Crude Awakening

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Fourteen years ago this month, one of Jeffrey Epstein’s friends emailed him a tentative itinerary for a quick trip to Caracas, listing nine “movers and shakers” the pedophile middleman needed to meet. Third on the list was Alejandro Betancourt, described as a “very very interesting kid” who “is only 34 years old and has over $3bill in contracts with the venezuelan gov’t.”

Today, Betancourt, whose full name is Leopoldo Alejandro Betancourt López, runs a company that just made, on its face, the most lopsided financial deal since the Russians sold us Alaska for $7 million: an agreement to spend $100 billion upgrading 17 Venezuelan oil fields, then to sell a fifth of the output of those fields to the United States at cost, for the next hundred years. Until weeks ago, the U.K.-based Betancourt was wanted in Switzerland for his involvement in various schemes to divert billions of dollars from various Venezuelan state-owned enterprises. But The Washington Post and others reported that Swiss authorities withdrew their extradition request from Britain under pressure from U.S. officials. And shortly thereafter, three top prosecutors from the U.K.’s Serious Fraud Office jumped ship to work for Betancourt, according to the Financial Times.

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Which is to say: The oil deal was a very good one, but only for Betancourt. Venezuela appears to be getting royally screwed, which continues a very old story.

Back in the early 1980s, an anonymous informant left a document on the windshield of an investigative journalist detailing a syndicate of “Petrospies” who had infiltrated the international marketing department of state-owned oil company PDVSA and extracted some $500 million selling inside information to competitors. In the 2000s, a team of former PDVSA execs in Miami bribed an old IT administrator they nicknamed “the Nerd” to run back the Petrospies play by setting up a “clone server” giving them backdoor access to all the inside pricing and production data they needed to help five commodities trading houses skim more than $5 billion in oil wealth. Nine years ago this fall, the Trump administration imposed secondary sanctions on vital oil diluents that caused the country’s daily oil production to plunge from 2.65 million barrels per day in 2015 to less than 500,000 in 2020. Seven years ago, President Trump recognized obscure puppet Juan Guaidó as Venezuela’s legitimate leader, setting the stage for the appointment of the treasonous legal team that unleashed a great vulture fund feeding frenzy resulting in the loss of “crown jewel” oil refining network Citgo, a blunder that almost certainly cost tens of billions of dollars, though the refineries’ sale is still being litigated and ultimately requires the blessing of Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent.

Then, just after New Year’s Day 2026, after abducting leader Nicolás Maduro and killing some 80 bodyguards and security staffers, the Trump administration appointed commodities trading houses Vitol and Trafigura to manage Venezuela’s oil revenue, rerouting some $15 billion into unspecified offshore accounts controlled by the State Department, and allowing its new puppet government to access just under a half billion dollars for earthquake response.

Yet for some reason, it was only the deal between the White House and Betancourt that finally caused Venezuela watchers across the ideological spectrum to revolt, all at once:

“Secretary Marco Rubio: You have just lost any trust Venezuelans ever had on you, and it will come to haunt you,” wrote Ricardo Hausmann, a Harvard economist and justice minister in the Guaidó puppet government and key player in the $19 billion “alter ego” blunder that lost Citgo. “The United States has wreaked havoc on us,” former oil minister Rafael Ramírez told The New York Times, describing the deal as “grotesque” and a “historic act of surrender” while refraining from mentioning his own “unprecedented robbery scheme,” as then-Venezuela attorney general Tarek William Saab termed his alleged embezzlement of nearly $5 billion from PDVSA—in concert with Betancourt—just four years ago. (Neither Ramirez nor Betancourt was ever charged, and both have denied any wrongdoing, though 18 former bank executives were convicted last year in Andorra for facilitating money laundering for PDVSA officials and contractors.)

“The Trump administration isn’t trying to end socialism in Venezuela. Instead, it is doing socialism in Venezuela,” editorialized the libertarian magazine Reason. Meanwhile, the World Socialist Web Site and a few similarly obscure sources reported on a small rally in Caracas in which students and public employees waved signs lambasting imperialism, demanding a hike in the monthly minimum wage of 130 bolivars—roughly 15 cents—and pronouncing Betancourt’s deal the “Worst Oil Contract in the World.”

