The life and wealth of Pedro Luis Martín, alleged cartel player, spy and Venezuelan bogeyman

Not many in Venezuela know his name, but those who do don’t like talking about him openly. He is Pedro Luis Martín Olivares, a former intelligence officer accused by witnesses and alleged victims of running a kidnapping and extortion racket for years. Operating out of a secluded penthouse in a luxury Caracas hotel, he is now believed to run one of the main branches of the Cartel of the Suns drug organization, in partnership with high-ranking Venezuelan officials.

On April 24, 2015, he was indicted in the Southern District of Florida for distribution of more than five kilograms of cocaine, knowing that such controlled substance would be imported into the United States. And yet he remains free to do as he pleases.

The United States is offering a $10 million reward for his arrest — more even than for the sons of infamous Mexican cartel boss Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán. The U.S. government has also sanctioned his commercial interests, which span private security, surveillance and poultry farming.

Despite the high-level charges and the power he wields, Martín, 55, has managed to keep a low profile, even as his family has accrued substantial assets abroad.

Now, the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project and the Miami Herald, in partnership with Armando.info and Infolibre, have traced part of Martín’s fortune to Barcelona, Spain, where his relatives have acquired luxury apartments in one of the city’s most expensive districts. Two of them are unknown to Spanish investigators who looked into Martín’s assets in the country.

Drawing on court documents, investigation files, company and property records and interviews, reporters also uncovered new details about the former intelligence official’s life.

Martín is one of more than a dozen Venezuelan officials and businessmen close to the Caracas socialist regime who are facing charges in South Florida for money laundering, corruption or drug trafficking. Years of operating without checks and balances have allowed corrupt officials to siphon billions of dollars out of the state’s treasury and benefit from the operations of drug traffickers allied with or working for high-ranking military and regime officials. Experts claim that a great deal of that illicit wealth has flowed to South Florida, inflating the local real estate market.

Ivan Simonovis, a former police commissioner and criminal investigator in Venezuela, said that Martín had “held a lot of power and did a lot of damage to many people” over the years, although his influence had recently declined.

Of six people interviewed, only Simonovis agreed to be quoted by name. The others would speak only under condition of anonymity, fearing retribution. Reporters have also reached out to Martín and his family members but so far they have not been willing to comment.

Beyond the fact that Martín was born in 1967 in Caracas, there is little public record of his early years.

In a rare interview with the Spanish website of the pan-Arab TV network Al-Mayadeen in October 2020 — published six days after the U.S. reward for him was announced — Martín described himself as a “lawyer and economist.”

Simonovis, a former political prisoner under the Caracas regime who later became chief intelligence advisor to opposition leader Juan Guaidó — recognized by the United States as the legitimate president of Venezuela — said that Martín got involved in drug trafficking and money-laundering activities in the 1990s, years before socialist president Hugo Chávez got elected.

He later began cooperating with Venezuelan authorities to avoid prosecution, helping set up several “controlled deliveries” — drug sales carried out with the knowledge of Venezuelan law enforcement to capture other traffickers.

After Chávez became president in 1999, Martín was appointed to the city’s anti-drug office, apparently leveraging connections he had built in the police force, Simonovis said. In 2002, Martín became director of financial intelligence in the Venezuelan secret services — the General Sectoral Directorate of Intelligence and Prevention Services, known then as DISIP and later renamed the Bolivarian National Intelligence Service, or SEBIN.

Four different sources, including Simonovis, said he then started to run a “parallel office” out of Centro Lido, a business and commercial center in Caracas, while he was at the DISIP. He and his associates used informants and wiretaps to obtain compromising information on wealthy or powerful figures, fabricated criminal files and demanded money to bury the information and stop the harassment, they said.

A wealthy Venezuelan who spent years in jail said Martín also used to visit the prison and offer “favors,” such as access to the rooftop, computers, or distance learning courses, in exchange for payments.

Eventually, Martín’s power had grown enough that he began to blackmail figures within the Chávez power structure. “That was the straw that broke the camel’s back,” Simonovis said.

A former military official and a person who knew Martín’s family confirmed this account, saying Martín was removed from his post after trying to extort someone close to Chávez.

‘You Never Abandon Intelligence’

Martín left the DISIP in 2004, but he apparently maintained a connection to the intelligence community. In the interview with Al-Mayadeen in 2020, he said that he still “handles information” despite formally departing the intelligence agency.

“You never abandon intelligence, you always keep getting information,” he said.

Simonovis and the wealthy Venezuelan who had been imprisoned said Martín kept managing his “parallel office” out of Centro Lido, where he now also began to run a commercial empire: After leaving DISIP, Martín founded at least five companies, spanning sectors such as security, private surveillance, transport for valuables, and even a poultry farm.

Details of these companies’ operations show that Martín remained well-connected even after leaving his official post.

Company records show that his private security firm, Grupo Control 2004, won contracts from major state-run institutions, including the state bank Bicentenario, the Maracaibo airport and Minerven, a major mining company.

Another of his companies, PLM Consultores, provided “advisory services in institutional relations” to 11 companies linked to Omar Farías, a businessman known in Venezuela as the “Insurance Czar” because he won major insurance contracts from public institutions, allowing him to amass a fortune under Chávez.

