The hand of the United States has resurfaced in the legal proceedings facing Alejandro Betancourt. This time in Spain. The Venezuelan businessman, identified as the architect of the deal that will give Donald Trump control of a fifth of Venezuela’s oil, has been under investigation by Spain’s National Court (Audiencia Nacional) for more than a year on charges of money laundering and tax evasion. But the case has been stalled for months, and sources close to the investigation point to one party responsible: Washington.

Judge Santiago Pedraz is waiting on a response to a formal request for legal assistance sent to U.S. authorities that never arrives, and after shelving the case once already, he has issued a new warning: if there is no answer from the United States by December, he will close the case again.

Behind this story lies more than a simple delay; it’s about a figure of critical interest to the United States. Betancourt has emerged as the man behind the oil deal that Washington and Caracas signed a few weeks ago, one that will allow the United States to profit to the tune of millions of dollars from a quarter of Venezuela’s oil reserves. Trump’s inner circle is well aware of his legal cases in Venezuela, the United States, Switzerland, and Spain —the latter two still active— but has used him to achieve its goal of reviving Venezuela’s oil business following the capture of Nicolás Maduro this past January 3.

The signing of that deal put the businessman and his multiple legal cases under scrutiny, but the White House —and acting Venezuelan president Delcy Rodríguez— have not only defended him publicly, but had also been maneuvering for months to protect him legally, as U.S. media has extensively documented.

The Spanish judicial proceeding, which is investigating the origin and destination of more than 4 billion dollars allegedly diverted from PDVSA, Venezuela’s state oil company, is waiting for Washington to respond to a request to take testimony from a series of key witnesses, since they have already been convicted in the United States. Their testimony could help establish the underlying crime in Madrid, but nearly a year after that request was made, no one has responded.

The money laundering offense under investigation in Spain requires a predicate crime that establishes the illicit origin of the funds. Judicial sources explain that if the witnesses confirm corruption at the oil company, it would establish that the money that reached Spanish territory has illicit roots, and the Spanish case could move forward to examine how that money was laundered by feeding it into a legal financial system. Betancourt, known in Spain for having become the owner of the Hawkers eyewear brand, invested millions in numerous Spanish companies and even bought a castle in Toledo.

The five “essential” witnesses have already been convicted in the United States for the same PDVSA corruption scheme, known as Money Flight. They are Abraham Ortega Morales, the oil company’s former director of financial planning; Carmelo Urdaneta, a senior official in Venezuela’s oil sector; Álvaro Ledo Nass, PDVSA’s former legal advisor; Luis Fernando Vuteff, an Argentine businessman and son-in-law of opposition figure Antonio Ledezma; and Luis Carlos de León, former financial director of Electricidad de Caracas, a PDVSA subsidiary.

Sources at the Audiencia Nacional explain that there is no legal deadline by which the country must respond. So when does it usually respond? “When it’s in its interest,” notes one judge who asked to remain anonymous. Spain and the U.S. have well-oiled judicial cooperation systems backed by cooperation treaties. In fact, the Ministry of Justice keeps a Spanish liaison judge in Washington to help facilitate cooperation. Until a few weeks ago that position was held by María de las Heras, though she has just been replaced by judge Íñigo Herrero.

Prosecutorial sources who have worked in international cooperation explain that collaboration with the United States isn’t always straightforward, given the country’s size and the fact that its 50 states plus federal system operate separately. Cooperation becomes more difficult, they say, when what’s being requested is a measure that limits rights —such as a search and seizure or a wiretap— but they note that taking testimony via videoconference, as in this case, “should move quickly.”

In this impasse, Betancourt is shoring up his legal position with documents from Venezuela’s Public Ministry certifying that, despite all the schemes and suspicions in which the businessman has ended up involved, the case against him in his home country was dismissed without his involvement being proven.

EL PAÍS reached out to the U.S. Department of Justice, which did not respond; the State Department, which declined to respond officially; and the Pentagon, which merely offered the same statement issued after the announcement of the oil deal with Betancourt, reports Macarena Vidal Liy.

American help in Switzerland

The proceedings in Spain stem from an investigation opened in Switzerland nearly a decade ago. The Zurich Prosecutor’s Office had an extradition order against Betancourt from the United Kingdom, where he remained confined between his two mansions because he was barred from leaving the country. But in May, U.S. efforts to help him paid off. As The Washington Post revealed, senior Trump administration officials —then-Attorney General Pam Bondi, her deputy Todd Blanche, and Deputy Secretary of State Christopher Landau— pressured Swiss prosecutors directly seeking information and favorable treatment for their ally.

