{"id":554,"date":"2026-06-17T18:37:44","date_gmt":"2026-06-17T18:37:44","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/cityrelocationnews.com\/?p=554"},"modified":"2026-06-17T18:37:44","modified_gmt":"2026-06-17T18:37:44","slug":"the-hole-in-donald-trumps-venezuelan-oil-strategy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cityrelocationnews.com\/?p=554","title":{"rendered":"The Hole in Donald Trump\u2019s Venezuelan Oil Strategy"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Jarrod Agen, the head of President Donald Trump\u2019s National Energy Dominance Council, was in a celebratory mood. Just after one o\u2019clock on April 30th, he landed in Caracas, Venezuela, on the first direct commercial flight to arrive from the United States since 2019. Only a few months before Agen\u2019s trip, the Venezuelan government had accused the U.S. of orchestrating an imperialist scheme to plunder its resources. Now regime officials waited patiently on the tarmac as the plane carrying Agen\u2019s delegation passed under the streams of a water salute and rolled to a stop. The pilots leaned out of the windows of the cockpit, unfurling American and Venezuelan flags for the cameras. Sporting a dark suit and gold-framed aviators, Agen descended the air stairs with a confident smile. \u201cPresident Trump is a man of action,\u201d he said. \u201cWe are moving at Trump speed to get things done.\u201d<\/p>\n

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Since the day that Trump intervened in Venezuela, the President has been blunt about his motives. \u201cWe\u2019re in the oil business,\u201d he said, just after announcing the capture of the country\u2019s leader, Nicol\u00e1s Maduro. Venezuela has some of the world\u2019s largest proven oil reserves, and U.S. companies once ran extensive operations there. But the regime had pushed almost all of these businesses out years ago, and Trump was eager to facilitate their return. \u201cWe\u2019re going to have our very large United States oil companies\u2014the biggest anywhere in the world\u2014go in, spend billions of dollars, fix the badly broken infrastructure, and start making money for the country.\u201d The U.S. took control of Venezuela\u2019s oil exports, and officials were dispatched to Caracas to broker deals with the regime.<\/p>\n

Agen, who had visited Trump in the Oval Office just before his trip, had brought along representatives from oil companies seeking to invest in the country. He planned to meet Venezuela\u2019s interim leader, Delcy Rodr\u00edguez, for lunch to discuss some of the deals that his boss was \u201cvery excited about.\u201d Before their meeting, he was escorted into a hall where a guestbook lay open to a blank page, a portrait of Maduro wearing the Presidential sash hanging conspicuously above it. Unfazed, Agen bent over to sign the book. \u201cDrill Baby Drill!\u201d he wrote.<\/p>\n

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Venezuela\u2019s oil industry has been under state control for decades. By welcoming foreign investment, Rodr\u00edguez was trying to distance herself from her predecessor\u2019s failures. The country had spiraled under Maduro\u2019s leadership: the economy shrank by three-fourths, inflation skyrocketed, and about twenty-five per cent of the population fled Venezuela. \u201cIf Rodr\u00edguez wants to save the Bolivarian revolution, she has to use this\u2014whatever time frame Rubio and Trump are going to give her\u2014to deliver the goods economically in Venezuela to win back the population,\u201d a former U.S. senior official told me.<\/p>\n

During her time as the country\u2019s Vice-President, Rodr\u00edguez came to oversee the state-run oil company, P.D.V.S.A. Under Maduro, corruption inside the organization was rampant: shell companies linked to the President stole billions of dollars\u2019 worth of exports, and large sums of money vanished from P.D.V.S.A.\u2019s coffers. When Maduro took office, in 2013, Venezuela was producing more than two million barrels of oil per day. But, under his tenure, production tanked: by 2020, Venezuela\u2019s production levels had dipped below four hundred thousand barrels.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Rodr\u00edguez didn\u2019t root out the organization\u2019s dysfunctions, but, in her dealings with Americans, she succeeded in casting herself as a more reliable interlocutor than those who came before her. Chevron, which has been operating in Venezuela for decades, worked directly with Rodr\u00edguez as it increased its production in the country during the Biden Administration. \u201cWhen P.D.V.S.A. elements tried to run their skimming operations, Chevron would go to Delcy, and she would shut that shit down,\u201d the U.S. official said. \u201cThere\u2019s a lot of belief among people in the oil sector that they can do deals with Delcy Rodr\u00edguez, and she will deliver on what she says.\u201d<\/p>\n

