This video is mostly an accurate history of Venezuela’s oil history but it comes with this warning that makes no sense to me:
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Oil execs met w Prez et al today. They say Venezuela is uninvestable at present. Major changes in law required to resolve. Then years of investment to make significant differences.
To Venezuelan citizens major problem is probably inflation due to mismanagement and corruption in the oil industry and its proceeds major driver of the economy. Reforms that moderate inflation are likely fastest improvement to man on the street.
We hear that Syria paid its military by manufacturing amphetamines. You wonder if cocaine proceeds prop up the govt in Venezuela.
Since Hugo Chavez’s rise to power back in the '90s, Russia has viewed Venezuela as an important client state in the United States’ backyard. Weakening that is a positive.
I’ve been trying to find out what ‘the plan’ is for the oil. I don’t think that there is one yet. I can only see US oil giants investing in Venezuela if they have assurances of the backing of the US military for many many years, which is what Trump keeps saying is going to happen. Trouble is that Trump won’t be in power for that long and things change.
Security was such that not much could be said about plans in Venezuela. If it leaked it would not be a surprise and injuries could have been more severe.
Now that it’s in the news, many aspects are under discussion. No doubt that includes how willing Venezuela is to co-operate w US ideas.
But has it been weakened materially? Remember, apart from the removal of Maduro no other aspect of the regime has been changed yet.
Certainly the Russians have been shown to be inconstant and unreliable allies…but I think that’s the result of them being consumed by the Ukraine conflict, forcing them to concentrate there and crippling their resources to project power anywhere else right now. That certainly gave the U.S. a wide opening to move in militarily, and apparently their lack of support (and maintenance) degraded all the fancy Russian anti-air defenses Venezuela had. Because the Russian’s can’t do much, the U.S. can park a hundred-plus warships off the Venezuelan coast and make the government really pay attention to our interests - but we’re not going to keep all those ships there indefinitely (and we probably could have made Maduro sit up and be more accommodating if we had that fleet there as well).
The same is true of China - perhaps even moreso. It’s not like Venezuela’s going to give back all the money they borrowed from China. We’re going to pressure them to reduce their diplomatic ties with China….but those ties were forged in the first place due to macro geopolitical factors that have not changed.
The only thing that might be on offer that would materially reduce China’s influence would be to force Venezuela to start selling all their oil to us instead of China. Except I’m not sure that’s actually going to happen. Domestic oil producers are already deeply stressed by low oil prices, so there will be a lot of Congressional pushback against the U.S. subsidizing a foreign competitor to those producers. More importantly, all that oil is fungible. If we move a few 100K bpd of Venezuelan heavy sour from going to China to the U.S., then our refineries that can process that stuff then buy less heavy sour from Mexico and Canada - who will then in turn increase their sales to China. So China has less influence in Venezuela, but gains influence in Mexico and Canada as they become a more important export customer. While Venezuela still remains part of the Belt and Road - because again, the government of Venezuela hasn’t changed at all.
I don’t know. We’ll have to see what (if any) long term changes occur. If the regime is fundamentally changed, we might see many positives. If it remains a left-wing military dictatorship fundamentally aligned with the China-Russia bloc (because it is a left-wing military dictatorship and thus has to stay outside of our bloc), then not much is likely to be different.
Costa Rica was the most supportive as 87% of respondents approved of his arrest, followed by Chile (78%), Colombia (77%), Panama (76%) and Peru (74%). Sixty-one percent of respondents in Argentina and 60% in Ecuador supported his ouster, as did 52% in Uruguay.
Only in Mexico did a plurality, rather than a majority, support his arrest. Only 43% supported it, with 42% opposed.
chavez and maduro are the primary image of rapacious BAD populists in literate Latin America. Hated, and the path their supporting populations voted for, understood (profoundly because of rage) but now seen by many as deceitful and/or idiotic.
Governments seem to fall into a vicious cycle (with lots of variations on the theme)
Elect a government
If the government ruins the economy people look for a savior
The savior creates a tyranny
People tire of the tyranny and revolt
If the revolution succeeds, back to step one
In 1956 Hungary was at stage 4, the revolution succeeded locally. I had great hopes that the US would take a stand to prevent Russia from reconquering Hungary. My hopes were dashed. Czechoslovakia fared no better. Nor Poland.
Will the US prevent the Mullahs from reconquering Iran?
I have long marveled at the fact that even at the height of the Great Depression, with millions of people out of work, bread and soup lines, and hopeless despair…
…coupled with the twin (and coincidental) catastrophe of the dust bowl, affecting millions and leading tens of thousands of farmers into bankruptcy and exile from their family home…
…the US still did not devolve into the kind of rioting and societal collapse we so often see in other countries.
And there’s the famous quote when a supporter told FDR that if he solved the economic problems he would go down as one of the greatest American Presidents in history, to which he (supposedly) replied “And if I fail I may be the last.”
The Trump administration’s first sale of Venezuelan oil is valued at $500 million, an administration official told Semafor.
The sale marks an initial milestone in the administration’s management of Venezuela after the US ouster of its former leader, Nicolás Maduro, 11 days ago. President Donald Trump has indicated that the US would effectively run Venezuela for an indeterminable amount of time and take control of up to 50 million barrels of its oil — marketing and selling it while distributing the proceeds back to Venezuela in an arrangement with little precedent.
Trump signed an executive order on Friday that provided some details on how the US plans to block courts or creditors from tapping any revenue from those oil sales. Venezuela owes international bondholders, oil companies and others as much as $170 billion — one reason why US firms have been reluctant to help rebuild the country’s infrastructure.
Trump told ConocoPhillips CEO Ryan Lance last week that the US is “not going to look at what people lost in the past, because that was their fault.”