Elio Casale (@eliocasale en threads.net)

The FT quoted me referring to Venezuela’s Alejandro Betancourt as a “POS.” I was being concise. Allow me to explain: 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 overbilled Venezuela by billions for power plants that did not work. He bribed every minister and vice minister involved in the deal. This is all now public. The Derwick Associates criminal enterprise is perhaps the most perfect illustration of the corruption that flourished during Hugo Chávez’s dictatorship. Why is he more of a POS than the average corrupt Chavista? Because Betancourt had access to an excellent education and was born into privilege (but not money—his family had frittered their fortune away). Betancourt exploited the connections he had made in his Caracas high school, including a friendship with the son of Chávez’s vice minister of electricity. That is how it all began. That is the origin of his ill-gotten wealth. Betancourt’s criminality is remarkably simple: Who do I have to pay? How much do I have to give them? How do I make sure that everyone I pay with stolen money becomes invested in protecting me? His own partner, Francisco D’Agostino, admitted their methods to me. And it has since been proven in multiple cross-border investigations. That method did not stop in Venezuela. He has since spent enormous sums hiring firms, consultants, lobbyists, PR operatives, journalists, producers, real estate agents, lawyers, investigators, and political figures across the ideological spectrum, in multiple countries… particularly Spain, France, the United Kingdom, and the United States, to launder his rotten reputation and keep himself from being prosecuted for his many crimes. Betancourt paid a former Executive Assistant District Attorney of New York to halt prosecutions in Manhattan (Adam S. Kaufmann). Betancourt paid Fusion GPS, the firm behind the Steele dossier. Betancourt paid former WSJ reporters to smear whistleblowers who dared to expose him. Betancourt paid Rudy Giuliani as part of a legal effort urging the US Justice Department not to charge him while he was under investigation for a cascade of felonies. Think about that combination for a moment. Fusion GPS and Rudy Giuliani. Betancourt’s ideology is transactional: Pay anyone useful. Turn money into access. Turn access into protection. Turn protection into respectability. Democrat or Republican. Left or right. It makes no difference. There is no ideology beyond self-preservation. Everything he touches he soils, and makes part of his criminality. When I called Alejandro Betancourt a POS, I was being efficient. The real scandal is that the United States government is now willing to treat him as a legitimate partner.