More than 70 percent of Gaza’s residents are refugees.

One of the smuggling operations the I-Unit encountered was led by Uebert Angel, Zimbabwe’s ambassador-at-large to Europe and the Americas. Angel was appointed personally by Mnangagwa with the responsibility of securing global investments for Zimbabwe, and is one of the country’s most influential diplomats.Angel, who is also a prominent pastor, works with his deputy, Rikki Doolan. The duo made an offer to Al Jazeera’s undercover reporters that Angel could use his diplomatic cover to smuggle dirty money into Zimbabwe. That cash would then be used to purchase Zimbabwean gold with the help of Henrietta Rushwaya, president of the country’s mining association and a niece of Mnangagwa.

“It’s a good washing machine, right?” Doolan said, a smile on his face, while speaking with Al Jazeera reporters.Angel and Doolan repeatedly claimed that the country’s president was on board with their plans. Angel had another laundering idea too: He proposed using the unaccounted money to build a hotel near Victoria Falls, a popular tourist attraction in Zimbabwe.‘It’s very clean that way’

If access to power is the currency that Angel and Doolan peddled, gold is the calling card of a string of — at times rival — smuggling operations.One of the gangs is run by Kamlesh Pattni, a businessman who in the 1990s was accused of pocketing hundreds of millions of dollars belonging to the Kenyan exchequer through a gold smuggling scheme. He was charged but never convicted. Al Jazeera’s undercover operation shows that Pattni is now involved in a similar scam in Zimbabwe, exporting gold to Dubai and then laundering both the money and the precious metal.

Pattni’s biggest competitor, a gold smuggler named Ewan Macmillan, also offered to help launder money for Al Jazeera’s reporters. Like Pattni, Macmillan, uses a group of couriers to transport hundreds of kilos of gold per week from Zimbabwe to Dubai, where it is then laundered through a web of companies and false invoices. Central to Macmillan’s operations is his business partner Alistair Mathias, who advises clients on how to cleanse their dirty cash.

Finally, Al Jazeera obtained details of how Simon Rudland, one of Zimbabwe’s richest men, launders money through both Zimbabwean and South African companies. Rudland is the owner of Gold Leaf Tobacco, one of southern Africa’s biggest cigarette brands, especially on South Africa’s black market.He recalls an atmosphere of fear, with most people terrified of speaking out against the authoritarian government. “That fear sprang from the terrible defeat in the Spanish Civil War and from the many deaths that occurred during the war, but also from the harsh repression from the post-war period up to the end of the dictatorship,” he explains.

Informants were everywhere, and the circle of trusted individuals was small. “As you can imagine, this is no way to live – this was living in darkness, silence, fear, and repression,” Vallejo says.“There were few of us – very few – who dared to move from silence to activism, which involved many risks.”

Vallejo was imprisoned in 1970 for attempting to set up a labour union among SEAT employees, spending half a year in jail, including 20 days being tortured by Barcelona’s secret police. After another arrest in late 1971 and the prosecution demanding 20 years for what were then considered crimes of association, organisation and propaganda, Vallejo crossed the border with France in January 1972. He ultimately gained political asylum in Italy, where he lived in exile before returning to Spain following the first limited amnesty of 1976, which granted pardons to political prisoners after Franco’s death in 1975.Today, Vallejo dedicates his time to human rights activism. He presides over the Catalan Association of Former Political Prisoners of Francoism, created in the final years of the dictatorship.