2026 Oil Reform

The early morning of January 3, 2026, marked a turning point in Venezuela’s recent history. An operation carried out by US forces combined airstrikes on Caracas and strategic military areas with a ground incursion that culminated in the abduction of President Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, and their subsequent rendition to New York. The operation left more than 90 dead, including 32 members of the Cuban special forces who fought to protect Maduro, inflicting some damage on the imperialist forces before being killed.

While it is certainly strange that the United States could carry out the operation to kidnap Maduro and his wife without encountering significant resistance—beyond that offered by the innermost security ring, most of whom were of Cuban origin, like the aforementioned 32 martyrs—perhaps even more surprising are the statements made by Defense Minister Vladimir Padrino López. Weeks after Maduro’s kidnapping, Padrino asserted that it was impossible to deploy fighter jets at the time of the attack given the United States’ air superiority, with 150 aircraft. He thus acknowledged that, with the exception of the president’s personal guard and a few soldiers stationed near the residence, the Venezuelan Armed Forces did not respond to the imperialist aggression. 

We cannot speculate on military matters, since we are not experts and do not have all the necessary information on the issue. That falls outside our purview. In any case, Padrino López’s own words and the events that unfolded during the attack indicate that, for some reason or another, the decision was made not to respond militarily to the Delta Force attack in the early hours of January 3 in Caracas. 

To the surprise of many, Maduro’s abduction did not lead to an immediate or complete institutional collapse. Vice President Delcy Rodríguez assumed the interim presidency, backed by the Supreme Court and the National Assembly, headed by Jorge Rodríguez. This “two-pronged approach” allowed for a certain degree of formal stability to be maintained while the administration of the country’s strategic resources was reorganized and the implementation of policies to adapt to the new context was accelerated.

Coordination with Washington was immediate. On January 15, CIA Director John Ratcliffe – who just days earlier had overseen the aggressive operation alongside Donald Trump in Florida – visited Caracas and met with Delcy Rodríguez. A few days later, the reform of the Organic Law on Hydrocarbons was presented and approved. This timeline reveals an almost symbiotic alignment between Venezuelan authorities and the US administration aimed at ensuring that oil wealth flows under the empire’s supervision, while simultaneously safeguarding the interests of large corporations and international creditors. Whether this link is the result of betrayal or capitulation is, for now, irrelevant. However, what is becoming clearer every day is that, if this were a tactical retreat, it seems unlikely that it could be corrected without strategic direction. And the latter appears to be beyond the reach of the country’s new authorities.

The liquidation of oil sovereignty: from Chávez to Delcy Rodríguez

The recent reform of the Organic Law on Hydrocarbons (LOH) is not a minor amendment to the previous law, but rather the culmination of a process of gradual neoliberal regression that finally took shape in the substantial repeal of the 2001 law – a cornerstone of the Chavista social project and a historic achievement in the assertion of Venezuelan sovereignty.

The original 2001 law, enacted by Hugo Chávez as an Enabling Law, alongside subsequent reforms in 2006 and 2007, marked the peak of Venezuela’s oil nationalization. It established exclusive state ownership of hydrocarbons in the subsoil, PDVSA’s monopoly on international marketing, majority state control in all joint ventures, state planning of investment, and the priority allocation of revenue to social development.

Throughout the various phases of Maduro’s administration, and in the face of the economic crisis caused by brutal US-led sanctions, revenue-seeking policies were implemented in an effort to secure liquidity and foreign currency, which gradually eroded the Chavista socioeconomic structure. This laid the groundwork for the gradual privatization of national resources, even though commercial control and ownership of the oil remained formally in the hands of the state.

Furthermore, during the 2019–2024 period, Maduro granted operating licenses to Chevron and other foreign corporations that allowed for direct exploitation and marketing in certain areas, setting precedents for private control over production. These agreements, presented as “temporary exceptions” to revive output and alleviate the social burden of sanctions, established the framework of dependency that the 2026 reform ultimately consolidated legally.