The Zurich Prosecutor’s Office declined to confirm to this newspaper whether that pressure influenced its decision, but it did confirm that it withdrew the extradition request, citing particularities of British law. Thanks to that withdrawal, the travel restrictions the U.K. had imposed on him while reviewing the extradition request were lifted, and Betancourt was able to resume flying by private jet to Venezuela and the United States to finalize the details of the historic oil deal announced by Trump nearly two weeks ago.

The case in Switzerland remains open, but another detail revealed by The Post showed that the United States has no interest in cooperating. The Prosecutor’s Office asked the U.S. Department of Justice to arrest Betancourt if he entered U.S. territory, and not only did it fail to do so, but it also shielded him as its business partner.

Meanwhile in Spain, the Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office —which filed the original lawsuit in June 2025 not only against Betancourt but also against his cousin Pedro Trebbau, his partner Francisco Convit, and three other people— remains determined to prove a multimillion-dollar fraud.

According to the investigation, in 2012 the Venezuelan oil company issued a 4.35 billion loan to the private company Administrador Atlantic that was, in reality, only meant to get the money out of the country so it could eventually be laundered, allegedly, through accounts belonging to Venezuelan businessmen and former officials. Anti-Corruption investigators believe that “significant amounts of money” were invested in Spanish territory in real estate and other assets after the money was brought from Venezuela “through bribes paid to officials” totaling 42 million dollars.

This vast money-laundering network has international ramifications. Sources close to the investigation explain that between March and April of 2025 there was a meeting at Eurojust —the European Union’s agency for judicial cooperation— where officials from various countries, including Spain, shared information on how to address this complex money-laundering scheme, which sought to conceal, through overlapping companies and different countries, the enormous amount of money under investigation.

Although Judge Pedraz had shelved the case in March, the Criminal Chamber forced him to reopen it following an appeal from the Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office, which considered the dismissal “premature.” Testimony was still needed from those witnesses, who can only be interrogated with Washington’s cooperation. And nothing has moved since.

Betancourt isn’t willing to lose any legal battle, and he has armed himself both inside and outside Spain. Outside the country, back in 2019, he hired Rudy Giuliani —then Donald Trump’s personal lawyer— to defend him before the U.S. Department of Justice, where he had been named an unindicted co-conspirator in the Money Flight case. In Spain, he has retained the law firm of José Antonio Choclán, one of the most sought-after criminal defense attorneys in major corruption cases. The firm has defended, among others, singer Julio Iglesias, the former lover of Spain’s emeritus king, Corinna Larsen, broker Víctor de Aldama in the Koldo case —a corruption scandal implicating the Socialist Party (PSOE)— and former Real Madrid footballer Cristiano Ronaldo.

While the United States has yet to respond to the request for legal assistance, Betancourt has submitted to the Spanish court a document from the Directorate General of International Criminal Cooperation of Venezuela’s Prosecutor’s Office, which was overhauled in February following the capture of Nicolás Maduro. Unlike the terms former Attorney General Tarek William Saab and several Chavista officials used to describe Betancourt in the past, this document now clears him of all responsibility.

The speed of Venezuelan justice contrasts sharply, in this case, with the slowness of the American one. In just six days —following a formal request from his own lawyer in Caracas on June 30— the agency’s director, Ana Osto Ascanio, signed a response detailing the investigation point by point. It reaffirms that the Venezuelan case was closed in 2023 with “res judicata” status, meaning, the Venezuelan prosecutor’s office argues, that he cannot be prosecuted in another country for the same acts, according to investigation documents reviewed by EL PAÍS.

Various sources consulted at the Audiencia Nacional point out the speed with which Delcy Rodríguez’s government —which now backs Betancourt— handed over this document, even as Venezuela has gone decades without cooperating in other major Spanish judicial cases, such as the extradition of ETA members sheltering in the country. One such case involves the Audiencia Nacional’s renewed effort to locate 14 ETA members in hopes that Maduro’s fall would open a new avenue for cooperation, a request that remains unresolved.

