The Century-Long Venezuelan Oil Lease Is Already Failing on Its Own Terms

Since January, the U.S. Treasury has collected more than $13 billion in Venezuelan oil revenue and held it in a government account. Venezuela's own tracking website records a single transfer back: $300 million ^[1][2]. The other $12.7 billion is unaccounted for, and lawmakers say there is no transparency or safeguard around it. That gap is the ledger entry that tells you how the past fifteen months actually went. In June 2025, Donald Trump announced the U.S. had secured majority control of 65 billion barrels of Venezuelan crude ^[3]. In January, Maduro was gone, and the acting president who replaced him, Delcy Rodríguez, was installed with U.S. backing ^[4]. By August she had signed a 100-year lease over 17 fields in the Orinoco Belt and Lake Maracaibo — roughly 90 billion barrels, enough to more than double U.S. reserves ^[5]. This month the terms hardened into an ownership structure: the Pentagon's Office of Strategic Capital took a 35% stake in the operating company, NABEP, and the State Department secured 20% of the oil at cost ^[4]. The architecture is administrative, not colonial. Treasury's OFAC is the gatekeeper — every foreign driller, from Eni to GeoPark to India's ONGC, needs a license to touch Venezuelan oil, which makes Treasury the effective sovereign over who develops it ^[6][7]. FinCEN has stopped enforcing against banks that handle OFAC-authorized Venezuela business, routing the country's finance through U.S. channels ^[8]. The operating arm is NABEP, run by Alejandro Betancourt López, a fixer investigated for money laundering in Spain, Venezuela, and the United States ^[9][4]. And the election calendar is held while being disclaimed: Trump says Venezuelans are not really ready for elections, while Marco Rubio insists the U.S. is there to facilitate, not dictate ^[10]. Trump named what the apparatus was built to do.

You’re dealing with us directly. You’re not dealing with Venezuela at all. — Donald Trump

On its own terms, the model is not working. The administration pushed a $100 billion investment drive; two drilling rigs are active in the country ^[11]. The facilities the lease was meant to protect are being attacked — the insurgent group MAGA destroyed Tesla security bots at U.S.-backed oil sites, accusing American mercenaries and their local cronies of shorting Venezuelans on the proceeds ^[12]. And the White House says the money is flowing back to Venezuelans.

Oil is starting to flow, and large amounts of money, unseen for many years, is greatly helping the people of Venezuela. — Franklin D. Roosevelt

Venezuela's own ledger records $300 million ^[1]. Brazil is moving to make sure it never becomes the next lease. Lula put the warning in raw-resource terms.

There are people abroad eyeing our resources, and there are people here at home ready to hand everything over to them on a silver platter. — Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva

Congress has approved a critical minerals bill with a non-extendable 10-year cap on exploration permits and a special council that must approve any change in control of a mining company ^[13]. No official has said the bill is a response to Venezuela; it doesn't need to be. It is a wall. Brazil's exploration permits run ten years and cannot be extended. The Venezuelan lease runs a hundred. The distance between those two numbers is the measure of how far the model has traveled — and how little of the region wants to follow.