The January 2026 reform promoted by the Delcy Rodríguez administration, designed in accordance with the requirements of January 9 Trump administration Executive Order 14373, completes this process of erosion and represents a substantial rollback of the economic foundations of Chavista social transformation. Many of the changes introduced reflect mechanisms imposed under the Anti-Blockade Law (2020) and the Special Economic Zones Law (2022), which loosened restrictions on the private sector’s role, primarily through broad tax exemptions and trade incentives, while the 2026 LOH eliminates any remaining obstacles to private operational control of that sector. Or, in other words: what under Maduro were exceptions designed to circumvent sanctions – particularly pressing in the context of the pandemic and post-pandemic period – are formalized in Rodríguez’s reform to institute open subordination.

First, the exclusive state ownership of hydrocarbons in the subsoil – which the 1999 Constitution reaffirmed as an inalienable principle and which even Maduro formally upheld – has been rendered meaningless. While Article 5 of the 2001 law stated that “hydrocarbons in the subsoil are the property of the Republic,” the 2026 reform establishes that foreign private operators can acquire property rights over production from the moment of extraction, allowing them to market it directly without the state involvement that characterized the original Chavista model. The qualitative difference from the Maduro era is that this direct commercialization is now generalized across the entire sector, and the geographical and temporal restrictions that maintained a prospect of state control have been eliminated.

Second, the reform permanently eliminates the state monopoly on international commercialization. The 2001 law and subsequent reforms stipulated that PDVSA was the only entity authorized to export. The 2026 reform allows Western conglomerates such as Chevron, ExxonMobil, Shell, and Repsol to directly market all or portions of production, thereby undermining the state’s sovereign authority to decide to whom to sell, under what conditions, and at what price. Private companies now determine the destination of shipments, negotiating directly with refiners and distributors, while the Venezuelan state receives only royalties and dividends subject to external control mechanisms.

This commercial subordination is further reinforced by a restrictive framework imposed by Washington: General Licenses 46, 50A, and 52 issued by the US Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) strictly prohibit Venezuelan crude oil from reaching entities based in Russia, China, Iran, North Korea, or Cuba, extending the ban to any company that maintains ties of ownership or control with individuals from those countries. Far from restoring commercial autonomy, the 2026 reform institutionalizes these barriers: while transnational corporations are given carte blanche to negotiate directly with Western refiners, all transactions with Chavismo’s historical partners remain prohibited. The Venezuelan state is reduced to collecting royalties under foreign supervision, with no capacity to direct oil flows toward those markets that for years guaranteed the sustainability of the Bolivarian project. This leads to a situation as deplorable as it is surreal, where the Zionist entity has been able to receive Venezuelan crude without hindrance, while Cuba is left helpless against Washington’s strangulation.

Third, the reform abolishes state control over investment and exploitation. The 2001 law reserved for the state the right to plan investment. The 2026 reform allows private operators to unilaterally determine investment levels, the technology to be used, and reserve policy, eliminating any need for approval from Venezuelan authorities beforehand. Foreign companies acquire the right to import equipment and personnel without restrictions, operating under a regime of fiscal and legal extraterritoriality.

Fourth, the reform dismantles the framework for protecting social investments. The 2001 law stipulated that oil revenues must be allocated primarily to economic and social development. The 2026 reform includes provisions allowing for international arbitration to resolve disputes, prioritizing the protection of private investments over any social claims. Funds derived from oil production are subject to foreign control mechanisms. 

Lastly, the aforementioned OFAC licenses effectively establish an architecture of fiscal subordination that privileges foreign interests, with Venezuelan oil proceeds deposited in US Treasury-run accounts. By accepting these licenses – and with the additional stipulations of the reform – the Delcy Rodríguez administration is effectively subject to mechanisms for external validation of its budgets.

Oil reform and foreign oversight are not isolated processes: they constitute a neocolonial arrangement disguised as economic normalization, which maintains formal sovereignty while relinquishing operational control. In strategic terms, Venezuela has gone from being an actor with a relative capacity to define its energy policy— despite sanctions and threats — to a subordinate whose critical decisions are dictated by the United States. 

Condemning Iran: geopolitical alignment as submission

Structural subordination is also evident in foreign policy. In the face of the recent imperialist aggression against Iran, launched jointly by the United States and the Zionist entity on February 28, 2026, which left more than 200 dead in the first few hours (including 148 girls killed in the bombing of an elementary school in Minab), the Delcy Rodríguez government rushed to abandon its traditional alliance with Tehran. 

