A prominent sign stretches across two sides of a corner building at a small shopping center in Upata, Bolívar state, displaying the name Alibaba Gold Center C.A. This two-story edifice, located at the intersection of Ricaurte and Van Pragg streets in the capital of the Piar municipality, houses not just a branch of that enterprise but a whole chain of small businesses dedicated to gold buying and quality assessments of the metal. More than a town mall, this property acts as a virtual vacuum that sucks in and accumulates gold extracted from the jungle regions of this part of Venezuelan Guayana.
The ticket booths with polarized glass prevent any view inside the shops. In the narrow lobby, two clerks sit scrolling on their mobile phones. Without standing up from their plastic benches, they respond with a lack of enthusiasm that “the gram of gold is $90.” The manager of the neighboring business approaches a few customers with a little more energy, reminding them that the purity of the metal is also assessed on the upper floor. It’s late May 2025, and the lethargy of a midday work week prevails in the area.
However, the days here were not always so sluggish. Until 2023, the streets downtown, located 173 kilometers east of Ciudad Bolívar, the state capital, buzzed with chaos and the overlapping noise of cars, motorcycles, customers, and gold buyers known as “fishermen.” These individuals waved bundles of Brazilian reais and bolivars in the street, shouting a litany: “I buy gold, I buy gold!”
With the push of the Orinoco Mining Arc, a megaproject decreed by Nicolás Maduro in 2016, the extraction and small-scale commercialization of minerals became the most flourishing activity in a region traditionally known for cattle ranching and agriculture, also recognized for timber exploitation and the production of white cheeses, including the popular Guayanese cheese, which is essentially a designation of origin in practice.
Similar to one of the tales from One Thousand and One Nights, where a poor woodcutter claims the den where 40 thieves hide stolen treasure, the name Alibaba Gold Center conceals not just the facade of a building but also a large-scale illegal marketing and money laundering operation involving Brazil and Venezuela. This operation was uncovered by the Brazilian Federal Police and executed by a criminal organization comprised of a dozen Venezuelans (at least two of whom are from Upata), 14 shell companies, and a wealthy sum of 4,362.4 million Brazilian reais, equivalent to 771.61 million dollars, transacted between February 2023 and March 2024, according to judicial documents of the case.
The criminal investigation initiated in 2023 by the Brazilian Federal Police and the Public Ministry regarding the illegal commercialization of gold and money laundering reveals that Alibaba Gold Center, registered in Ciudad Guayana—Bolívar’s industrial and commercial city located 55 kilometers west of Upata— and headquartered in Tumeremo, 120 kilometers southeast, is one of 13 companies, and the only one in Venezuela, that served ad hoc for the trafficking and laundering of gold sourced from Brazil.
Upata, the gateway to the Mining Arc, sheltered the gold rush under the administration of Yulisbeth Josefina García González, known as La Tata, who served as mayor of Piar municipality from 2017 to 2025. The projection that her administration provided, in conjunction with the informal trade of the precious metal, offered her political benefits: in May, she was elected as the first female governor of Bolívar state—Venezuela’s largest and one of its richest states—for the 2025-2029 term, a position she assumed in June during a ceremony attended by Nicolás Maduro himself.
The controversial career of La Tata in local government was propelled from Upata, where she won the mayoralty exactly a year after Maduro’s decree formalizing the creation of the National Strategic Development Zone, the Orinoco Mining Arc.
Humble Origins, Golden Destiny
As of May 2025, most inhabitants of the vast Bolívar state were unfamiliar with the name Yulisbeth Josefina García González. Just three months later, she became the most powerful person in the region.
Indeed, her first name may have seemed foreign and unknown, but not the nickname that Yulisbeth García has carried since childhood and for which she became famous, and, at times, feared: La Tata.
The governing United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV), which reserved big plans for her, saw in her a disruptive leadership very functional to governmental interests. Her unwavering commitment to Hugo Chávez’s memory and Nicolás Maduro’s policies, coupled with her energetic influence over the local population, marked her as a natural leader, characterized by her strong rhetoric and perceived by her supporters as diligent and decisive. A quintessential chavista profile.