But no one was more devastated than Thor Halvorssen—a man invariably identified as a “human rights activist” in media reports, though a more appropriate title would be Betancourt’s longest-running hater—who posted a 23-paragraph diatribe on the evil undergirding the deal: “Betancourt is a criminal who bears direct responsibility for immense human suffering in Venezuela. Tens of millions of innocent people endured blackouts and their consequences: hospitals without electricity, basic services collapsing, and lives put at risk … all so Alejandro Betancourt and his cousins could buy a Falcon jet and a castle in Spain.”

Betancourt has never been formally charged with or convicted of a crime, and he has sued Halvorssen in the past for intimating as much. These dueling denunciations and legal maneuvers have the character of a high-net-worth soap opera, and Halvorssen’s history would suggest he trots out those millions of innocent Venezuelans not out of genuine concern for their well-being but to gain the upper hand in the rivalry.

Halvorssen and Betancourt did not respond to a series of questions from the Prospect.

JEFFREY EPSTEIN NEVER ENDED UP GOING to Caracas; one of his pilots warned he might be detained for hours on the tarmac. But in November 2012, he asked his go-between for Betancourt’s name, and the following month the men exchanged a nondisclosure agreement between Betancourt’s Derwick Associates and an unspecified company regarding a potential joint venture with PDVSA.

This was right around the time Betancourt’s gang had started to have problems with Halvorssen and his affiliates, as evidenced by a PDF contained in the files: a Florida defamation lawsuit dated September 13, 2012, against a right-wing bank CEO named Oscar Garcia Mendoza, who Betancourt alleged had bankrolled a website full of allegations against him and Derwick that he claimed were untrue. Mendoza was Halvorssen’s cousin on the side of his non-Norwegian mother Hilda Margarita Mendoza, and a prominent donor to his nonprofit Human Rights Foundation, an anachronistic though deep-pocketed institution best known for hosting an annual confab called the Oslo Freedom Forum in which wealthy right-wing political activists are feted in a none-too-subtle publicity campaign aimed at the various Nobel committees. (María Corina Machado appeared the year before she won the Nobel Peace Prize.)

The HRF would barely register as hypocritical in Trump times, but when Halvorssen founded it two decades ago it was something of a pioneer in the realm of demonizing nationalist or left-wing populist governments and celebrating their right-wing would-be saboteurs in the language of human and civil rights. This dated back to Halvorssen’s first big “client” as a human rights activist, his now-deceased father Thor Halvorssen Hellum (whom we will refer to as Halvorssen Sr.), who was arrested in 1993 while his son was still an undergrad and held for 74 days on suspicion of masterminding the quintessential “Epstein class” crime spree, a string of explosions known as the “Yuppie Bombings.”

A series of five bombings included four letter bombs and finally a car bombing that totaled 20 cars in the lot of Caracas’s premier luxury shopping mall. As the Miami Herald reported at the time, one of the primary suspects was a karate champion turned private investigator with an outstanding warrant for his arrest in Miami. Nearly all the karate champion’s alleged co-conspirators belonged to aristocratic families suspected of involvement in drug trafficking, defrauding PDVSA, or other illicit activities; a few were affiliated with the Grupo Mendoza industrial conglomerate founded by Halvorssen’s great-uncles. The explosions hadn’t killed anyone directly, but an art dealer who was reportedly involved in the plot and had threatened to rat out his associates had been taken on a short flight and shot, then pushed out of the plane, Pinochet-style, into the Caribbean, according to contemporaneous news reports citing local police.

The black-belt PI was arrested and charged, and would eventually be jailed for several years. His stockbroker told authorities his client was shorting widely held stocks and seemed intent on generating a sell-off. But the Caracas market had lost half its value in the 18 months that had transpired since Hugo Chávez’s failed coup attempt, was thinly traded anyway, and the bombings barely made a dent. The bombings had, however, briefly jolted the international market for Venezuelan bonds, which could have netted savvy traders tens of millions of dollars and even conceivably served as a pretext for the then-acting president Ramón José Velásquez to postpone elections and temporarily institute martial law, as Alberto Fujimori had done a year earlier in Peru.

