Golden Resilience: How OSINT is Empowering Colombia’s Journalists 

‘Bajo los árboles viejos

cuya sombra el suelo baña…’

‘Humo’ [“Smoke”], José Asunción Silva (1865-1896)

In Colombia and Venezuela, when the dry season comes, the golden yellow blooming of the guayacán trees is spectacular. 

These 50-foot trees’ blooms look like golden trumpets. Appearing in synchronicity with all the other trees, they litter the ground when they fall - a symbol of beauty, and Latin America’s ecological wealth. Their yellow canopy offers food and shelter to wildlife: birds, insects, deer, monkeys and squirrels. Butterflies are drawn to the seed pods, and hummingbirds to the nectar. 

Now threatened, the guayacán trees are also a symbol of resilience. An individual tree takes 20 years to reach its full height. Built to survive drought, they come back every year; even after experiencing natural disasters, they’ll regenerate from leftover roots to defiantly bloom again. For this reason, Indigenous Colombians say that if someone harms a guayacán tree, they’ll suffer the wrath of the spirit inside.

Like the yellow guayacán (Tabebuia chrysantha), Colombia’s journalists are a critically endangered species. RSF recently declared Colombia ‘one of the most dangerous countries… for journalists’ in Latin America, the continent that Reuters names ‘the deadliest region for journalists worldwide.’ 

Still, one Colombian journalist reached out again to share with us how the truth - like those yellow blooms - is something that cannot be suppressed. Circumventing traditional investigative channels, journalists are finding a new, more democratic way to do their work: OSINT. 

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Meet Néstor

Playing out under the guayacán trees was a story too explosive for Colombia’s heavily restricted mainstream, and OSINT Industries helped to expose it. 

OSINT Industries user Néstor Espinosa Robledo’s successes have been assisted by our platform’s provision for investigative journalists. In the past, Néstor has shared four of his vital investigations in another Case Study. Here he shared successes in fighting corruption, fake news, suspicious government contracting, and - in a life-saving twist - the humanitarian crisis in the Darién Gap, discovering ties to organized crime and a lack of action from Colombian authorities. 

Néstor used our platform to expose everything: from how a lack of robust data protection endangered citizens' financial security, to how a coordinated, state-backed disinformation campaign attempted to discredit Colombian journalism. 

For this investigative bravery, like so many in Latin America, Néstor encountered pushback. He was sued after he exposed a Mafia-backed human trafficking operation. His latest, OSINT-powered investigation wasn’t publishable in traditional media for reasons of money, politics and potential danger, leading him to publish in the independent, pro-transparency outlet Cuestión Pública.

Now more than ever, Néstor’s work with OSINT Industries showcases our shared belief that the truth is sacred - and open-source. Néstor’s stories demonstrate the potential of #OSINT4Good; making sure the truth is always accessible, even in a repressive information culture that threatens journalists even with violence.

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The Green City

Formally known as the Specially Designated Nationals and Blocked Persons List, the ‘SDN’ or ‘Clinton List’ (nicknamed after the President that began it) is the U.S. Treasury Department's log of international criminals active in terrorism, narcotics trafficking or any other activity that threatens the United States. It’s managed by the Office of Foreign Assets Control, or OFAC. Néstor was researching the ‘Clinton List’ when he noticed a new name.

Due to historic links with the narcotics trade, a Colombian connection on the Clinton List is far from uncommon. At present, one in five names listed here are Colombian, making up 20% of the US Treasury’s international most-wanted. Some of the first targets were from Néstor’s country: infamous figures like the Rodríguez Orejuela brothers of the Cali Cartel, or individuals linked to the Medellín Cartel. Once they make the list, targets are subject to sanctions that freeze their U.S. assets and instate global restrictions that make it difficult to operate internationally. 

‘There really is no explanation or standard for why someone gets on the list…’ - Prof. Peter L. Fitzgerald, Stetson University in Florida. [Source: The City Paper Bogota]

The reasons why particular criminals make OFAC’s list - while others don’t -  is not explained, and can sometimes seem arbitrary or even incorrect. With Colombians so overrepresented on the ‘Clinton List’, it's common for journalists to investigate new names themselves.

