Earlier this month, a US special forces operation illegally strong-armed Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro from power. Maduro and his wife were, as the White House saw it, “arrested” and taken to the United States.
The White House, in its usual style, immediately posted hype edits of its arrest. A montage of Maduro shouting, “Come and get me cowards. I’m not afraid of you,” was followed by footage of the former leader being led across a heliport in New York before being arranged in the NY Southern District.
Yet the lack of bloodshed during the operation suggests that, behind the scenes, negotiations with key players in Venezuela were taking place to facilitate Maduro’s seizure. Diosdado Cabello and other key figures from the Venezuelan United Socialist Party (PSUV) and the army remain in power.
This has direct implications for what comes next. While the PSUV’s current leader has been deposed, the party itself has not.
The administration in Washington has imagined a rapid up-tick in Venezuela’s oil production now that Maduro is no longer in charge. Venezuela once produced over 3 million barrels a day, but this has since fallen to less than 1 million.
The collapse in production is commonly attributed to “socialist state mismanagement”. While this is probably a factor, the country’s oil sector was also targeted by sanctions during Trump’s first term that severely curtailed its access to technical partnerships and Western finance.
To this picture of decaying infrastructure and an undemocratic party-military cartel in government, one must add the technical challenge of the oil itself. Venezuela has 17% of the world’s proven oil reserves, higher even than Saudi Arabia with 15%. However, its reserves are on par with the Alberta tar sands in terms of their “heaviness” or viscosity, and thus difficulty of extraction.
As a professor at the Alberta Institute of Technology observed, exploiting anything deeper than the surface level of the tar sands was a technically novel and unproven endeavour even in the 2000s.
“Similar to the Alberta Oil Sands, Venezuela’s Orinoco Belt’s massive oil reserves don’t translate to massive oil production rates,” a former subject-matter expert at a US oil major recently wrote, “at least without very significant infrastructure development and capital expenditures.”
With the PSUV still in power, that’s something the oil majors will be very wary of. So the Venezuelan transition may end up being more about Trump’s vanity than any substantial geopolitical shift.
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