In 2010, Martín surfaced in a classified U.S. State Department cable, published by WikiLeaks, detailing an alleged Venezuelan intelligence agency plot to assassinate then-Panamanian President Ricardo Martinelli. The cable did not provide any reasons Venezuela’s government would want to carry out such an assassination, but it did link Martín to the Chávez regime — six years after he left his post with the intelligence service.

“While no evidence of any plot was found, the law enforcement team found significant derogatory information on Pedro Ruiz [sic] Martín Olivares,” said the cable issued by the U.S. Embassy in Panama, which described him as a “seriously bad actor.”

Around the same time, a joint anti-narcotics operation carried out by authorities in the United States and British Virgin Islands would have profound consequences for Martín.

Luxury Apartment

The Spanish security agency began investigating Martín in 2014 over his alleged drug trafficking and high-level Chávez government connections. Calling him “Platanote,” or “The Big Plantain,” they started probing his assets in Spain.

One of their targets for surveillance was a Barcelona apartment Martín bought in 2003. Currently worth around $200,000, the fourth-floor apartment is in a working-class neighborhood.

When reporters visited in June, they found the mailbox had no name on it, although a neighbor said they could often see “movement in the shutters,” indicating it was occupied.

OCCRP was also able to identify two other, more valuable Barcelona properties unknown to Spanish authorities, together worth around $2.5 million, according to company documents. Both are located in a 1950s-era former bank building in the city’s “Golden Mile,” a strip of high-end property in the city center.

Both properties are owned by Urdanbest SL, a Spanish company in which Martín’s wife, Alejandra Besteiro, his son Pedro Luis Martín Besteiro, and his stepson Orlando Urdaneta Besteiro appear as directors.

Urdanbest is located in a luxurious office in one of Madrid’s most expensive neighborhoods.

Drug Charges

In 2010, police arrested three men who were waiting in a boat to retrieve a package dropped in the waters of the Virgin Islands by a plane from Venezuela.. Inside, they found more than 261 kilograms of cocaine.

Authorities linked the shipment to Colombian drug trafficker Roberto Mendez Hurtado, also known as “Pluma Blanca,” from the Norte del Valle cartel. In 2013, Colombia extradited Mendez and he was accused of organizing cocaine shipments from Venezuela to Central America and the Caribbean. After pleading guilty and receiving a 19-year sentence from a federal judge in Miami, Mendez was released early this year.

According to U.S. authorities, Mendez had several high-ranking Venezuelan officials on his payroll, including Martín, who allegedly helped coordinate cocaine shipments from his position in the DISIP and distributed bribes to Venezuelan officials. He also allegedly made sure radars were turned off to allow planes loaded with cocaine to pass through Venezuelan airspace.

Martín was close to Hugo “El Pollo” Carvajal, a former Venezuelan military intelligence chief who was once in Chávez’s inner circle, according to a prosecution source.

According to U.S. authorities, Carvajal, Martín, and other top Venezuelan officers were allegedly part of the “Cartel of the Suns” drug-trafficking organization embedded within the country’s military and led by high-ranking officials with the regime of President Nicolás Maduro, who succeeded Chávez after the latter died. After two years on the run, Carvajal was captured in Spain in 2021 and is awaiting extradition to the United States.

The United States indicted Martín on drug trafficking charges in 2015. Three years later, the Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) sanctioned his companies, saying that Martín had “exploited his government position and accepted bribes from drug traffickers operating in Venezuela and Colombia as part of a broader scheme to facilitate the movement of narcotics from and through Venezuelan airspace.”

In 2018 OFAC also mentioned Martín in its sanctions against Diosdado Cabello, one of Venezuela’s most powerful politicians, claiming the two “worked together to move illicit money to Panama, the Dominican Republic and the Bahamas in late 2016.”

Early in 2020, the Department of Justice charged Cabello and Maduro with drug trafficking, accusing them of heading the Cartel of the Suns and turning Venezuela into a narco-state. Around a dozen other high-ranking government officials were also indicted on the same charges.

In his interview with Al-Mayadeen, Martín dismissed the charges against him, saying that Mendez was offering false information to reduce his own sentence.

U.S. authorities “put people in prison who don’t even know you,” he said. “They tell them that they have to testify against you in order to reduce their convictions.” He said the OFAC sanctions had been merely a way to “blackmail and pressure” him to turn against senior Chávez government figures.

According to Venezuelan and U.S. sources tracking down the activities of the Venezuelan cartel, Martín works closely with also-indicted Venezuelan trafficker Carlos Orense Azocar, who was extradited in late June from Italy to New York to face charges that carry a maximum sentence of up to 30 years in prison.

People linked to the investigations said that Orense and Martín had worked initially with also-charged “El Pollo” Carvajal, the spy chief, who was arrested in Spain and is fighting extradition.

According to U.S. court transcripts, Martín turned himself in to Venezuelan authorities after an Interpol “red notice” was issued against him, a fact his lawyer in the United States used to argue that he could not be considered a fugitive.

U.S. prosecutors reject this argument, claiming that Martín had turned himself in because he knew Venezuela would not send him to the United States. When the Venezuelans approached U.S. authorities to ask if they wanted to file paperwork to have Martín extradited, they declined.

Martín was not detained and was freed to go about his business.

“We know well and good that there’s a constitutional prohibition in Venezuela from Venezuela extraditing its own citizens,” said Adam Fels, assistant U.S. attorney at the time. “So why even bother?”