36-year-old Mahdy Akil Helbawi - aliases ‘Turco’, ‘Jonathan’, or ‘El Jefe’ - had been captured in a residential complex in Cúcuta, a verdant border city near Venezuela known as the ‘Green City’ and an ‘urban lung’. Born in Colombia to Lebanese parents, Helbawi and his shell company Zanga SAS were accused of money laundering and drug trafficking in support of Hezbollah; this Lebanese Islamist group is designated as a terrorist organization by the United States, Israel, and several other NATO member countries. The list alleged Helbawi cleaned his money via environmental devastation. His operation involved the export of charcoal, made from the burned remains of golden guayacán trees felled for the purpose.

To find out more, Néstor’s first call was OSINT Industries.

Through our platform, Néstor’s investigation for Cuestión Pública could reconstruct via OSINT the movements that Akil Hebawi made to reach the leafy streets of Cúcuta on that fateful September day. Between 2016 and 2024, they had evidence of Hebawi’s frequent movements within Colombia, between Cartagena, Barranquilla, Santa Marta, Maicao - Hebawi’s hometown - and most recently, Bucaramanga and Aguachica. Evidence also showed international travel to Mexico and Belize, and Néstor had proof that exports of charcoal were carried out between 2016 and 2019, and cryptocurrency transactions too. 

As the seasons continued to change, Néstor began a four month OSINT investigation that confirmed Hebawi’s crimes against Colombia’s natural beauty - crimes that branched into international crises.

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The Family Tree

Mahdy Akil Helbawi’s Barranquilla-based company Zanga SAS was founded in 2015 to export animals, construction materials, fruit and charcoal. It was, Néstor uncovered, a family business. Listed as co-founding the company was Mouhamed Helbawi, Akil’s brother, who registered the company using his own foreign passport. The OSINT indicated that the Helbawis’ business began with capital of 10 million pesos (2500 USD), operating out of an office located within a luxury Barranquilla shopping center. In parallel to their export business, the Helbawis opened kebab shops serving shawarma to hungry Baranquillans.

Néstor began following OSINT related to the Helbwais’ charcoal. 

Intelligence reports from the Colombian Prosecutor's Office indicated that Zanga SAS had facilitated a series of charcoal exports, between 2016 and 2019, from Colombia to the Middle East. In all, a total of 84 charcoal shipments left the Colombian port of Cartagena. Between 2016 and 2018, almost every charcoal shipment went to Lebanon; after 2017, the destinations diversified, with additional shipments to Israel and the United Arab Emirates too. 

As Néstor wrote, the company’s movements of charcoal tracked with the theory that Zanga SAS was ‘part of a network used to move and launder money for the terrorist group in Latin America with connections in Belize and Venezuela.’

He confirmed, moreover, that the Helbawi brothers’ money-laundering business was needlessly threatening Colombia’s golden symbol of resilience: the iconic, vulnerable guayacán tree. 

It’s important to note that all species of the genus Guaiacum (the guayacán) are listed in Appendix II of CITES - the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora - as endangered species. 

Yet between 2016 and 2019, the Helbawis’ company burned enough guayacáns to produce 2.4 tons of charcoal, contributing to the extinction of only 32,210 trees in La Guajira. Néstor saw their export values increased exponentially. In 2016, the company made 28 exports with a total value of $385,809 US, or 1,546,719,855 million pesos. In 2018, Zanga SAS traded $673,040 US, approximately 2,698,237,551 million Colombian pesos.  In 2019, the Helbawis’ made just one export to Dubai and three to Ashod, Israel - but had managed to make $1,445,877 US, or 5,796,564,269 pesos, all at the expense of their country’s precious natural resources.

The weight of their 2016 export was 737,300 kilograms; by 2018 it weighed 1,111 tons. This is the weight of the Burj Khalifa spire, a space station module, or the largest recorded blue whale. The value of the guayacán trees lost and the time they took to grow and mature to their full beauty is near incalculable, and can never be remunerated.

Looking at the Single Business Registry (RUES), Néstor found that although Zanga SAS continued to renew its registration until 2022, the Helbawi brothers had continually avoided accountability: they never correctly registered assets or income gained from these immoral exports.

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‘Cual tibio aliento aromado

que el frío condensa en nube

humo tenue y azulado

en espiral de ella sube…’

‘Humo’ [“Smoke”], José Asunción Silva (1865-1896)

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Branching Out

In the Zanga SAS file at the Barranquilla Chamber of Commerce, Néstor found an email address. He immediately ran an OSINT Industries search.