Trump has said that he expects to see at least a hundred billion dollars in investments flow into the country. In the months since his Administration rolled back long-standing sanctions, Venezuela\u2019s ten-year sovereign bond has soared, and investors have flocked to Caracas with the zeal of bargain hunters at a flea market. The U.S. has imported roughly a hundred million barrels of oil, worth an estimated eight billion dollars, from the country. \u201cWhen you lose eighty-five per cent of your G.D.P., there\u2019s a big opportunity,\u201d James Story, a former American Ambassador to Venezuela, said. \u201cThat means that there\u2019s nowhere to go but up.\u201d<\/p>\n

Still, experts have cast doubt on the long-term viability of the Administration\u2019s efforts in Venezuela. \u201cA lot of people are saying that perhaps we did everyone a favor by getting rid of Maduro, because there was a level of pragmatism outside of him, but an inability to act because he made all the decisions,\u201d Story said. \u201cThat doesn\u2019t necessarily mean that Delcy is a dyed-in-the-wool capitalist who was just waiting for her moment.\u201d Story noted that Rodr\u00edguez\u2019s political ascendancy happened under Maduro. \u201cFor thirteen years, she was part of the beggaring of the nation,\u201d he said. \u201cIs she not somehow responsible for the outcome?\u201d<\/p>\n

Like many observers, Story believes that Venezuela\u2019s oil industry will not recover unless there is a change in leadership. Rodr\u00edguez remains deeply unpopular in Venezuela; the opposition figure Mar\u00eda Corina Machado still maintains support among huge swaths of the population. \u201cThe same institutions\u2014and many of the same individuals\u2014that presided over the country\u2019s economic and institutional collapse remain in power today,\u201d Luis Pacheco, a Venezuelan engineer who spent sixteen years at P.D.V.S.A., said.<\/p>\n

The Trump Administration\u2019s plan for Venezuela has three phases: stabilization, recovery, and transition. Pacheco insisted that recovery could not take place without transition. Although Secretary of State Marco Rubio has said that the phases might overlap, Trump has shown little interest in promoting an election in Venezuela. \u201cIt strains belief to think that those who dismantled the country\u2019s institutional framework will now be the ones to rebuild it,\u201d Pacheco said.<\/p>\n

When Ricardo Rausseo, a Venezuelan businessman who has been living in Texas for almost eight years, heard that Maduro was gone, he was exultant. An engineer by training, Rausseo had co-founded a contracting business when the Venezuelan oil industry was booming. For years, he oversaw maintenance at the nation\u2019s largest refineries and worked for some of the biggest names in the industry. \u201cOil runs through my veins,\u201d he told me. \u201cA refinery does for me what a Victoria\u2019s Secret model does for everyone else.\u201d<\/p>\n

Venezuela mainly produces the type of heavy oil that refineries across the U.S. Gulf Coast are designed to process. In the early twentieth century, when vast deposits of oil were found in the country\u2019s northwest, Dutch, British, and American companies seized on the opportunity to develop and profit from the country\u2019s nascent industry. Before long, Venezuela became one of the world\u2019s leading producers of oil. In 1975, government authorities moved to nationalize the country\u2019s oil industry; P.D.V.S.A. came to oversee every step of the process.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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When Hugo Ch\u00e1vez was elected, in 1998, oil accounted for most of the country\u2019s export revenue. The socialist President tightened government control over the industry and pushed thousands of employees, including geologists and engineers, out of P.D.V.S.A. Rausseo still remembers the day when officials mandated workers at the company to wear red\u2014the color of Ch\u00e1vez\u2019s party. The regime also exerted near-total control over staffing decisions. \u201cWe no longer had the freedom to hire our own people,\u201d Rausseo said. \u201cWe had to work through a system they built specifically to reward those who voted for them.\u201d<\/p>\n

Over time, graft and mismanagement came to hobble the industry. Rausseo was expected to fill openings for jobs such as crane operators with people who had never set foot in a refinery. Millions of dollars\u2019 worth of contracts went unpaid. Agreements meant to last decades became a dead letter. Ch\u00e1vez insisted that foreign operators cede majority control of their operations to P.D.V.S.A.; when oil giants like ConocoPhillips and ExxonMobil objected, the government expropriated their assets.<\/p>\n

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In 2018, Rausseo ended his last contract with P.D.V.S.A., for a seven-mile underwater pipe designed to feed oil tankers. \u201cIt was a slow, grinding decline\u2014each day worse than the last\u2014until finally, we hit a wall,\u201d he said. It became clear to him that no one would be spared from the country\u2019s downward spiral. He abandoned operations with a multimillion-dollar debt from P.D.V.S.A.<\/p>\n

