

Considering the secret recordings made by the FBI cooperating witness and heard by the Miami jury, Maionica was the main link between Antonini and the Venezuelan government. He was the man that claimed in front of Antonini: "The Argentine Vice-Minister of Justice had met with Gen. Henry Rangel Silva, the head of Disip."

The next key meeting took place on December 4 in the Disip headquarters, between Rangel Silva (the officer allegedly appointed by Chávez to head the operation, as stated by the defendant), Maionica, Franklin Durán and his brother Pedro. "Rangel would say that a sale of equipments for the Disip had been made," stressed Maionica. He said that the Disip would be the agency in charge of giving USD 2 million in cash to Antonini.

Nohelia Sartre
EL UNIVERSAL