García’s origins, born in 1979, are rooted in El Pao, a small town rich in iron and the second most important in the Piar municipality, after Upata.
Coming from “a very humble household,” as described by a dissident source from chavismo in Bolívar state, her early years played a crucial role in shaping her sense of solidarity.
“She is a girl from a close-knit family. It’s not that she suffered abandonment or felt rejected, no, she comes from a very humble family but her father, mother, and siblings were always very united,” confides another source who worked alongside the former governor Francisco Rangel Gómez, a retired general close to Hugo Chávez and also a PSUV member.
Rangel Gómez served as the governor of Bolívar state for three terms, from 2004 to 2017, and left power after successfully plotting an electoral fraud against the opposition candidate Andrés Velásquez, which was validated by the PSUV-dominated National Electoral Council (CNE). After the debacle, the PSUV appointed another general, this time of the National Guard, Justo Noguera Pietri, as governor, and Rangel Gómez, facing diminished leadership, had to go into a golden exile in Mexico. But he never stopped supporting La Tata.
‘Manu militari’
Though she held no public offices or positions within party bureaucracy, Yulisbeth García stood out as a community leader. During this period, ex-governor Rangel Gómez identified her as a potential asset for the PSUV.
“In the nascent PSUV bases, she was a woman who won over the Upata sectors that she actively engaged with. Well, she was very close to the governor’s team. She had the gift of mobilizing people, delivering a message that resonates, telling them what they wanted to hear. She earned her political standing in Upata,” remembers the source close to Rangel Gómez.
Government reports in the official press note that in 2014, García was elected as a delegate to the PSUV National Congress. Later, she became the regional head of the government food distribution program Mercal. The then-Minister of Food and future governor of Aragua state, General Rodolfo Marco Torres, who was sanctioned in 2018 by the U.S. Treasury Department, praised García González’s work.
La Tata’s rising star shifted the leadership in Upata from ex-mayor Gustavo Muñiz (2008-2013), who seemed to enjoy firm support within the PSUV.
“In fact, she has said it in her speeches: she was the one handing out papers to the governor; referring to the notes from the people to communicate issues [to the governor]. The aides of Rangel Gómez would later receive them, and they always had to be analyzed. She was in charge of that,” the privileged source continues. La Tata earned the general’s trust, who tasked her with planning his official visits to Upata. Often, ex-mayor Muñiz wasn’t even informed of these visits. Everything went through García, highlighting both Muñiz’s decline and the favor that La Tata was gaining in Bolívar City, the state capital. “Indeed, she was the one coordinating the governor’s visits to Upata. It was common to call La Tata, even parallel to the [sic] chavista mayor. She was just a simple militant. But she was always in the active militia,” she emphasizes.
With these credentials, García climbed the ranks and gained prominence. “She would tell Rangel Gómez that he was her boss, and he would always call her Tata with complete trust. She has claimed that Rangel is her political father. She has said this many times.” The political and almost familial relationship between Francisco Rangel Gómez and Yulisbeth García grew so close that the general, during his voluntary exile in Mexico, which began after leaving the governorship in 2017, continued to enthusiastically promote the campaign of the current governor.
As mayor, García made it clear that her administration was distinctly chavista and engaged in mobilizing grassroots groups. A trophy that she garnered in her role as commander of regional cells and manager of violence was the attack faced by opposition leader María Corina Machado in Upata, who was met with stones, sticks, insults, and even theft upon arriving during a tour of the city in October 2018.
In a statement at the time, Vente Venezuela, Machado’s political group, denounced that the mayor had directed the attack: “This act, executed by violent groups under the direction of the municipality’s mayor, Yulisbeth García, known as La Tata, is proof that we are facing a mafia and criminal state willing to go to any length.”
That same year, a local leader from Machado’s party, Octavio Robles, was arrested by the Bolivarian National Guard (GNB). The Vente Venezuela activist had been making allegations against “the gold mafias from Upata to the south”, and attributed the campaign of discredit and intimidation that he faced to his criticisms of the mayor of Piar.
