Yesterday, I asked a Venezuelan in the area about the oil deal between the US and his country. He concluded with a rather sensible point: The US is the best country to do business with. My guess is that most Venezuelans share that view after almost 30 years of Chavez wrecking their oil industry and country.
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This is a good deal for both sides, as Yuri Perez pointed out:
For more than a quarter-century, Venezuela was not merely poorly governed. It was captured by Cuban communist intelligence services. Russian arms entrenched it.
Chinese loans stripped the country of sovereignty while the Chávez–Maduro regime looted Venezuela, wrecked the currency and filled the prisons.
The result was a failed state: mass exile, political prisoners, electrical blackouts and a platform for America’s enemies in the Western Hemisphere.
That history is what critics of the new U.S.–Venezuela energy agreement prefer to forget.
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Last week, President Trump announced a historic oil partnership with Venezuela’s interim government. Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Secretary of War Pete Hegseth negotiated it. Interim President Delcy Rodríguez confirmed the core terms: 17 strategic fields holding more than 65 billion barrels, a production target above 1.5 million barrels a day, more than $100 billion in private investment and large fiscal flows to Venezuela.
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Whether the final term is a generation or a century-scale U.S. stake, the meaning is the same. The United States has taken a secured interest in the resource that once financed communism in Cuba and subversion all over Latin America.
Previously, Venezuela’s oil was “sovereign” on paper and enslaved in practice — used to pay Cuban handlers, Russian weapons, and Chinese debt while Venezuelans fled. Sovereignty without property rights, honest courts, and a state that cannot be flipped by the Cuban communist regime is an empty word.
Well said. Sovereignty on paper is what they had. In theory, the people owned the oil, but in reality it was Chavez and the boys who used the resource to get rich, finance their failed socialist projects, send money to left-wing candidates in Latin American elections, and align the country with the world’s bad guys.
The left is calling it colonialism because they can’t get Trump out of their heads. It’s all about Trump with these people. However, my own unscientific survey (i.e., conversations with Venezuelan friends) convinces me that Venezuelans trust capitalism more than the Democrats do.
So, time will tell, but a prosperous Venezuela pumping oil is the best thing that could happen to a future government down there. Keeping China out of the country is a nice dividend as well.
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