Judge Pedraz’s ultimatum, in any case, still stands. In a filing dated August 10, the judge stated that he cannot continue pursuing proceedings into the money laundering charge because, without establishing the predicate crime (corruption), they would be “useless.” The judge asserts that he “cannot wait indefinitely for U.S. authorities” to act on Spain’s request, calling it contradictory that they have shown “great interest and cooperation” while failing to respond. He therefore allows a “reasonable amount of time” that, in his view, “cannot extend beyond December of this year.”

The clock, once again, is running in Betancourt’s favor. And in this case, the United States doesn’t need to make major moves that later get exposed in the American press months down the line. Simply doing nothing is enough.

The Argentine collective joy after winning the Qatar World Cup in 2022 was played out to a soundtrack that began like this: “In Argentina I was born, land of Diego and Lionel, of the lads from the Falklands I will never forget.” Four years later — in the attempt to win a fourth star in the tournament held in the U.S., Mexico and Canada — Messi, Maradona and the islands shared verses again in a new Argentine soccer anthem: “For the Falklands, for Diego, for Leo’s last one, Argentina, I want to see you two-time champion.”

In Argentina, soccer and nationhood go hand-in-hand. There is no greater or more popular nationalist cause here than regaining the islands that have been a British Overseas Territory since 1833. The Falklands, which are known in Argentina as Las Malvinas, awaken a mix of pride, pain, and belonging, but they also create a consensus that turns them into a readily available political resource to shift attention when reality becomes uncomfortable, as Javier Milei has just done.

Why do the Falklands occupy a central place in the Argentine imagination? Some researchers say you must go back to Argentina’s founding narrative and its thwarted destiny — the story that nostalgically recalls that the country was once powerful and prosperous and then ceased to be.

“When Argentina emancipated itself from Spain, the Falklands were part of it and then they were stolen from us, and that ties into Argentina’s trauma — to what it could be and is not,” says political scientist Mariana Altieri, author of the book Malvinas y Gibraltar, conflictos atrincherados (The Falklands and Gibraltar: Long-Standing Conflicts). She recalls that from the start of the British occupation successive governments and major literary figures such as José Hernández, author of Martín Fierro, demanded Argentine sovereignty over the islands. “Those rights never expire,” Hernández wrote in 1869.

“The farther the idea of recovering them recedes, the more the logic of revenge grows,” Altieri continues, noting that soccer has been one of the arenas where that revenge has been possible symbolically. The most remembered instance came in 1986, only four years after the Falklands War, when Diego Armando Maradona scored one goal with his hand and another after dribbling past five English players and the goalkeeper in what was dubbed “the goal of the century.” The latest meeting, in 2026, in the World Cup semifinal, featured his heir, Lionel Messi, as captain of the Albiceleste in a comeback 2-1 victory. The euphoria that greeted the second goal in front of every television in Argentina increased at the end of the match, when some players unfurled a homemade flag on the pitch that read “Las Malvinas son argentinas” (The Falklands are Argentine). No one cared about the expected FIFA sanction.

Anthropologist Rosana Guber, one of the country’s leading specialists on the Falklands War, says it was “obvious” there would be some political claim during the match. “The players were a channel. The protagonist was a guy at the hotel who grabbed a sheet and painted the slogan on it. He was nobody. Or he was everyone. Because what he did was shout that we beat the British, that we have rights over the islands and that we must be recognized,” Guber says.

A professor and senior researcher at the National Scientific and Technical Research Council (CONICET), Guber believes that the feeling the Falklands provoke in Argentines can be understood if they are seen as a symbol. “A symbol like the flag, the national anthem, or the cross. And symbols have different meanings, not just one. They speak to people who can hold very different positions on everything. That was the point Milei appealed to the other day, saying: ‘On this we are all together.’ Just like in 1982,” she notes.

Of all its multiple meanings, Guber highlights three: the outstanding sovereignty issue that Great Britain refuses to negotiate with any Argentine government; the popular cause that claims the Falklands from soccer stands, parades, demonstrations and any other setting; and the 1982 war, to which the dictatorship sent thousands of conscripts aged 19 and 20 and which caused the deaths of 649 Argentine combatants and 255 British servicemen.

An omnipresent emblem

Historian Esteban Rodríguez lives in Río Grande, the city closest to the Falklands. It is less than 600 kilometers (370 miles) away, compared with the nearly 12,800 kilometers (7,950 miles) separating the islands from the British coast. The province that includes Río Grande, Argentina’s southernmost, is called Tierra del Fuego, Antarctica, and the South Atlantic Islands, and the outline of the islands appears on every Fuegian student uniform, on all of the local soccer clubs’ kits and on numerous murals and plaques. The provincial anthem is the March of the Malvinas. Children learn it from the moment they enter school: “Behind their misty quilt / We shall not forget them / The Argentine Falklands / Claims the wind and roars the sea.”