Over the past couple of months, Rausseo has been in touch with business owners who, like him, are thinking about going back. Word spread around that the regime was looking into ways to service the debts of businesses willing to partner with American companies in Venezuela. Industry leaders were considering their options, too. Chevron had vowed to grow its presence on the ground and increase its production in the country by about fifty per cent. Exxon initially was unwilling to entertain the idea of returning, but later dispatched negotiators to meet with Rodr\u00edguez\u2019s team and inspect different sites, including one that it formerly operated. \u201cIt\u2019s a country with an immense untapped potential,\u201d Francisco Monaldi, the director of Rice University\u2019s Latin America Energy Program, said. \u201cAlthough the infrastructure is deteriorated and there are many issues to address, it remains an opportunity unlike almost any other in the world.\u201d<\/p>\n

Rausseo had seen these opportunities up close, but he had also witnessed the industry\u2019s implosion. Like many people, he was having trouble shaking off his suspicions of the regime. So far, most investments in Venezuela are in existing oil sites\u2014brownfields, in industry parlance. Investors with a high-risk threshold, particularly from Texas, have been jumping at those opportunities, Monaldi said. \u201cIf you run the numbers, you could recoup your investment in about a year,\u201d he added. But no one was counting on these deals to revive Venezuela\u2019s oil industry or bring in the hundred billion dollars that Trump repeatedly cited.<\/p>\n

Venezuela\u2019s institutions have been in the regime\u2019s grip for so long that they have lost all credibility. There are no checks and balances; no independent agency to auction off and assign oil licenses. According to Monaldi, P.D.V.S.A. controls about a quarter of the country\u2019s oil production; people with connections to the regime hold a comparable share. The other half is split into joint-venture arrangements. Chevron oversees twenty-five per cent of the national output. \u201cThe remainder? It\u2019s basically Russia and China, through their respective state-owned energy companies,\u201d Monaldi said. \u201cIf you add up the shares belonging to the regime\u2019s associates with the Russian and Chinese stakes, you\u2019re looking at well over forty per cent of Venezuela\u2019s total production\u2014and that is a genuine hot potato for Washington.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Monaldi has been keeping an eye out for investments in greenfields\u2014projects involving entirely new infrastructure, which are costlier and require a commitment over the long term. So far, none have materialized. At Washington\u2019s insistence, Rodr\u00edguez\u2019s government passed a new hydrocarbon law, which gives private companies greater autonomy to operate oil fields and sell the crude. But too many questions remain around Venezuela\u2019s fiscal terms and how contract disputes might be solved. The C.E.O. of ConocoPhillips, Ryan Lance, has said that Rodr\u00edguez\u2019s legislation is \u201cwoefully inadequate.\u201d A more pressing issue for his company is whether the regime will pay back the twelve billion dollars it owes ConocoPhillips since expropriating its assets, in 2007.<\/p>\n

\u201cIn the absence of institutions, everything must go through one person,\u201d Luisa Palacios, a Venezuelan expert at Columbia\u2019s Center on Global Energy Policy, said. \u201cAnything that hinges on a single individual carries exceptionally high risk.\u201d With time, investors would adjust their position depending on how Venezuela\u2019s risk profile changed. \u201cTo properly assess that level of risk, you need to understand what is subject to change\u2014politically and legally,\u201d Palacios added. \u201cThe central question for any investor is this: How confident can I be that, three years from now, in the absence of an election, Venezuela won\u2019t be dragged back into a sanctions regime? There is also the rule-of-law question: what guarantees do I have that my assets won\u2019t be seized again, or that the rules won\u2019t be rewritten again?\u201d<\/p>\n

Pacheco compared the plight of Venezuela\u2019s oil industry to that of a family dealing with a tangled inheritance. \u201cImagine there\u2019s a room; in that room, there are boxes filled with your grandmother\u2019s jewels. If you get your hands on those jewels, you can walk them straight to Sotheby\u2019s or Christie\u2019s and turn a profit. It\u2019s a quick win. Except, who has the key to the room? Nobody seems to know. Where\u2019s the door? Also unclear. What does it take to get in? No one can say.\u201d He went on, \u201cPresident Trump\u2019s underlying vision is right. Venezuela can be a major player in the global oil markets. The country sits in the right hemisphere to serve U.S. interests. But the key to the vault is in Venezuelan hands.\u201d<\/p>\n

