Caracas Chronicles

Once upon a time in Yugoslavia, there was a man named Željko Ražnatović, popularly known as Arkan. Young Željko had been a protégé of Yugoslavia’s Interior Minister and developed a taste for crime early on. He crossed borders at will to cause chaos and build criminal networks in Western Europe. He returned to Yugoslavia in the 1980s and, under the protection of the socialist regime, became one of Belgrade’s most recognizable gangsters.

When the Yugoslav Wars broke out, Arkan became perhaps the most feared warlord in the region, commanding a special paramilitary unit, the Serb Volunteer Guard, better known as Arkan’s Tigers. His criminal record, from battles in northern Croatia to the siege of Srebrenica, includes every horror that people tend to associate with the Yugoslav Wars.

But Arkan, an icon of a grim era, is remembered not only for the atrocities he committed. He remains a symbol of Serbian masculinity, a blend of charisma, brute force, and audacity. When the war ended and the man sought pleasures beyond contract killings and extortion rackets, he decided Serbian football needed a new national champion. Red Star and Partizan had dominated the scene for decades, so in 1996 Arkan took over Obilić, a small club from a trendy Belgrade neighborhood. The club’s new fanbase included veterans from his own paramilitary forces, and threats against rival fans and players became part of matchdays. It took Obilić less than two years to win the national title and reach the playoffs of the UEFA Champions League.

Why tell this story, then? Venezuela is not exactly a war-torn country, but seems like a place where powerful figures—with considerable autonomy inside and outside the state security apparatus—are taking liberties very similar, if not identical, to those Arkan took in the former Yugoslavia thirty years ago.

Granko does not run the DGCIM, but his actions and reputation as a brutal operator of chavista repression have earned him enough influence to stamp his personal branding onto the institution.

This is Sparta

On Saturday, June 14th, the final of the Torneo Apertura was played between Deportivo Táchira and UCV. The former is one of the most important clubs in Venezuelan football, with a national fanbase that is the largest and perhaps the most intense in the country. UCV, the supposed football club of the Central University of Venezuela, earned promotion to the top tier in 2020 for the first time ever, after a leadership change at the club. Its following largely consisted of students. The club qualified for the Copa Libertadores playoffs (Latin America’s Champions League) in 2024, debuting this February with a curious emblem on the front of its uniform: a military helmet from Ancient Greece over black and gold stripes—the same design worn by agents of the General Directorate of Military Counterintelligence (DGCIM).

That’s the logo of Team Espartanos, the personal sports brand of a 44-year-old colonel who leads DGCIM’s special actions unit, and whom both Chilean officials and the UN Fact-Finding Mission have little praise for. The 2022 Bachelet Report on repression, extrajudicial killings and torture in Venezuela mentions the name of Alexander Granko Arteaga 96 times, where interviewees accuse him of running black sites and leading the capture and inhumane treatment of dissidents by the orders of Nicolás Maduro, Diosdado Cabello and former DGCIM chief Iván Hernández Dala (replaced last year in Maduro’s last cabinet reshuffle). In Chile, prosecutors and police forces are investigating Granko’s involvement in the killing of First Lieutenant Ronald Ojeda Moreno in early 2024. A fingerprint allegedly places Granko in the scene where Ojeda was kidnapped.

Granko does not run the DGCIM, but his actions and reputation as a brutal operator of chavista repression have earned him enough influence to stamp his personal branding onto the institution. That branding has featured in the digital propaganda of Operación Tuntún, and Granko uses it to promote himself as the “cool soldier” behind the success of Universidad Central—a team where his 16-year-old son is already a first-team player despite his age.

In a celebration photo posted by the club, midfielder Alexander “Makelele” González is seen kissing the trophy while wearing the signature helmet typically used by DGCIM agents.

