Javier Bertucci

In January 2018 he announced his presidential candidacy, in which he referred to his desire to be "the light among the darkness," to seek to electoral victory over Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro, and to affect change in the country.

Bertucci was linked to the leakage of the Panama Papers in 2016. According to a series of emails delivered to the German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung consulted for an investigation by journalist Katherine Pennacchio, Bertucci contacted the law firm Mossack Fonseca to be the president of Stockwin Enterprises Inc, a company created in Panama on January 3, 2012, with a capital investment of five million dollars dedicated to the purchase and sale of inputs, mainly the importation of raw materials from the food sector.

On July 2, 2010, Bertucci was charged with aggravated smuggling and conspiracy to commit a crime. He was detained for three days when he tried to move a 5,000-metric-ton tanker ship from the Ocamar dock in Puerto Cabello to the port of Barahona in the Dominican Republic. The ship was thought to contain 5,000 tons of diesel disguised as paint thinner. The diesel, through its Tecnopetrol company, was referenced in file GP01-R-2010-000234 of the Court of Appeals.

Bertucci completed both his primary and secondary education in the town of Yagua (north of Valencia). In school he met Francisco Barrios at age 12, who introduced him to his future wife Rebeca Barrios, Francisco's sister. In 1994, at the age of 24, Bertucci married Rebeca Barrios. They have three children: Raquel Rebeca, Valeria Alejandra and Javier Abraham.

From 1993, with his wife Rebeca, Bertucci began to preach in squares, parks, and houses. In the 1990s, the Bertucci Barrios family moved to Valencia, where they lived, and simultaneously formed a small evangelical church in the town of Tinaquillo (Cojedes, 48 km southwest of Valencia), which remained for the next five years.

Bertucci began to follow the Evangelical Christian Church in 1990, when he had "an experience with God at 21 years old." He decided to start a pastorate career a month after his marriage when he received the "call of God" (an expression that indicates when a believer recognizes the task to follow within a church or in your life as a Christian).

Javier Alejandro Bertucci Carrero (born November 16, 1969) is an evangelical pastor, philanthropist, and Venezuelan businessman. In 2016, he was linked to the leakage of the Panama Papers. He runs the Maranatha Christian Church, a religious congregation with more than 16,000 followers in Latin America that expands social work and evangelist through the Civil Association El Evangelio Cambia, of which he is a leader and founder. He was a candidate in the 2018 Venezuelan presidential election.

Javier Bertucci was born on November 16, 1969, in Guanare, Portuguesa, to a peasant family that subsisted on a banana and tobacco producing plantation. His great-grandmother, Maria de las Nieves, helped the Bertucci family experience economic mobility.