Tareck El Aissami

Tareck Zaidan El Aissami Maddah (طارق العيسمي; ; born 12 November 1974) is a Venezuelan politician, who served as the vice president of Venezuela from 2017 to 2018.

El Aissami was born on 12 November 1974 in El Vigía, Mérida, Venezuela.

He is one of five children.

His mother, May Maddah de El Aissami, is Lebanese while his father, Zaidan El Amin El Aissami, also known as Carlos Zaidan, was a Druze immigrant from Jabal al-Druze in Syria.

He was the head of a local Iraqi Ba'athist Party in Venezuela and had connections with leftist political movements in the Middle East.

Another family member of El Aissami involved in Ba'athism was his great-uncle, Shibli El Aissami, who was the Assistant Secretary General of the National Command of the Iraqi-dominated Arab Socialist Ba'ath Party.

El Aissami's father supported Hugo Chávez during the February 1992 Venezuelan coup d'état attempt and was arrested.

Following the arrest of El Aissami's father in 1992, his great-uncle Shibli El Aissami retired from politics in Iraq, remaining in the country until the 2003 US-led invasion of Iraq.

Studying both law and criminology, El Aissami attended the University of the Andes (ULA) in Mérida, Venezuela.

While there, he was a student of Adán Chávez Frías, the older brother of Hugo Chávez, who was said to have been a mentor to El Aissami.

In 1997, he joined the National Youth Directorate of the Fifth Republic Movement to support the election of Hugo Chávez.

Near the same time, El Aissami was arrested during an anti-government protest after throwing stones at authorities.

In 2001, El Aissami became president of the student union at ULA.

According to the vice rector of academic affairs at ULA, most of the 1,122 students living in the student dormitories at the time were members of Utopia or its allies, that "only 387 are active students and more than 600 have no university connections", and that there were "always weapons there".

Unnamed opponents claimed that during student elections El Aissami threatened other candidates with armed gangs, while former governor Florencio Porras (PSUV) accused him of attempting to rig student elections.

Following the September 11 attacks in 2001, it was also reported by witnesses that El Aissami had celebrated the attacks on the United States.

On 27 March 2003, days after the 2003 invasion of Iraq, El Aissami and his father attended a press conference with Iraq's ambassador to Venezuela, denouncing the United States invasion of Iraq and showing "solidarity" with "the defenseless Iraqi people."

El Aissami then first met Hugo Chávez while attending ULA and followed Chávez as a self-described radical chavista since.

He dedicated time during his post graduate studies to supporting Chávez's Fifth Republic Movement (MVR).

In July 2003, El Aissami lost his reelection campaign as president of the student union by 70% compared to other candidates, with the newly elected student council finding their office robbed and damaged.

After graduating with magna cum laude honors, El Aissami maintained his connections with fellow ULA students as he entered into politics, with members of Utopia later obtaining positions in Venezuela's Bolivarian government.

In September 2003, Hugo Cabezas, El Aissami's close friend from the ULA and Utopia, was appointed to be the head of the National Office of Identification and Foreigners (ONIDEX), a passport and naturalization agency that was part of Venezuela's interior ministry, by President Hugo Chávez.

The same year, after El Aissami had lost the student reelection campaign, Cabezas invited him to work as his deputy at ONIDEX.

Cabezas and El Aissami were then assigned to Mission Identidad, a Bolivarian mission tasked with creating national identifications for Venezuelans.

After being established in the capital city of Caracas, El Aissami later campaigned to become a legislator in the National Assembly, winning a seat in the 2005 parliamentary elections.

From 2007 to 2008, he served in the Ministry of the Interior as the Vice Minister of Public Security.

The Iranian military company Qods Aviation, which was sanctioned under the 2007 UN Security Council Resolution 1747, has operated in Aragua since 2008 in collaboration with the Venezuelan Military Industries Company Ltd.

The joint project continued throughout El Aissami's tenure.

According to analyst David Smilde of Washington Institute on Latin America (WOLA), while serving as Governor of Aragua, El Aissami "presided over a police force that came to be one of the most violent and abusive in the country".

He previously was Minister of the Interior and Justice from 2008 to 2012, Governor of Aragua from 2012 to 2017, and the vice president of Venezuela from 2017 to 2018.

While holding that office, El Aissami faced allegations of participating in corruption, money laundering and drug trafficking.

In September 2008, Hugo Chávez appointed El Aissami as Minister of the Interior and Justice In 2009, he stated that anti-drug operations in Venezuela had improved following the expulsion of the United States Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) from Venezuela, stating that the Colombian and United States government anti-drug agencies had "turned into important drug-trafficking cartels".

On 24 August 2011, El Aissami announced the ban on the public use of firearms in Venezuela.

El Aissami headed the Ministry of the Interior and Justice until he was elected governor in 2012.

He served as the governor of Aragua from 2012 until 2017.

Despite enacting 21 security plans for Aragua, violence continued to increase, with the murder rate at 142 murders per 100,000 citizens in 2016.

President Nicolás Maduro appointed El Aissami as Vice-President on 4 January 2017.

He served as Minister of Industries and National Production since 14 June 2018, and as Minister of Petroleum from 27 April 2020 until 20 March 2023.

In 2019, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) added El Aissami to the ICE Most Wanted List, listed by the Homeland Security Investigations unit.

El Aissami, who was among the power brokers in the Nicolás Maduro regime, resigned on 20 March 2023 amid a widening corruption probe.