The Hitz fortune did not vanish in a single act. It vanished inside the collapse of a government.
The man on the cover of TIME
In February 1955, Marcos Pérez Jiménez appeared on the cover of TIME magazine, following Nikita Khrushchev. He had held power since 1952. Three years after that cover, it was over.
He was overthrown in 1958 amid allegations of corruption, misappropriation of funds, and even murder. Investigators noted that he had entered office in 1949 with about $23,000, and that ten years of a government salary should have brought him a little over $336,000. They believed his true worth ran as high as $700 million, at least $12 million of it embezzled.
How the money moved
The charges went before the Investigating Committee Against Illicit Enrichment, created in 1948 to establish whether the wealth of public officials was lawful and free of what the historian Judith Ewell summarized as “speculation, bribery, extortion or other financial crimes.”
Ewell’s study of the case, “The Extradition of Marcos Pérez Jiménez, 1959-63,” set out the methods: converting treasury funds to himself, charging improvements on his private property to the state, directing government money to businesses in which he held a stake, taking commissions on government contracts, and speculating in land.
Much of it left the country. Over the course of 1957, Ewell reported, Pérez Jiménez attempted to send 500,000 bolívars to the Hibernia National Bank in New Orleans, and the bank’s president advised him to send smaller sums so as not to drain the currency. Five New York banks were subpoenaed to establish what he had deposited over a decade. The most damaging evidence surfaced in a suitcase holding cash, bank deposit slips, cancelled checks drawn on the United States, securities, and handwritten notes showing commissions divided between the president and his ministers.
Ewell wrote: “Documents of land ownership showed that Flor and Marcos Pérez Jiménez owned property in nearly every corner of Venezuela. It appeared inconceivable that his relatively modest estate and salaries could have provided the sum of $13,513,576.39 which he and his intermediaries had invested or deposited during his years in power. The latter sum was approximate and included some values which were registered in the names of third persons.”
Where the Hitz estate sat
In February 1958, to stop the funds from fleeing the country, President Wolfgang Larrazábal ordered the official confiscation of all Pérez Jiménez property under investigation.
Othmar Hitz was a coffee exporter with plantations and land, a chain of pharmacies bearing his own name, and accounts in three countries. He had also, years earlier, signed everything he owned into the name of his lawyer, Rafael Naranjo Ostty, on the advice that it would shield him from a tax dispute. Ostty would later appear among Pérez Jiménez’s own defense lawyers at the trial in Caracas. A single photograph from that trial shows him seated at the president’s left, arms open in a crisp white blazer.
Whether Naranjo Ostty was one of the “third persons” in Ewell’s accounting has never been established, and this dispatch does not claim it. What the record does show is the shape of the thing: a fortune held in another man’s name, a state seizing the holdings of that man’s circle, and an estate that was never recovered. The lawyer has his own dispatch.
Othmar was out of prison again in 1958. Later that year he was dead, and when the family finally won an exhumation, the grave was empty. That dispatch is here.