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According to the Herald, the karate champion told interrogators that Halvorssen Sr. was the plot’s mastermind. It was hardly implausible: Halvorssen Sr. had written checks to one or two of the known co-conspirators, and was embroiled in three or four concurrent and overlapping scandals that were all in the process of boiling over. A CIA asset dating back to the 1970s, when the agency recruited him due to his post helming the national telecom company, Halvorssen Sr. in 1989 had been secretly named to a stealth “ambassador level” appointment, with diplomatic immunity, as a covert narcotics specialist envoy to the United States. This was a particularly enviable perk in a period that saw Halvorssen Sr.’s own agency handler indicted over Iran-Contra, and the DEA—which Halvorssen Sr. had infiltrated by starting a love affair with one of its officials in Venezuela, according to an Associated Press story—frantically scrambling to rein in CIA-protected drug organizations.

But the DEA had declared war on Halvorssen Sr., agency officials were now publicly accusing him of thoroughly “penetrating” the organization solely to pump agents with false leads, the man who appointed him had been impeached, and diplomatic immunity does not extend to the diplomat’s home country; the walls were closing in. Until! Halvorssen Sr.’s accuser, the karate PI, retracted his statements implicating him, claiming he had been tortured into making them. An investigative journalist friend of Halvorssen Sr.’s helped recruit Amnesty International to consider his cases, and the family concocted an elaborate conspiracy narrative casting the jet-setting spy entrepreneur as a patriotic civil servant being raked over the coals by allegedly pro-Cuba bankers, the Medellin cartel, and “nefarious elements” in the government: Chavistas, in other words, five years before the election of Hugo Chávez, who was himself at the time still imprisoned at a more remote facility 50 miles away from Caracas.

When he was arrested, Halvorssen Sr. fit the conventional image of “political prisoner” about as much as Ghislaine Maxwell does today. Even if he’d had nothing whatsoever to do with the Yuppie Bombings, the man was deeply immersed in drug trafficking, fascist death squads, and the lawless factions of intelligence agencies that protect both, who was suspected of masterminding a false-flag attack with the intention of suspending democracy. The notion that he was somehow a political prisoner of a government that had killed hundreds if not thousands of protesters who rallied to oppose an IMF-imposed bus fare hike in 1989 was patently ridiculous.

And yet: The public relations, as it so often does, worked. The case yielded sympathetic coverage from the University of Pennsylvania alumni magazine, and the family helped enlist Manhattan DA Robert Morgenthau, Sen. Jesse Helms, and Contra leader Adolfo Calero to lobby for his release. Amnesty International inspectors photographed injuries Halvorssen Sr. had sustained at the hands of a mysterious man he alleged police had invited to beat him up, whom he later identified as the son of the banker he’d been hired to smear. Finally, a judge ordered him released for insufficient evidence after 74 days, and Halvorssen Sr. decamped to Miami, just in time to avoid a devastating epidemic of bank collapses and IMF austerity measures back home, where he wrote a series of op-eds—“The Price of Vigilance in Venezuela’s Banking Community” was the title of one that published in The Wall Street Journal—portraying himself as the victim of a violent bank oligarch and praising the new president for breaking his campaign promise to resist IMF-imposed shock treatment.

It was this cynical recipe, co-opting the virtue signaling of the populist left to sell fascism as “freedom” and naked criminality as courage, that would pretty much define the public portion of young Thor Halvorssen’s career, in which he co-founded first a libertarian free-speech organization initially designed as a conservative “answer” to the ACLU, then a small production studio for anti-woke documentaries with names like “Mine Your Own Business,” and finally the HRF.

Behind the scenes, Halvorssen preoccupied himself normalizing the Cold War on the Latin American left. In the woke language, pink fonts, and NGO brand positioning of the Human Rights Foundation, the lines between protests and coups, uprisings and industrial sabotage blurred. His first cousin Leopoldo Lopez, alleged widely in media reports to have orchestrated public protests during the failed 2002 coup attempt and to have led a violent “citizen’s arrest” of the interior minister, was sold to friendly media as a martyr for freedom. A 302-page Halvorssen-commissioned legal analysis of the 2009 overthrow of moderate left-wing Honduran president Manuel Zelaya criticized the Supreme Court for cutting procedural corners in its otherwise honorable effort to remove him for presiding over an “erosion of democracy” by announcing a vote over the prospect of reforming the constitution. Halvorssen loathed Chavismo so deeply that he viewed Venezuelans who did not seek to overthrow its government as treasonous traitors, regularly skewering investors who bought the beleaguered bonds of Venezuela or PDVSA.