In an initial statement, it took a stance condemning both the imperialist aggression and the response of the attacked country, falling into a shameful and ridiculous position of neutrality. This official statement, issued on February 28 stated that the Venezuelan government “condemns and deeply regrets that the military option was taken against Iran” and expressed dismay over the civilian casualties. However, the text then went on to refer to “Iran’s inappropriate and reprehensible military reprisals against targets in various countries in the region.” In doing so, the Delcy Rodríguez administration denied the bombed country the right to self-defense, placing the aggressor and the victim on the same level.

This statement, which Foreign Minister Yván Gil ended up deleting from his social media accounts hours later, marks a definitive break with the anti-imperialist stance that Venezuela had been building for two decades. The condemnation of the response by Tehran – a historic ally of Chavismo and high-level strategic partner since 2022 – shows that alignment with imperialism is now a fait accompli.

The Venezuelan communiqué cannot be understood without considering the context: the complete opening of the oil sector to foreign capital, the aforementioned reception in Caracas of the CIA director, and the subsequent arrival of US Chargé d’Affaires Laura Dogu as a diplomatic representative, along with visits by US Secretary of Energy Chris Wright, US Interior Secretary Doug Bergum, and the head of US Southern Command, General Francis Donovan; all within a few weeks, prior to Trump’s own recognition of Delcy Rodríguez as Venezuela’s president.

The Rodríguez administration not only hands over the oil and refuses to stand up to the empire, but also politically legitimizes US hegemony, breaking with the internationalist and popular legacy that Chavismo had always fostered, defended, and pushed forward. The condemnation of the Iranian resistance – which undoubtedly amounts to a condemnation of the entire anti-Zionist Axis of Resistance and all peoples oppressed by the colonial entity – is presented as “international responsibility” and a “commitment to peace.” The new Venezuelan administration thus disguises its surrender of diplomatic sovereignty and buries the solidarity-driven, internationalist Venezuela that Chavismo led, both during Chávez’s and Maduro’s tenures.

Cabral’s Dilemma: betrayal of the Chavista project or class suicide

To fully understand what has happened in Venezuela, it is quite helpful to examine it in light of the political theory of Amílcar Cabral, the independence leader of Guinea-Bissau and Cabo Verde and one of the most incisive thinkers of African and Third World liberation. Cabral first formulated the concept of “class suicide” in his 1964 message to Guinean militiamen, later developing it in numerous speeches throughout the 1960s and 1970s, particularly in his address, “The Weapon of Theory,” delivered at the First Tricontinental Conference of the Peoples of Asia, Africa, and Latin America, held in Havana in January 1966.

In the context of Guinea-Bissau’s liberation struggle, Cabral further developed this theory by applying it to that specific reality in his work Guinea-Bissau: An African Nation Forged in Struggle, posthumously published in 1974. The Guinean petty bourgeoisie, formed under the Portuguese colonial administration, had to choose between joining the African Party for the Independence of Guinea and Cabo Verde (PAIGC) and its peasant base, renouncing their privileges as colonial officials, or remaining on the sidelines and eventually collaborating with Portugal. Cabral had no illusions about the difficulties of this choice. The historical dilemma of this petty bourgeoisie, according to Cabral, is strictly binary: “either it betrays the Revolution or it commits suicide as a class.” There is no third way, no middle ground, and no possible compromise. Any attempt to maintain a neutral stance ends, sooner or later, in subordination to imperialism and the betrayal of national interests.

Class suicide did not mean the physical disappearance of individuals, but rather the destruction of their particular class status. It entailed a radical and conscious transformation. As Cabral explained, the petty bourgeoisie had to “renounce the class position it occupies in social life” and “integrate itself with the popular forces – that is, with the workers and the peasants.” In other words: voluntarily abandon their privileges as an intermediate class, cease to be a class separate and distinct from the people, and fully identify with the popular forces as part of a project of national and social liberation. 

The betrayal of the revolution – the other option in this dilemma – occurs when the bourgeoisie preserves its class existence and its intermediary privileges through subordination to imperialism. It does not renounce its position, does not identify with the people, and does not dismantle its networks of privilege. On the contrary, it negotiates its corporate survival with the enemy, becoming a comprador bourgeoisie. This betrayal is not always explicit or conscious. It often presents itself as “realism,” “pragmatism,” or “tacticism.” But its result is always the same: the consolidation of structural dependence and the blocking of any emancipatory project aimed at true sovereign independence, an indispensable requirement for delinking from the imperialist system.