It was Mahdy Akil Helbawi’s address. He found the Helbawis were the sons of Amar Mohamed Akil Rafa, head of operations for the Hezbollah terrorist cell who perpetrated the  1994 Israelite Mutual Association (AMIA) bombing in Buenos Aires. The deadliest terrorist attack in Argentinian history, this atrocity left 85 dead and 300 injured when a car bomb detonated outside the building. Involving alleged support from Iranian officials and a horrific surge in Argentinian anti-Semitism, the case remains officially unresolved.

Néstor found that between 2018 and 2022, Madhy Akil Helbawi had visited Central America and the Caribbean. Between 2019 and June 2024, Helbawi’s Google Maps account showed his visits to luxury hotels and restaurants. Helbawi’s international trips coincided with the final year of charcoal exports. OSINT Industries revealed that in October 2019, Helbawi had visited the Gran Bodega Libre in Belize, a department store. 

Néstor cross-referenced with a US government file; a criminal like Amar Mohamed, Helbawi's uncle Samer Akil Rada had operated in Belize. He’d fled after committing drug trafficking offences, after a 500kg (78st) shipment of narcotics was found hidden in a fruit crate in El Salvador. This was another link to criminality, and it was another family affair.

Néstor’s OSINT Industries search showed that in October 2020 one of Helbawi’s accounts checked in at Playa del Carmen in Yucatán, Mexico - leaving a Google review for a computer store, ‘PC Depot’. The US government file on Samer Akil Rada included a Venezuelan technology import company in his criminal network: BCI Technologies CA had been exposed as a ‘front’ for drug trafficking to finance Hezbollah. Like father, like son; like uncle, like nephew.

Finally came a revelation. OSINT Industries showed Helbawi’s email was registered on the Binance cryptocurrency platform. Reuters notes that the National Office for Combating the Financing of Terrorism (NBCTF) has frozen 143 wallets linked to the Middle East on Binance between July 2021 and October 2023 - for connection to a ‘designated terrorist organization’ or illicit funding of ‘serious terrorist crimes.’ Not only does Helbawi’s presence on Binance fit the profile of modern terrorist financiers, but crypto is a known method by which Hezbollah operates financially. 

Néstor tracked the story to its conclusion on OSINT Industries. Helbawi had left a five-star Google review of an Italian restaurant in the exclusive Cabecera del Llano neighborhood of Bucaramanga, and another review of a Japanese restaurant in Aguachica, Cesar. This was only a six hour drive from Cúcuta.

On August 10th this year, the Colombian Attorney General's Office had handed Helbawi over for imprisonment. For his burning of the guayacán trees, he’s been charged with illegal use of natural resources, alongside aggravated money laundering, illicit enrichment of individuals including a terrorist group, and use of false documents. 

‘[Zanga] negatively affected at least 32 hectares of native forests in La Guajira, with the sole intention of illegally producing charcoal.’ - Colonel Edwin Masleider Urrego Pedraza, Colombian Director of Criminal Investigation and Interpol [Source: Cuestion Publica, trans. OSINT Industries]

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Endangered Species

‘I prefer to stay in the present for my mental health.’ - Néstor

The Latin name for guayacán means ‘wood of life’; even through attacks like the Helbawis’, the trees persist. Like the guayacán tree, Colombian journalists are endangered - but thanks to OSINT, their vital work can still thrive.

Journalists will always find new paths to investigate, and Néstor favours the power of OSINT. He primarily utilizes OSINT Industries to facilitate his successes, but tells us he also employs Kali Linux, Tails, data-scraping tools, and leaked information in his very democratic fight to spread the truth. In the future, he’s curious how AI could join OSINT to power his ability to do journalism differently in an often hostile climate.

This climate does affect journalists’ sense of confidence in their work. Néstor says that ‘lots of people are scared, because they think [my] work looks like hacking. But, it's just OSINT, which is very important for journalism.’ OSINT is very new for Colombians, and Néstor often has to explain to people what it means, and what it can do. 

However, as OSINT becomes more mainstream among Colombia’s journalists, the #OSINT4Good movement can continue to empower those who make sure we always hear the truth. Perhaps OSINT could be likened to the guayacáns’ little golden trumpets, littering the ground; anybody can pick them up, and see how they can make Colombia (and the world) brighter.

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For more details of Néstor’s work, or to contact him, visit:

Question Publica: https://cuestionpublica.com/tala-de-arboles-en-peligro-de-extincion-y-exportacion-de-carbon-vegetal-serian-las-actividades-de-hezbola-en-colombia/#

El Colombiano: https://www.elcolombiano.com/cronologia/noticias/meta/nestor-espinosa-robledo

Twitter (X): https://twitter.com/nesthora_