In the 1990s, Halvorssen’s aunt Antonieta Mendoza had served as PDVSA’s vice president of corporate affairs. And Oscar Mendoza’s Banco Venezolano de Crédito had famously ridden out the 1990s banking collapse thanks in part to a massive influx of funds from PDVSA pension funds. Much of the workforce was ideologically aligned with the right-wing Mendozas, and had engaged in a series of crippling strikes in the months leading up to the coup; nearly 20,000 PDVSA staffers were fired for subversion in the 18 months that followed.

ALEJANDRO BETANCOURT WAS JUST FINISHING UP college in Boston at the time, but like Halvorssen he was keenly aware that there would be profit in the chaos. Back in prep school, he had ingratiated himself to a friend’s PDVSA executive dad named Javier Alvarado Ochoa; upon graduation, he found a gig at the scrappiest, most ambitious oil field exploration startup that would have him, determined to learn the ropes as quickly as possible. In 2010, an unusual stretch of dry weather brought the country’s hydropower-heavy electric grid to its knees, Ochoa was named energy minister, and Betancourt seized the opportunity to secure billions of dollars in contracts to build new plants for his startup Derwick Associates. Within two years, Mendoza, Halvorssen’s cousin, had dedicated a whole website to his exploits, wherein he described Betancourt as the “boss” of a “new group of private sector criminals” that had “stolen” billions out of Venezuelan state-owned enterprises; “laundered” it into, among other things, a “hunting estate” and a “cargo ship” that “smuggled” tantalite from Guyana; and “threatened even journalists with complete impunity.”

Betancourt’s ensuing defamation lawsuit, which would later be settled, maintained that all of these allegations were categorically false. But aside from the tantalite thing (which was probably an effort to link Derwick to the recently terrorist-designated FARC), stealing from state-owned enterprises and laundering the proceeds into offshore assets is the most venerable method of wealth accumulation that exists, at least in Latin America.

What was unusual was Betancourt’s age, inexperience, and lack of parental guidance. His mother was a jewelry designer with a retail store in Palm Beach, his father a cardiologist turned concert pianist who divided his time between Valencia and Boca Raton. Betancourt attended Suffolk University, worked a few years in London for the now-defunct oil field exploration startup, which had a license from the government of São Tomé and Príncipe to drill in a 1,000-square-kilometer stretch of the Atlantic Ocean, then founded Derwick, based in Barbados, with some buddies, essentially as a middleman/lobbying firm to replace staffers and foreign contractors who had been purged in the post-coup wave or the nationalization drive Chávez had embarked upon when the financial system began to seize up in 2007. Both the company and its principals were almost totally unknown before they won 12 no-bid power plant contracts worth $5 billion.

Halvorssen had gleefully led campaigns to smear former Rep. Joe Kennedy II for spearheading the Venezuela-owned Citgo’s program to provide drastically discounted heating oil to low-income households in Boston; money managers who bought Venezuelan bonds for complicity in torture and forced starvation; and the United Nations Human Rights Council for failing to expel Venezuela for the crime of jailing his cousin for four days.

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But in Betancourt, Halvorssen found perhaps his first bête noire who was every bit as cynical as he was. Team Thor commissioned letter-writing campaigns demanding Derwick’s subcontractors cut ties with the firm, published reports urging law enforcement authorities to investigate the company for Foreign Corrupt Practices Act violations, and more. Betancourt alleged in his defamation case against Mendoza that Halvorssen seeded nasty stories about his clique of “boligarchs” in Forbes and The Wall Street Journal. An analysis commissioned by the opposition party–controlled National Assembly estimated that Betancourt’s company Derwick had billed the government $1.51 billion for work that was worth $551 million. In 2021, by which point Derwick had been banned from doing business with the Maduro government, Reuters reported the plants were producing just 10 percent of the power Derwick had promised. (Halvorssen dismissed the analysis as a whitewash.)