It is easy to understand why, Rodríguez says, because the Falklands are an inseparable part of Argentine identity, especially in the south. “We feel the Falklands as a loss and it is a loss that has been seared into us because we are reminded of it all the time,” the historian says. That feeling deepened after defeat in the war declared by the dictator Leopoldo Fortunato Galtieri.

Río Grande was the main city in the conflict. Super Étendard jets took off from there to bomb British ships. After the defeat, every April 1, on the eve of the day the war began, a vigil is held to pay tribute to the fallen and keep the memory alive. The tribute continued despite the de-Falklandization policies imposed in the 1980s and 1990s, when veterans maintained the cause against the tide. Today, despite low temperatures and the nearly constant icy wind, “the vigil can bring together up to 20,000 people,” Rodríguez says.

Unknown islands

Journalist Nicolás Cassese has just published the novel Puerto Stanley, 1982 and has traveled to the Falklands three times as a reporter for the newspaper La Nación. He believes many Argentines know little about the islands beyond the dispossession in 1833 and the war a century and a half later: “The latest resurgence of Argentine nationalism rests on the triple M — Messi, Maradona and the Malvinas — but we have an enormous amount of information on the first two and almost nothing about the Falklands,” Cassese says.

As an example, he recalls that when he published the novel some friends asked about the title because they did not know what Puerto Stanley referred to and some even associated it with a well-known brand of thermoses. They were unaware that it is the name the British use for the largest town in the archipelago, Port Stanley, known on Argentine maps as Puerto Argentino. Although he was accused on social media of being a traitor, he explains that the town was founded in 1845, when the British already controlled the islands, and that Argentines themselves used that name for decades. Also little known are the strong cultural and commercial ties that once existed between the Falklands, Tierra del Fuego, and the far south of Chile. “The first sheep brought to Santa Cruz at the end of the 19th century came from the Falklands,” he says by way of example.

Knowledge about the islands is rarely firsthand. Fewer than 1% of Argentines have visited the Falklands. The journey is very expensive, requires staying at least a week and accepting that your passport will be stamped. Yet they are an indispensable part of the historical construction of national identity. “In the 19th century, Argentina was a new country with many immigrants who spoke different languages, and education was crucial to creating a common identity. The Falklands were part of that narrative,” Cassese says. Others, like Guber, believe the school’s role was lesser than often claimed, even minimal.

Experts speak of the Falklands as a symbol, a place of mourning and an open wound. But the islands are also one of the few points of unity in a society split in two. That unity has made them politically useful on numerous occasions. Milei took advantage of a remark by Donald Trump that hinted the United States might revisit its historic neutrality in the sovereignty dispute over the islands to defend, on national television, the statement “the Falklands are Argentine.” In his speech, which ended with “viva la patria” (long live the homeland), he announced sanctions against companies operating in the area without Argentine authorization and promised to build a military base in the south.

Given that a 2011 law already imposes those sanctions and that construction of the announced base had already begun before he halted it, the opposition accused him of opportunism and of “galtierizing” the cause, in reference to the former dictator. The La Plata Veterans’ Center (CECIM) branded Milei a hypocrite and criticized his use of the Falklands as a “life preserver to hide his miseries.”

Cassese, by contrast, argues that “for Milei embracing the Falklands cause is all gain” and notes that with it he shields “one of his weak flanks; the accusation of being a sellout,” since he has tried to reform the law that caps foreign ownership of land.

Argentina’s foreign policy on the Falklands has swung for decades between confrontation and attempts at rapprochement. Altieri believes Milei has so far chosen the cooperative line, like Mauricio Macri before him. In 2025, Milei expressed support for self-determination for the Falkland Islanders: “We hope that the Malvinas people will one day decide to vote with their feet for us. That is why we seek to make Argentina such a power that they will prefer to be Argentines.” By contrast, his televised speech on Thursday “was a 180-degree turn,” says Altieri.

While Milei’s economic course divides society, “the announcement of sanctions, of imposing costs on the British, generates a lot of support; the majority agree that that is what must be done,” Altieri adds. In his third year in office, Milei has just discovered the power of a flag that transcends the divide.

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