London – Tomorrow marks the start of the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), the most significant event for the American political right. The event is sponsored and organized by the American Conservative Union, led by Al Cárdenas, the head of the Republican Party in Florida. Unfortunately, the president of the ACU (pictured with his student Marco Rubio) is a key partner at the law firm Tew Cardenas, which represents one of the most corrupt business groups in Venezuela: Derwick Associates. What makes Cárdenas’s connection with the owners of Derwick Associates, Pedro Trebbau-López and Leopoldo Alejandro Betancourt-López, more than just limitless greed is his involvement in a significant, yet undefined, lawsuit against two of the most important figures in the Venezuelan opposition.
The targets of Tew Cardenas are the president and vice president of Venezuela’s leading free-market think tank, CEDICE-Libertad. These two men have spent the last 14 years fighting against the Chávez government’s slide into autocracy. One is a banker, Oscar García Mendoza, and the other is entrepreneur, Rafael Alfonzo.
In February, I sent this information to various U.S. media outlets. PJ Media and The Daily Caller responded, both interested in publishing the story. Unfortunately, after agreeing to publish the article detailing Cárdenas’s hypocrisy, both outlets backed out without explanation. I understand they may not want to get involved in legal disputes, but it still saddens me. Hopefully, CPAC attendees will have a chance to ask Al Cárdenas why his firm represents perhaps the most corrupt group of oligarchs to come out of Chávez’s Venezuela. When I began investigating this story, I uncovered another troubling fact: Cárdenas has done this before when he represented Ricardo Fernández Barrueco (both are in the photo above), another Chávez associate who went from parking cars to amassing a fortune of $1.6 billion in less than a decade.
Cárdenas, of course, has the right to earn a living representing criminals and scoundrels, but is it really kosher for the conservative movement to elevate him as its anointed leader while his firm pursues the beleaguered opposition in Venezuela?
Recently, Otto Reich, a former Bush appointee, co-authored (with Ezequiel Vázquez-Ger) a brilliant article in Cárdenas’s backyard, Miami, about Derwick Associates and their ongoing corruption. However, given Derwick’s tendency to threaten lawsuits against anyone who writes about them without permission, Reich wisely avoided mentioning Cárdenas or Derwick by name, instead writing:
“In Chávez’s Venezuela, however, a politically favored group (some with no previous experience in complex sectors like energy and finance) managed to accumulate, sometimes in just four years, fortunes that allowed them to purchase luxurious mansions in the U.S., expensive private jets and cars, exceptional racehorses, and more.”
Reich and Vázquez have bravely denounced the corruption on the right side of the aisle. The key question now is: will those at CPAC call for order within their ranks on this issue? As the Venezuelan opposition increasingly becomes the target of undefined attacks, the bullies at Derwick are celebrating weddings in the U.S. and lining the pockets of so-called beacons of the conservative movement.