But Betancourt had done something with those ill-gotten markups most Chavistas had never tried: sharing the wealth with the regime’s traditional enemies. He hired the Federalist Society–affiliated defamation law firm Clare Locke to defend his power plants, the Republican lobbying firm Ballard Partners to represent a purveyor of midrange sunglasses he co-owned, Rudy Giuliani as a personal attorney-cum-fixer, the brother and father of erstwhile opposition leader Juan Guaidó for various other purposes, and Fusion GPS, the firm behind the notorious “Steele dossier,” to compile a report accusing Halvorssen of sexual- and substance-abuse proclivities. In 2024, when Betancourt joined forces with Trump’s golfing buddy Harry Sargeant to buy out Chinese- and Russian-owned oil fields, the two hired former GOP congressman Aaron Schock as an unregistered lobbyist, and shortly thereafter Laura Loomer was posting favorably about the prospects for a win-win détente with the Chavistas. (Loomer has denied being part of a Venezuela influence operation, though The New Yorker noted that she “sometimes corresponds with Harry Sergeant.”) And when Otto Reich, the famously hard-right Iran-Contra figure, Human Rights Foundation contractor, and former ambassador to Venezuela who crafted George W. Bush’s Latin America policy, turned down a lucrative offer to work for Derwick, Betancourt and his buddies allegedly did the next best thing, according to a lawsuit Reich filed against Betancourt in 2013: They told everyone he was working for them anyway.

At the time, Reich claimed in his lawsuit, he was in talks to nab a $20,000-a-month gig with Mendoza and Banco Venezolano as part of their Derwick-trashing campaign. But Mendoza got cold feet after a process server greeted one of his surrogates at the Miami airport, on his way to a meeting with Reich, with an amended complaint accusing the surrogate of meeting with a “former U.S. government official” for the alleged purpose of “provid[ing] false information of criminal wrongdoing” by Derwick, which Reich claimed was designed to give bank officials “the false impression that Ambassador Reich was a ‘double agent’ working for Derwick Associates, and that Ambassador Reich had shared the location and timing of his [meeting] with Briceño with Derwick Associates in order to allow legal papers to be served upon Briceño.”

Reich’s most brilliant conservative hire, all the way back in 2015, was Martin Rodil, a shadowy character accused by Spanish prosecutors of orchestrating a massive conspiracy with reactionary Spanish police officials to extort millions of dollars out of wealthy and/or formerly powerful Venezuelan exiles in exchange for immigration assistance and “protection” from prosecution and U.S. financial sanctions. As the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists explained in 2022, the exiles were not just pumped for money, but for information and testimony on former friends and colleagues detailing Chavista involvement in drug trafficking, money laundering, bribery, commerce with Iran and sanctioned entities like Hezbollah and FARC, and perhaps most alarming, any and all information they could provide on left-wing Spanish politicians, particularly the Spanish anti-austerity party Podemos, which Rodil sought to frame as a satellite project of the Maduro government. (Handwritten notes maintained by a soldier in the anti-Podemos smear campaign suggest one of Rodil’s most important partners, a Madrid-born Israeli military consultant named Alberto “Avi” Galán, was even involved the installation of the infamous Pegasus spyware on the mobile phone of Spanish prime minister Pedro Sánchez and a handful of other left-wing politicians.)

Rodil has yet to be arrested or charged, and it seems almost certain Israel would refuse to extradite him, but he also has a vital insurance policy in MAGA-world. He is one-half of the duo behind two critical Trumpworld conspiracy theories: that Maduro was involved in a successful effort to steal the 2020 election for Joe Biden, whose presidency he then sabotaged by dispatching thousands of violent tattoo-covered paramilitary infiltrators to storm the border, occupy vacant housing, and inflict terror on the residents of Aurora, Colorado. (His partner Gary Berntsen is an ex-CIA agent and co-owner of a consultancy that once advised a Kuwaiti royal on the nuts and bolts of pulling off a private-sector regime change operation.) While beyond dubious, Rodil’s reports have been foundational for fleshing out the legal basis for some of the Trump administration’s more authoritarian executive orders, underscoring an important reality about life in the no-rules-based international order: never quit one’s side hustle if one’s day job might be ruled illegal at any moment.

