Venezuela’s oil industry has long been a site of struggle—between national sovereignty and foreign control, between social development and extraction for profit.
In a wide-ranging conversation with theAnalysis.News, Venezuelanalysis founder and contributing editor Gregory Wilpert situates today’s crisis in that longer history, from the Chávez government’s effort to reclaim PDVSA for Venezuelans to the current US strategy of tying sanctions relief to oil exports.
As Washington pushes Caracas to increase production and redirect crude away from China, Wilpert examines whether interim leadership in Venezuela is navigating an impossible economic bind—or whether the country’s oil and sovereignty are once again being bargained under coercion.