Pedro Luis Martin Olivares is a former Venezuelan intelligence chief wanted in the U.S. for drug trafficking. His family has managed to acquire millions of dollars’ worth of property in Spain.

Key Findings

• The family of Pedro Luis Martin Olivares, a former intelligence officer and alleged drug trafficker sanctioned by the U.S., has acquired luxury apartments in Barcelona.
• The apartments, located in one of the city’s most expensive districts, are worth around 2.5 million euros.
• They were purchased while Martin was in the sights of U.S. officials for alleged involvement in the Cartel of the Suns, a drug trafficking group embedded in the Veneuzelan military.

Pedro Luis Martín Olivares is little known in his native Venezuela, nor does his name appear on international “most wanted” lists. Yet 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.

Martin, a high-ranking intelligence officer under former President Hugo Chávez, was indicted by a Florida court on drug trafficking charges in 2015. The U.S. has sanctioned his commercial interests, which range from private security services to poultry farming.

But despite the high-level charges against Martin, 55, and the official power he wielded under Chávez, he has managed to keep a low profile over the years, even as his family has accrued substantial assets abroad.

Now, OCCRP, in partnership with Armando.info, Infolibre, and the Miami Herald has traced part of Martin’s fortune to Barcelona, where his relatives have acquired luxury apartments in one of the city’s most expensive districts. The properties are unknown to Spanish investigators who looked into Martin’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, including the fact that he also acquired a Spanish identity card.

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

Of six people interviewed in Venezuela about Martin, including two former Venezuelan military officers who worked under Chávez and a police officer, only Simonovis agreed to be quoted by name. The others asked to remain anonymous out of fear that speaking publicly about Martin would invite retribution.

Martin did not respond to requests for comment.

Beyond the fact that Martin was born in 1967 in Caracas, there is little public record of his early years. He has described himself as a lawyer and economist, but reporters could not find any record of him having studied those subjects in Venezuela.

According to Simonovis, who worked as a police investigator for years before becoming a political prisoner under Chávez and then escaping to the United States, Martin became involved in drug trafficking and money laundering in the 1990s.

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

“He had the water up his neck, but he could still breathe,” Simonovis said.

After Chávez became president in 1999, Martin was appointed to the Caracas anti-drug office, apparently leveraging connections he had built in the police force, Simonovis said. In 2002, Martin became director of financial intelligence in the Venezuelan secret services — the General Sectoral Directorate of Intelligence and Prevention Services, known as the DISIP.

Simonovis, backed up by two sources who knew Martin, said he then started to run a “parallel office” out of Centro Lido, a luxury mall and office space in Caracas, while he was a senior intelligence officer. He and his people used informants and wiretaps to obtain compromising information on wealthy or powerful figures, and then demanded money to stop the harassment, they said.

OCCRP The Centro Lido in Caracas.

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

Simonovis said that at a certain point Martin’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,” he said.

Martin left the DISIP in 2004, but claimed to maintain a connection to the intelligence community. 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 — he said that he still “handles information” despite formally departing the agency.

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

Simonovis and the wealthy entrepreneur said that Martin kept managing his “parallel office” out of Centro Lido, where he now also began to run a commercial empire: From 2004 to 2007, Martin founded at least five companies, mostly in the field of private security, although he did also open a poultry farm.

Details of these companies’ operations show that Martin 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.