The theory of class suicide has profound methodological implications for political analysis. First, it establishes that national liberation cannot be led by the national bourgeoisie or by the petty bourgeoisie unless they have committed class suicide. Second, it demonstrates that formal independence does not equate to real liberation if the political leadership retains its character as a subordinate intermediary class. Third, it points out that the class struggle continues during the revolutionary process and that the principal contradiction is not always between the people and external colonialism, but also between the people and their own leadership that resists class suicide.

What sets the Venezuelan case apart is that the petty bourgeoisie – whether treacherous or capitulationist – is not the traditional colonial class that Cabral analyzed, but rather a bureaucratic bourgeoisie forged in the very process of revolutionary change. Over two decades of Chavismo, this class has accumulated experience in state administration, built autonomous power networks, developed a distinct corporate identity, and created a social base of support. Class suicide would mean renouncing all this historical accumulation, dissolving into the popular masses, and reconfiguring the project from the ground up by aligning with the proletariat and the communal project. Betrayal, on the other hand, allows for the preservation of bureaucratic and clientelist power structures by adapting them to the new framework of subordination. A bureaucratic bourgeoisie that controls the state and oil revenues has its own material interests that may conflict with a direct confrontation against imperialism.

In the wake of the rapid and radical changes implemented by the Delcy Rodríguez administration that we have described, we can observe with bitterness how the national bourgeoisie has ceased to administer independence – the original purpose of the Chavista project – and has instead come to manage dependence.

All of this is being presented, as one would expect, under the guise of Bolivarian continuity, the preservation of symbols, and rhetoric about historical responsibility, all of which serve to obscure the surrender of oil revenues to imperialist control, demolishing what was once the cornerstone of the Chavista social project. This is accompanied by a rupture or abandonment of historic alliances such as with Iran and Cuba, with national resources destined for the Zionist entity without question, in a shameful capitulation to US interests.

The 2026 oil reform is the key element of this submission: state ownership of oil – a pillar of the sovereign development project – is being dismantled in favor of corporate control and placed at the mercy of the US Treasury. This constitutes a sophisticated form of neocolonial domination because it hinders resistance to the brutal imperial agenda. Indeed, the masses are not facing an enemy in the form of a foreign occupation, but rather an elite that speaks their language, appropriates their symbols and folklore, and maintains a patriotic rhetoric, all while systematically dismantling the core foundations that Chavismo built over decades in its quest for a historic break with dependency.

Conclusion

The history of liberation struggles teaches us that if the revolutionary project is the lighthouse, the revolutionary class must be its operator. As such, its cause must be anchored in a historical strategy capable of guiding even the most difficult tactical retreats. But there can be no tactical retreat without strategy, nor strategy without the material foundations on which to sustain it. Economic independence is not a mere ideological ornament of the revolutionary process: it is its condition of possibility. When a nation’s sources of wealth are handed over to the empire’s management, when the revenue that fueled the social project is subjected to external control, and when the state voluntarily relinquishes the instruments that allowed it to decide on its own development, there is no room left for future strategic maneuvering. What is presented as prudence or realism is nothing more than, at best, the institutionalization of capitulation; at worst, of betrayal. 

Those same processes of national liberation have also shown that no revolution has survived without cadres willing to take on the risks demanded by the confrontation with imperial power. Revolutionary leaders are not called upon merely to manage structures, but to embody a historic will capable of sustaining the conflict to its final consequences. In the early hours of January 3, as the Venezuelan state apparatus sealed its commitment to servile negotiation, those willing to give their lives for that cause were the Venezuelan soldiers and 32 Cuban internationalists who fell defending the presidential residence. And in that event, both brutal and symbolic, lies the essence of the dilemma Cabral articulated decades ago: in the face of imperialism, there is no lasting middle ground between class suicide and betrayal. Everything else – the rhetoric, the symbols, the appeals to tactics – are merely transient ways of naming a decision that, sooner or later, history ultimately reveals.

Joan López and Alejandro Pedregal are members of the Anti-Imperialist Network (AIN), anti-imperialist.net.

The views expressed in this article are the authors’ own and do not necessarily reflect those of the Venezuelanalysis editorial staff.

Source: El Salto Diario

Note: there have been minor edits to the original version to clarify certain aspects of the oil reform.