WITNESS THE CONTRAST BETWEEN BETANCOURT and his old mentor, Javier Alvarado Ochoa, the former PDVSA executive who Halvorssen alleged was the benefactor of Betancourt’s first few power plant projects. Ochoa paid more than 1.1 million euros to a Rodil-owned LLC in three installments in 2015, telling ICIJ Rodil was “a very good and subtle extortionist … He causes you sickness, so that you have the need to be cured.” But 1.1 million couldn’t cure him: Bill Barr’s Department of Justice indicted Ochoa four years later, though Spain declined to extradite him. Betancourt, by contrast, is believed to have paid Rodil 500,000 euros, per a police report cited in Spain’s El Periódico. Yet he evaded the indictments and financial sanctions that swept up dozens of his old colleagues, mentors, and business partners, even as Spanish and Swiss prosecutors circled him so closely he was reduced to traveling exclusively via helicopter. On the morning of August 28, 2025, six Spanish police officers arrived, warrants in hand, at the gate of his estate in Toledo, absolutely certain he was home, only to learn he had somehow disappeared, possibly to Madrid, but his wife didn’t want to say any more without consulting her lawyer.

A recent Substack post by the old Trump fixer Lev Parnas is instructive. Most of us know Parnas, who has since reinvented himself as an anti-Trump multimedia pundit, as the Russian mob whisperer who went to Ukraine with Rudy Giuliani in an attempt to dig up dirt on the Biden family in advance of the 2020 election. But at the time, Giuliani was also working for Betancourt, and Parnas was working for Betancourt’s future business partner Harry Sargeant, an asphalt billionaire (and former Giuliani donor) who had been sourcing from Venezuela since the 1980s and was close personal friends with Maduro. (Notably, Parnas met Giuliani in 2017 through his work for the Florida super-lobbying firm Ballard Partners, which Betancourt hired that same year and whose lobbyist David Rivera was also hired, off the books, that same year by current Venezuelan ruler Delcy Rodríguez to represent PDVSA for the astronomical sum of $50 million.)

In 2019, en route to Ukraine, Giuliani and Parnas stopped in Toledo to visit Betancourt’s castle and meet Juan Guaidó’s father, as Reuters reported. The point of the gathering, Parnas says, was “to establish that he had secretly supported Guaidó and the Venezuelan opposition” so as to “demonstrate that he was helping advance American foreign-policy objectives.” Just as Trump wanted Parnas and his partner Igor Fruman to establish a “back channel” mode of communication with Ukraine, Betancourt wanted, he says, to establish a back channel to the Venezuelan government. But as Parnas points out, Harry Sargeant already was the “back channel” to Venezuela, via his relationship with Maduro. For that same reason, he had a target on his back among neocons like John Bolton and Mike Pompeo. The Barr Justice Department was prosecuting Sargeant’s company for Foreign Corrupt Practices Act violations at the time of the Toledo meeting, and after the Trump administration ordered it to cease doing business with Venezuela in spring 2025, federal investigators began probing accusations that the company had attempted to steal $43 million worth of asphalt on its way out the door.

What Betancourt offered the Trump administration, then, was something they probably didn’t yet know they needed: a back channel the hawks didn’t know about, preferably with a Chavista government official who through some miracle hadn’t yet been indicted. And given his knack for anticipating the needs of others, one wonders if Betancourt wasn’t also involved in promoting to Giuliani the fateful Venezuelan voting machine conspiracy theories, given that, the following year, Giuliani’s own claims about voting machine problems in the U.S. would put him on the losing end of a $2.7 billion defamation suit, which just happened to be brought by Betancourt’s own defamation lawyer Thomas Clare. In any event, the new back channel gave Maduro and Sargeant the Rudy treatment, which might have been more sustainable if the plan it had devised didn’t require PDVSA to do the same to the Venezuelan constitution and $10 billion in Chinese capital investment.

As former Biden official Francisco Palmieri observed, voicing his incredulity about the deal to The Washington Post: Betancourt is “someone ‘loathed by almost all sectors in Venezuela,’” in addition to some of its most loathsome exiles. To be fair, every credible source reports that Betancourt’s oil fields have already increased production tenfold, boosting the country’s aggregate oil production by more than 25 percent since the Trump coup and creating monthslong bottlenecks at the country’s dilapidated ports, but also perhaps suggesting that a single unitary resource looter is fundamentally more efficient than the sprawling theft syndicates that were historically drawn to Venezuela’s oil reserves. No wonder Jeffrey Epstein was so keen to meet with the guy.

The post appeared first on The American Prospect.