Back to the match: on June 14, around 800 Deportivo Táchira fans were traveling in more than 15 buses last weekend to support their team in the final. It was a common and well-known trip: 16-18 hours from San Cristóbal to Caracas that fans from the Andes have always made, for instance to see Táchira face off against its biggest rival, Caracas FC. This time, fans reported an excessive number of checkpoints that slowed their journey. To their despair, the National Bolivarian Police—under the control of Interior Minister Diosdado Cabello—stopped the traffic in a section of the Central Regional Highway some 30 kilometers away from Caracas.

Universidad Central won 1-0 and claimed the Apertura championship. Most visiting fans didn’t make it to the stadium in time for the match, although Táchira has a sufficiently large fanbase and Caracas-based supporters were able to attend. In the home stands, where the crowd was notably smaller, a conspicuous group of young “fans” stood out: all wore bandanas, waved UCV flags, and had shaved heads—what appeared to be trainee police agents posing as supporters. In a celebration photo posted by the club, midfielder Alexander “Makelele” González is seen kissing the trophy while wearing the signature helmet typically used by DGCIM agents.

However, this display of state-sponsored abuse and contempt for rival football fans did not end there. When one of the buses carrying fans was on its way back to Táchira, PNB patrols stopped them and took the passengers to a detention facility in Caracas at 3 in the morning. As of Tuesday, 29 Táchira fans were still in custody and had been brought before a judge that night, according to human rights defender Marino Alvarado.

Most have now been released under a court-appearance regime, but five are still jailed. Manolo Dávila, a Táchira-based sports journalist, interviewed the father of one Táchira fan and detainee, Antonio Zambrano, admitting in tears that he doesn’t have enough money to travel to Caracas and plead for his son’s release. Zambrano’s wife and 8-year-old daughter were among the Táchira fans in custody before being released on Tuesday night.

Cabello confirmed on Wednesday that the remaining five are being charged with resisting authority, claiming the fans attacked police officers and destroyed a patrol vehicle on the highway.

Stadium-and-jail feudalism

The Deportivo Táchira leadership remains silent about these incidents despite outcry from gocho fans. The club’s owner is 38-year-old Jorge Silva, a former official of the Venezuelan tax authority who went on to lead one of Venezuela’s largest food import companies. One that, as Armando Info revealed, grew exponentially by trading Brazilian meat exports for the Maduro regime. Earlier this year, Pinto inaugurated a youth training facility for the club, sponsored and promoted by Táchira governor Freddy Bernal, a former police agent known for his association with both state and non-state violence since his days as mayor of Caracas. Unsurprisingly, the Venezuelan soccer league hasn’t commented on the matter either, and likely won’t. Only a fan organization supporting Portuguesa FC has publicly condemned the events.

“This situation could have happened to us on any other day,” the statement reads. “These actions only undermine efforts to attract crowds to Venezuelan stadiums.” 

Some fans on social media have even called FIFA or Conmebol to investigate, an idea that doesn’t sound far-fetched. In the end, Universidad Central will play the next edition of Latin America’s most important soccer tournament, much like Obilic did when they faced Bayern Munich in the 1998 Champions League playoffs. 

Back then, Serbian warlord Arkan stepped down as club president and handed the position to his wife. When the Hague Tribunal indicted him for war crimes, not even his own country was a safe haven. He was killed in January 2000, nine months before Slobodan Milosevic was ousted amid massive unrest. The club Arkan once bankrolled collapsed soon after and is no longer involved in professional football.

For now, Universidad Central will continue in South American competitions, and Granko will keep promoting his Espartanos brand—also using the name of a university that has resisted chavismo’s encroachment—while his relatives and friends run the club’s facilities and accommodations in wealthy areas of eastern Caracas, on land simply handed over for development by the Venezuelan state.

Discussions about a political transition in Venezuela sometimes sound naive or premature, but it’s fair to wonder what kind of role a figure like Alexander Granko would play then. He surely wouldn’t have time for a soccer outfit like UCV in such a scenario. And this UCV project—not the club itself, which dates back to the 1950s, but the enterprise it has become—might end up like so many other opportunistic and dishonest ventures: forgotten, defunct, and just another embarrassing chapter in the country’s sports history.