In January 2013, U.S. Representative Henry Cuellar and his wife Imelda took an 8-day trip to Istanbul, Turkey, then to Baku, Azerbaijan, where they met with high-level officials in the latter country’s authoritarian regime and dined with executives from the state-owned oil company.
The Cuellars’ foreign tour, which was sponsored by an obscure Houston-based nonprofit called the Turquoise Council of Americans and Eurasians, initially drew little notice. But they made a big impression on officials in Azerbaijan, a former Soviet Republic nation with huge oil and gas reserves that is run by an oppressive dictatorship rife with kleptocracy and corruption. For several years, the State Oil Company of the Republic of Azerbaijan, better known as SOCAR, operated a trading office in Texas and was actively courting American politicians to support its initiatives.
Soon Azerbaijani officials, including its top diplomat in the U.S., began discussing how they might recruit the powerful Laredo congressman as a valuable ally in the United States to sway foreign policy in its favor—and away from Armenia, with which it had been locked in conflict for decades.
