To fully understand what is happening in Venezuela, analysts should watch the Venezuelan bond markets, as they’ve soared in the past few days, as U.S. investors close to Trump are expecting deferential treatment in collecting on debts that they have held for a long time. That’s where the real action is, and the oil markets are connected to this, but not with the goal of owning Venezuela oil production—there’s little interest in that right now. But instead, wealthy bondholders in the U.S., several very close to the Trump administration, hope to benefit in the long term from revenues generated by increased production, which some U.S. oil companies would help service. Remember that all of the big global oil corporations make money in a lot of different ways, partly by placing derivative bets on oil markets, rather than owning facilities that produce oil.
Trump is an extension of a longtime U.S. tradition when it comes to protecting massively wealthy U.S. bondholders who are looking for the best political solution for extracting payments on debts held: authoritarian rulers who agree to cooperate in paying bondholders and increasing accessibility and protection for foreign investors. At the same time, the Trump Administration is accelerating and expanding the close relationship between the U.S. state and the U.S. oil sector by leveraging the U.S. military to appropriate assets that will be delivered to private U.S. oil corporations, investors and service companies at taxpayers’ expense. This follows existing power dynamics whereby the U.S. government has long subsidized the costs of foreign direct investments by the U.S. oil corporation supermajors. What many analysts miss when they reference oil executives’ verbal hesitancy in investing in Venezuela, due to the expense, uncertainty and long-term payback for their investment, is the way that the oil sector continues to rely on U.S. tax breaks and state subsidies to underwrite their costs and expand their short- and long-term profit margins. The return of a more militarized and interventionist U.S. imperialism is designed to expand U.S. state and corporate power, discourage and reverse oil nationalizations and displace Chinese and Russian investments in favor of preferred U.S. investments. The Venezuelan bond markets are a useful starting point for understanding how this imperialism is operationalized.
At the time of the kidnapping of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro by the Trump Administration, there were as many as nine corporate lawsuits pending against the Venezuelan government alleging damages owed to U.S. corporations from the instability and termination of their operations in Venezuela. Several prominent investment firms that had stakes in extractive industries in Venezuela, including oil, natural gas and mining, are included in the list of litigants. Other corporate parties had previously sued Venezuela through the World Bank’s International Settlement of Investment Disputes, such as ConocoPhillips, which won nearly $9 billion dollars from the World Bank arbitration court. ExxonMobil has filed multiple claims against Venezuela, claiming $20 billion in payments owed by the Venezuelan state. Oil services firms such as Halliburton have also filed claims that are based on what the firm describes as instability that forced them to abandon investments in Venezuela. Halliburton’s litigation claimed that both U.S. sanctions and the Venezuelan government were to blame for the firms losses, but are currently suing only the Venezuelan government. Multi-billionaire investor Paul Singer, founder, President and Co-CEO of Elliott Management, is attempting to buy an ownership stake in Citgo, the downstream petroleum firm that was fully acquired by Venezuela’s state oil company PDVSA in 1990.
Collectively, these investors hope to leverage the U.S. intervention to collect billions of dollars in claims from U.S. acquisition of Venezuelan assets. In turn, the Trump Administration would provide these firms with a potential avenue to expand profit-making opportunities in Venezuela. This could involve Elliott Management’s energy firm Amber Energy purchasing CITGO, which owns an oil refinery in Lake Charles, Louisiana that is equipped to refine Venezuelan oil. This could also involve a return to Venezuela of ExxonMobil and ConocoPhillips, alongside service companies such as Halliburton who would be in line for infrastructure projects. Chevron, which is the one U.S. oil firm that stayed in Venezuela and has been allowed to export to the U.S., also could emerge as a long-term winner.
The Venezuelan bond market brings together the interests of U.S. investment firms, U.S. oil corporations and the U.S. state in an imperialist project, designed to expand the power of the U.S. throughout the Western Hemisphere at the expense of China and, to a lesser extent, Russia. U.S. intervention would be directed at protecting and expanding the role of U.S. investors and crowding out/excluding Chinese investors. The Trump Administration would also leverage a direct appropriation of oil from Venezuela as a piggybank for crony capitalist allies, whose riches would expand based on accelerated control and leverage of oil reserves. This brazen expansion of U.S. imperialism in its most overt and militaristic form would intensify the climate crisis, increase inequality between rich and poor throughout the Hemisphere and subject any government that wants to exercise control over its own resources to mafia-like extortion.
Following this playbook, what the Trump administration is doing now is attempting to cut a political deal on mafia terms with the Venezuelan state. The reason that Trump’s advisers have decided to keep the current Venezuelan regime intact is they think the Venezuelan military is a necessary precondition for ensuring stability and protection for any financial and investment deal they can negotiate. The outlines of any political deal would be: agreement by the Venezuelan regime to pay debts owed to bondholders, though percentages and who would be favored would have to be worked out (here the U.S. hopes to crowd out Chinese investors); opening Venezuela to more foreign investment across a range of productive and portfolio type investment options; oil concessions to the U.S. government; and commitments by the Venezuelan military to provide investment guarantees through security, police and contractual provisions. In return, the Trump administration would lower sanctions.
It’s a mafia state attempting to cut a deal with another mafia state: the Trump Administration with the Venezuelan military, which has been identified by Trump as the most powerful institution in Venezuelan politics. Indeed, the Venezuelan military cannot easily be dislodged without triggering a large-scale civil war, according to a CIA report which concluded that retention of the Venezuelan military, alongside senior Maduro loyalists, offered the best option for governing the country. Trump is currently pressuring Venezuelan officials to offer oil concessions to the U.S., reported to involve as much as $2 billion of Venezuelan oil concessions. If the U.S. acquires such quantities cheaply, at below market rates, profits from sales would likely be distributed to U.S. creditors, many of whom have ongoing lawsuits against the regime.
U.S. imperialism is designed to enrich wealthy investors, who are hopeful of being bailed out by U.S. militarism. The Trump Administration is the latest manifestation of brazen illegality in the expansive use of military force in the Western Hemisphere, intervening in ways reminiscent of late 19th and early 20th century U.S. military invasions, which at the time were concentrated in Central America and the Caribbean. The use of militarized violence on a large-scale is a symptom of an empire in decline, gasping at lowest-common denominator tactics to extract wealth by force, without bothering to address the larger systematic reasons for its decay.
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