The episode from 2024, when García ordered the detention of protesters who took to the streets of Piar municipality to protest the fraud in the presidential elections on July 28 of that year, during which the victory of opposition candidate Edmundo González Urrutia was disavowed, also became well-known.
Three consulted sources state that La Tata was in charge of that repressive operation. “She has been a pursuer of people who protest, of the opposition. After July 28, she personally pointed out individuals she wanted to send to La Pica [a notorious prison in Monagas state], to the worst dungeons. I’ve heard that the police ultimately released those individuals through economic agreements with their families,” insists one of the sources.
Terror Pays
Meanwhile, García allowed the gold trade to flourish, which allegedly rewarded her in return.
Américo De Grazia, former mayor of Piar, ex-deputy of the National Assembly, and former gubernatorial candidate for Bolívar, currently detained as a political prisoner, was among the first to point to García as the ultimate owner of the mine La Justicia, located just south of Upata.
This version is supported by another source who spoke with Armando.info for this article under the condition that their identity would not be revealed. According to this person, García ordered the seizure of this mine, considered one of the best in Bolívar state, as a vein of gold estimated to be 70 meters wide and three kilometers long runs through it, claims another source in the village.
“This mine,” continues the source, “was invaded from a family that had made it productive with agricultural activity. But she and a company named Berakah took over the mine, and there’s been no way to move them out.” The legal battle fought by the mine’s heirs has yielded no results.
In Upata, illegal gold mining and trafficking have overlapped with the traditional agricultural economy, although there are no reliable statistical reports to certify this. Despite the robust growth of the sector, as unregulated as it is vigorous, Piar’s capital lacks an independent chamber of commerce or mining, or any similar association to group businesses related to gold activities, which can be found in other towns with centuries-old mining cultures like El Callao and Tumeremo. The existing Chamber of Commerce and Industries in Piar is co-opted by García, to the extent that its representatives openly participated in her recent campaign for governorship.
In Upata, there is no regulation for the gold sector, which is somewhat surprising and even irregular since it concerns a “strategic material” that, within the context of the Mining Arc, is subject to rigid state controls.
Shortly after assuming her mayorship in 2018, La Tata enacted a decree intended to prevent the proliferation of gold buying and selling businesses. “Everyone knows they are illegal,” Yulisbeth García responded that same year to inquiries from reporters from Runrunes and Connectas about the small shops that were occupying whole blocks of the city, “I told them, ‘Stop, no more spaces for gold buying here.'”
However, that was either a mere facade or García changed her mind along the way, as evidenced by the boom in the informal gold trading sector that, in practical terms, invaded the streets right under everyone’s noses.
In contrast, Yulisbeth García, during her tenure as mayor of Piar, was quick to impose regulations on other lucrative commercial activities, such as an ordinance for the authorization of alcohol sales and their taxation. With similar diligence, she banned in 2018 the cash and sale of cash in bolivars and dollars in the city center.
Although Piar municipality falls within the borders of the Mining Arc, which theoretically promotes gold activities, it remains an underground economy. Not literally because some deposits require excavation, but because those engaged in this activity, especially on a small scale, prefer to keep a low profile and avoid attracting attention.
The greed for gold drives them to adopt a different dynamic than that of any other mineral, however valuable it may be. This dynamic is reflected at institutional levels: for instance, in May 2024, the Maduro regime announced the commencement of bauxite mining in the Piar municipality, a mineral essential for the global aluminum production industry. Yet nothing similar occurred regarding a couple of veins of gold, both southwest of Upata and towards the Guri Reservoir: the first, just a few kilometers from the Santa María settlement, and the other near the El Manteco road. In such cases, word spreads through the gold mining basin of Piar, prompting many—individuals, state officials, or corporations—to embark on a race where the only certainty is that whoever arrives first will benefit. But most are left with unmet desires.
Don’t Mess With Our Girl
It didn’t take long for rumors to spread around Upata that Yulisbeth García had reached an agreement with gold buyers, collecting a fee from them in exchange for allowing them to continue operating, akin to a tax or payment.
