For months, U.S. President Donald Trump proclaimed that his pressure campaign against the government of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, backed by dozens of illegal killings through drone strikes, was about fighting drugs and cartels. But at his press conference after the U.S. abduction of Maduro, Trump couldn’t stop talking about oil.
“We’re gonna take back the oil,” Trump brazenly said. “Very large United States oil companies” will “go in” and “spend billions of dollars,” he promised. “We’re gonna be taking out a tremendous amount of wealth out of the ground.”
All told, Trump uttered the word “oil” at least 20 times during the press conference. Oil company stocks — ExxonMobil, Halliburton, ConocoPhillips, Valero, Phillips 66 — surged the following day, with Chevron, the only major U.S. oil corporation with a current foothold in Venezuela, seeing its share value jump more than 5 percent.
Further demonstrating the administration’s drug accusations to be mere propaganda, the Justice Department recently dropped its longstanding claim that Maduro was the head of “Cartel de los Soles,” implicitly conceding that it is indeed not a drug cartel but a slang term referring to political officials who have become corrupted by drug money.
The Trump administration’s barefaced imperial grab for Venezuela’s oil is fraught with challenges, and it’s far too early to predict what will happen. But its abduction of Maduro and effort to gain control over Venezuela’s oil industry aligns with the administration’s openly stated vision of reasserting undisputed political and economic hegemony across the Americas and the Caribbean, including control over natural resources and trade routes, through gunboat diplomacy backed by military threats. In doing so, Trump is looking to corporate allies like Chevron, which could stand to benefit handsomely from his administration’s action — though this is far from guaranteed.
Hellbound and Down 