Elliott Abrams, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, was the special representative to Venezuela during the first Trump administration.
Latin American politics have been going President Donald Trump’s way. See the election victories of Javier Milei in Argentina, José Antonio Kast in Chile and Abelardo de la Espriella in Colombia. Venezuela could be the next country to turn right. Every poll suggests veteran conservative leader María Corina Machado would crush unelected President Delcy Rodríguez in an open contest.
That would be another Trump win, made possible only because he ousted dictator Nicolás Maduro in January. Instead, the U.S. president has dedicated himself to another project: keeping Maduro’s former sidekick in power permanently. The windfalls of cronyism are apparently too strong, and the attraction of Venezuelan democracy and free-market economics too weak. Days after ousting Maduro, Trump said: “We want stability, but we do want democracy.” Now he seems only to want oil.
That’s the logical conclusion from his Truth Social announcement on Friday that the United States has secured “more than 65 BILLION BARRELS of proven Oil Reserves in Venezuela.” It is a convoluted plan under which the U.S. will get a 35 percent equity stake in North American Blue Energy Partners, a private Venezuelan company, as well as the rights to at least 20 percent of its output for 100 years. Washington isn’t paying for either, and the Venezuelan people didn’t agree to it. Rodríguez did. It is evidently what she needed to do to win over Trump, who seems happy to see her repressive regime stay in power forever.
The agreement is almost certainly unconstitutional under Venezuelan law, which states that oil deposits “are the property of the Republic” and “therefore inalienable and not transferable.” If the government confers concessions, it must be for a “certain period, in all cases ensuring the existence of adequate consideration or compensation to serve the public interest.” A century-long grant of billions of barrels of oil without payment hardly meets that criteria. Nor is it likely to satisfy U.S. law. Does the Pentagon really have the right to be in the oil business?
Worse, because major U.S. oil companies have been unwilling to pony up large amounts of cash to invest in Venezuela, Trump has allied the government with the most shadowy and repellent Venezuelan businessman he could find. Alejandro Betancourt, who leads North American Blue Energy Partners, is under a Swiss arrest warrant for alleged money laundering involving Venezuela’s state oil company, PDVSA. (He denies wrongdoing and hasn’t been formally charged.) Yet Betancourt is one of the few who made fortunes under the corrupt Hugo Chávez and Maduro regimes — a symbol, among Venezuelans left and right, of everything wrong about cronyism driving out the free market and the rule of law.
When I served in the first Trump administration as special representative for Venezuela, we knew exactly what Betancourt stood for and kept him far away from the U.S. government. No longer, as The Post reported last week. Senior U.S. officials apparently “lobbied to resolve the case in Switzerland in a way that would avoid criminal charges and end travel restrictions against the Britain-based businessman.” Washington has also allowed him to visit for several meetings with the administration.
The U.S. plan thus depends on the remnants of the Maduro regime in both the presidential palace and the business community. This puts the Venezuelan democratic opposition forces in a bind, unable to support the agreement but reluctant to condemn something Trump is behind. The deal will fail if democracy ever returns to Venezuela, because the great majority of the people will be against it. The Venezuelan Communist Party has already condemned it, as has former centrist presidential candidate Henrique Capriles. They uniformly reject Rodríguez’s handing over precious natural resources to stay in power.
There is a sound idea behind focusing on Venezuelan oil. If the country’s production could climb back to the 3.5 million barrels a day it hit before Chávez took power in 1998, it could help make the Western Hemisphere the center of reliable, safe global production. The free market would create additional production in the country, as it has in Guyana and soon will in Argentina, if investments were guaranteed by the rule of law.
Yet Trump is trying to substitute a forced march for the free flow of capital and private-sector investment decisions. His deal won’t relieve American drivers: Gasoline prices won’t come down because any increased production from this deal is years away. Hundreds of billions of dollars in investments will be announced — some by grifters looking for special advantages, some by oil companies looking for favor with Trump and some by the president himself. But the money won’t follow, because it’s all tied to one man, who’ll be out of office in about two years, and to Rodriguez, whom the people of Venezuela will oust as soon as they’re able.
The tragedy is that the United States is now the partner to an unelected despot. A good test of how much Washington has abandoned Venezuelan democracy is its position on the date for new elections. Rodriguez wants them indefinitely postponed because she knows she will lose. Her opposition wants them next year. If U.S. officials start talking about how contests in 2027 are too difficult because more time and preparation are needed, this oil deal will prove to be the great sellout — of Venezuela’s natural resources and its people’s right to self-government.
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