OUR Venezuela is offering a $1 million reward for information leading to the capture of “El Conejo” (Rabbit), a notorious crime ring leader who recently clashed with law enforcement with automatic weapons.

“Wanted. Carlos Enrique Gomez Rodriguez or ‘El Conejo’. Reward: $1,000,000,” wrote a poster posted on Twitter by Judicial Police Director Douglas Rico.

Six other members of the group are also wanted, but no reward is being offered by the authorities.

Wanted for over a year, El Conejo is charged with “terrorism, extortion, kidnapping, murder and more,” including drug trafficking, according to the poster.

#International | Venezuela with $1 million remittance alias “Conejo” 👉 https://t.co/AKQOFkxCys pic.twitter.com/HtCk1PZ5vg

— EL NUEVO SIGLO (@ElNuevoSiglo) February 13, 2023

His name resurfaced in the media last week after violent clashes between police and his gang in Tejeria, a city in the north-central state of Aragua, 80 kilometers from Caracas (where dozens of people died in a November landslide).

According to local media, the gang allegedly attacked police stations in the area. In the photos posted on social networks, an armored car crashes into a house, the sounds of machine guns are heard.

The amount of one million dollars, expressed in US currency, is astronomical for Venezuela, a country in crisis, where the local currency, the bolivar, is constantly depreciating due to chronic inflation.

In July 2021, the authorities were already offering large sums of money for the search for members of the gang that flooded the Cota 905 area in Caracas. Police stormed the area during clashes that killed 26 people.

A $500,000 reward has been offered for information about high-profile gang boss Carlos Luis Revert, nicknamed “El Coqui”, who was killed in February 2022 in Aragua, an area controlled by El Conejo.

Venezuela shares with Honduras the highest crime rate in Latin America, with nearly 11,000 victims between 2021 and 2022, according to the Observatory on Violence (OVV), a non-governmental organization that collects case data in the country.

^{Source: APE-MEB, AFP.}