In a major law enforcement operation targeting cross-border corruption tied to Venezuelan public programs, Colombian national Álvaro Pulido — a man long sought by U.S. authorities for mass money laundering linked to Venezuelan government bribery plots — has been taken into custody in the United States.
The U.S. Department of Justice confirmed that the 62-year-old suspect was arrested on Sunday during an operation carried out by a Homeland Security Task Force. Officials have not yet released additional details surrounding how Pulido came to be in U.S. custody, leaving key procedural questions unanswered for the time being. Prior to this arrest, Pulido had been imprisoned in Venezuela starting in March 2023, where he faced local charges of siphoning profits from the country’s state-owned oil giant, PDVSA.
For years, U.S. law enforcement has prioritized locating Pulido: both the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) and the State Department offered a combined $10 million reward for information that would lead to his capture. Per an official statement from the U.S. Attorney’s Office, Pulido is scheduled to make his first court appearance on Tuesday.
Pulido’s apprehension comes just two months after another high-profile Colombian businessman with deep ties to the Venezuelan government, Alex Saab, entered a guilty plea on money laundering charges in a U.S. federal court. According to U.S. federal prosecutors, Pulido faces charges in two separate indictments that together accuse him of laundering more than $2 billion connected to bribery schemes within the Venezuelan government.
Prosecutors allege that Pulido and four additional co-defendants paid bribes to high-ranking Venezuelan government officials to win public contracts for the delivery of food and medicine to low-income Venezuelans. Once the contracts were secured, the group drastically overcharged the Venezuelan government for the goods, then funneled and laundered the illicit profits through overseas bank accounts, including multiple accounts held within the United States.
Investigators further claim that Pulido collaborated directly with Saab to launder $350 million from a separate bribery scheme centered on Venezuela’s currency exchange system, with the funds moving through bank accounts based in Florida.
Until earlier this year, Saab held significant influence within Venezuelan politics, with close personal ties to former Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro, who appointed Saab as industry minister in 2024. That position of power collapsed abruptly in January, when Maduro was captured by U.S. forces during a raid on the capital Caracas and transferred to New York to face trial on narcotics trafficking charges.
Within two weeks of Maduro’s capture, the new U.S.-backed interim government of Venezuela removed Saab from his ministerial post, and extradited him to the United States in May. Just last month, Saab formally pleaded guilty to the money laundering charges against him, setting the stage for the next chapter in the broader federal investigation into corruption tied to former Venezuelan government officials.