“A sold-out international oil and gas conference in Caracas, Venezuela, last week drew dramatic headlines in the financial press. Representatives from Big Oil, along with many smaller companies, mixed with their peers and government officials and grumbled about the country's broken-down electrical grid. Journalists seemed amused by a shortage of golf equipment for executives who wanted to hit the links at the local country club.
It's been nine months since President Trump used the U.S. military to arrest dictator Nicolas Maduro inside Venezuela, take him to New York, and promote his deputy, Delcy Rodriguez, to top despot.
Venezuelans thought they were going to get elections. Instead U.S. sanctions on oil sales have been lifted and dollars are again flowing to the criminal regime. Popular opposition leader Maria Corina Machado desperately wants to return, but Washington won't allow it.
The energy confab was a Trump administration idea. It's betting that by talking up the Venezuelan petroleum industry even while a dictatorship is still signing the contracts, it can get capital flowing into the country. The rebuilding of democratic institutions is supposed to follow.
Trump critics say that's an error in sequencing. They believe that before investors sink real money into long-term commitments in Venezuela, in amounts that matter, they will want to be dealing with a legitimately elected government operating under a rules-based system.
History is on the side of the skeptics. At a minimum, caution is in order when dealing with the chavistas, who over the past quarter-century have repeatedly "dialogued" with democrats, as they're doing now, only to refuse to relinquish power.
The energy summit harked back to a time in the once-prosperous South American nation when oil was the engine of growth. But elsewhere in the capital and the rest of the country, things remain dire. Triple-digit inflation and persistent power outages make life miserable for most Venezuelans. Ms. Rodriguez still holds an estimated 324 political prisoners, and more than two dozen others are under restricted freedom. Venezuelans at home and abroad are souring on the Trump administration.
Team Trump says it's still pushing for political reform through negotiations between Ms. Rodriguez's brother Jorge, head of the National Assembly, and the opposition. The two sides have been meeting on and off for two months and are rumored to be near an agreement on an independent supreme court. After that they're supposed to form an independent electoral council. If all goes well, some insiders say the country could hold elections by mid-2027.
Venezuelans who want to recover their country are holding onto this hope. But doubts creep in when the Trump administration attaches no importance to restoring good governance and instead makes a boom in oil production, driven by secret agreements, its priority. By continuing in this direction it's likely it will get neither.
Attending the conference was a low-cost way for large companies to generate goodwill with the White House. Even companies with little interest in Venezuela had reason to show up to stay on Mr. Trump's good side. Marginal players probably wanted to rub shoulders with Oil Ministry bigwigs who have discretionary power over rights to explore and exploit oil blocks. Sweetheart deals in exchange for who knows what are the way things work in Venezuela.
Venezuelans are complaining bitterly about the recent regime decision to grant proprietary rights over 17 oil fields to North American Blue Energy Partners, whose majority owner is palace insider Alejandro Betancourt. Yet rather than object to the no-bid contract, the Trump administration further eroded confidence by appropriating its own minority stake in the company.
In a country gutted by corruption, this is troubling. As oil analysts M. Juan Szabo and Luis Pacheco wrote on their Notes From the Oil Patch blog last week, it's worth pondering what's going on "when a company as limited in scale" as Mr. Betancourt's "announces the purchase of 50 drilling rigs and a significant number of steam generators for a sum exceeding $1 billion -- without having yet made the contract or its technical and financial plan public."
Mr. Trump's Venezuelan oil-gusher narrative is, for now, mostly rhetoric. Even contracts and memorandums of understanding, Messrs. Szabo and Pacheco write, "signed with solid companies such as TotalEnergies and Continental Resources, as well as the many contracts signed with companies lacking any real operating, technical, or financial track record, will take time to translate into investment plans, and even longer to contribute to incremental production." This means that "for the rest of 2026 and much of 2027, these agreements will likely remain in the stage of evaluating fields and weighing options before reaching a final investment decision, conducting baseline audits, carrying out detailed reservoir studies, and resolving logistical and talent bottlenecks."
Better outcomes might be had. But without a return to democracy.” [1]
1. Trump's Dubious Venezuela Strategy. O'Grady, Mary Anastasia. Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y.. 05 Oct 2026: A15.
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