Early in her mandate, García had to deal with countering the rumor: “I can shut down any shop because I have no commitments to any of them.” However, she acknowledged that she wouldn’t close these places “aggressively” because “they were all already built.”
This, however, didn’t stop the whispers. Alongside her well-earned reputation as a contentious militant, rumors of collusion with mining persisted, peaking in 2020 when ex-deputy Américo De Grazia labeled the then-mayor and future governor in a tweet (now X) as the head of “a real criminal organization“, in which “the hitmen operate and handle the gold sales run by pranes,” referring to gang leaders who control mining areas in southern Bolívar.
Then, in March 2023, the same opposition leader re-linked La Tata with the illicit business. He hinted in a tweet that she was sharing ownership of a gold mill at the El Muertico mine near Guasipati with then-governor of Bolívar, Ángel Marcano, and the then-mayor of Roscio municipality, Wihelm Torrellas. De Grazia asserted that the officials claimed 50% of the operation’s profits while allocating 20% to the state-run Venezuelan Mining Corporation, and the remaining 30% to the local miner.
The reaction to De Grazia’s repeated allegations eventually landed him behind bars at the end of 2024. Diosdado Cabello, traditionally seen as the number two in chavismo and now Minister of Interior, Justice, and Peace and Secretary-General of the PSUV, announced that the opposition leader, who had been missing for days, was captured by security forces upon returning to his native region after two years of forced exile. He accused De Grazia of being involved, along with Carlos Chancellor—former mayor of the similarly mining municipality of Sifontes—in a supposed conspiracy to assassinate La Tata. The lawmaker’s family quickly refuted the accusations, stating that “the allegations are obviously false and there is no evidence to support otherwise.” While Chancellor was recently released in July, De Grazia’s name continues to appear in the regime’s lists of political prisoners.
Cabello’s determination to imprison De Grazia, under the pretext of protecting Yulisbeth García, may have foreshadowed what the ruling party had in store for her: the nomination as governor of Bolívar state. Vice President Delcy Rodríguez, the “godmother” of the Mining Arc, raised her hand during the election campaign. Additionally, Héctor Rodríguez, Minister of Education, has visited Bolívar state to show his support for her. Nicolás Maduro demonstrated his backing during the election campaign and her proclamation as the new governor. Diosdado Cabello has also visited her multiple times and even took the opportunity to broadcast from Piar his weekly television program, Con el mazo dando.
The Armando Info and Mongabay Latam team reached out to Yulisbeth García via email for her version. However, as of the publication date, she had not responded.
A Picture is Worth More Than Gold
During one of her visits to Upata on a Thursday afternoon, reporters noticed a group of children playing with a ball in front of an advertisement for Alibaba Gold Center C.A., painted on the white walls of the Bicentennial Park, the sports complex in Upata managed by the Piar Mayor’s Office.
Next to the company’s announcement was the logo featuring the name of the mayor herself, Yulisbeth La Tata García. Ignoring the national administrative provision enacted in July 2013, the company billboard lacked the corresponding Tax Identification Number (RIF). “Of course, anyone who wants to advertise their business here has to coordinate with the Mayor’s Office. They have their rates,” commented a vendor from a nearby snack kiosk. According to his testimony, the municipal collection entity imposes a fee of $10 per month per billboard or sign.
This anecdotal image illustrates what transpired during García’s tenure in Piar: the normalization of companies like Alibaba Gold Center that sidestep the controls and regulations that the state itself demands for gold businesses.
The advertisement also led to an iconic photo from García’s administration, in which she, while greeting the crowd filling the stands, appeared flanked by the Alibaba Gold Center billboard. To a malicious eye, the photo could be seen as an endorsement where it was unclear who was sponsoring whom: the brand or the official?
This, and no other, is the tangible legacy of Yulisbeth García, La Tata, during her time in Upata: a sign of the advancing mining influence, from the jungle extremes of the south to the regional power’s headquarters.