Venezuela\u2019s oil revenues are currently being held by the U.S. Treasury, but neither country has disclosed how much money has flowed into the accounts, or what it has been used for. Since Maduro\u2019s capture, there have been few tangible changes in people\u2019s lives; the official minimum wage has remained frozen at a hundred and thirty bol\u00edvares per month, or less than a dollar, and people have been forced to rely on government-issued bonuses. The gap between Trump\u2019s economic ambitions and the reality on the ground gets wider every day.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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\u201cWe\u2019re falling back into the same trap the oil industry has fallen into in the past,\u201d Rausseo said. For all the talk of revamping Venezuela\u2019s oil infrastructure or improving the fiscal regime, there seemed to be no concern for the fact that the country has been ruined. \u201cHunger doesn\u2019t wait,\u201d he added. \u201cWhen eighty per cent of your population lives in poverty, you cannot look those people in the eye and say, \u2018Hold on, we\u2019ll first invest in these oil wells, then the companies will pay their royalties and taxes, and the government\u2014whoever that may be\u2014will take that money, redistribute it, and create social programs.\u2019 The urgency simply doesn\u2019t allow for it.\u201d In Rausseo\u2019s view, the industry needed to seriously think about how to \u201csembrar el petr\u00f3leo<\/em>,\u201d or sow the seeds of oil wealth.<\/p>\n

Rodr\u00edguez had initially pledged transparency: she set up a government website, for everyone to see the country\u2019s revenues. (Under her leadership, the government has sold oil to the U.S., Spain, and India.) But the only entry on the site was added in March: a sale of three hundred million dollars\u2019 worth of oil. \u201cThis arrangement\u2014total U.S. control over oil revenues\u2014is simply not sustainable,\u201d Pacheco said. The State Department had greenlit a disbursement of three billion dollars from the accounts and said that the accounting firm K.P.M.G. was auditing the money, but none of its reports had been made public, and little had been said about the Administration\u2019s efforts to rein in corruption. In Pacheco\u2019s view, this all posed a political conundrum: \u201cIf you hand everything Venezuela is producing to the Rodr\u00edguez regime, you\u2019ll be left with almost no leverage over her administration. But, if you give too little, the government will not be able to stabilize the currency, tame inflation, and so forth. So, you end up engineering a crisis with the potential to erupt into a full-blown social uprising.\u201d<\/p>\n

Exactly how Venezuela might become a major player in the industry remains an open question. For now, the only consensus is that it will take time, and that too many variables are at play. Rodr\u00edguez\u2019s dealings with the Trump Administration have come at a cost. \u201cEveryone around her is watching her every move,\u201d Benigno Alarc\u00f3n, a leading political analyst in Venezuela, said. \u201cThis could fracture the government if others feel they are being left to fend for themselves.\u201d Several voices within her party were already speaking out against the Trump Administration\u2019s proconsul role. Last month, when the U.S. conducted military drills over Caracas, Rodr\u00edguez\u2019s government downplayed them as \u201cevacuation\u201d exercises in the event of an emergency. The regime later circulated a video of Ch\u00e1vez that begins with the message, \u201cHe who knows how to master his emotions and bide his time, controls the fate of the battle.\u201d<\/p>\n

Rodr\u00edguez has reasons to play for time. Trump has only a few years left in office, and Republican prospects for the midterms are bleak. Democrats in Congress have voiced their intention to curtail the Administration\u2019s operations in Venezuela. Lawmakers have already requested that the U.S. Government Accountability Office look into the Trump Administration\u2019s handling of oil exports. As James Story, the U.S. diplomat, sees it, Rodr\u00edguez is counting on four things: a loss of interest on Trump\u2019s part; his distraction with another foreign-policy issue; a Republican loss at the polls in November; and the end of Trump\u2019s term. \u201cTwo of those things have happened,\u201d Story said. \u201cI haven\u2019t seen any movement on anything when it comes to democracy, yet we send Cabinet secretaries to sit across the table with people who have twenty-five-million-dollar rewards on their heads. We have to start making the hard asks of this regime now, because I can tell you, hard things don\u2019t get easier with time.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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The day after Agen landed in Caracas, a reporter called Rodr\u00edguez out: \u201cA few questions from the press?\u201d Smiling, Rodr\u00edguez deflected him: \u201cNo, I\u2019m O.K., thank you.\u201d The reporter persisted: \u201cWhen do you expect to hold elections in Venezuela?\u201d Rodr\u00edguez threw her hands in the air, making her way to the exit: \u201cI don\u2019t know,\u201d she said, with a dry laugh. \u201cSometime.\u201d\u00a0\u2666<\/p>\n

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Stephania Taladrid on why American investors are rushing back to Venezuela\u2019s vast oil sector, where promises of reform are fueling optimism even as many of the officials responsible for its decline remain in power.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":553,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-554","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-the-lede"],"yoast_head":"\nThe Hole in Donald Trump\u2019s Venezuelan Oil Strategy - City Relocation News<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/cityrelocationnews.com\/?p=554\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"The Hole in Donald Trump\u2019s Venezuelan Oil Strategy - 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