Venezuelas

Originally published in Spanish by Runrun.es

The mission of the Venezuelan Foundation for Seismological Research (Funvisis) is to guide life-saving actions during earthquakes. Its capacity to fulfill this purpose was severely diminished when, on June 24, the earth shook twice, devastating the country’s central coastline.

Multiple sources consulted separately for this report agree that the institution suffered a progressive dismantling following a pivotal change in command: the historical tradition of having scientists lead the agency was replaced by military leadership. Simultaneously, the entity was transferred from the Ministry of University Education, Science, and Technology to the Ministry of Internal Relations, Justice, and Peace, now under Diosdado Cabello.

Former employees look back at the institution with nostalgia. They speak of an era when budgets were always tight, but the sheer dedication to the job was enough to prioritize science, training, and prevention. Today, the landscape reveals a significantly reduced monitoring network, shuttered educational programs, and a lack of specialized personnel after they left the country in a state of heightened vulnerability.

Declining precision in seismological activity

Presently, the National Seismological Network represents a mere quarter of what it was a decade ago. A clear sign of this institutional weakness is that it took the Foundation 4 hours and 26 minutes to inform the public about the details of the dual earthquake. By comparison, the United States Geological Survey (USGS) maintains an average standard of 20 minutes to process and publish data for earthquakes outside its territory. For events within the state of California, where its seismic network is extensive, reports are issued within 2 to 5 minutes.

According to the institution itself, the National Seismological Network is responsible for recording Venezuela’s tremors in real-time using broadband stations “to reduce vulnerability across the country.”

André Singer, president of the institution between 1996 and 2000, noted that in 1999, the necessary funds were secured to acquire a modern seismological network. This network featured 35 broadband stations and began installation in the year 2000. That same year, Funvisis became an attached agency of the newly created Ministry of Science and Technology.

By 2014, Funvisis’s website stated that Venezuela had 40 stations distributed across areas of highest seismic activity. Regional networks complemented local data, such as the Seismological Network of the Venezuelan Andes (RedSAV) and the Seismology Center of the Universidad de Oriente (CSUDO).

The network in the Venezuelan Andes used to cover 25 seismological stations. Now, it is completely inoperative.

Curiously, in the 2015 annual report from the Ministry of University Education, Science, and Technology, Funvisis reported expanding the network to 38 stations. This was achieved after putting two satellite seismological stations into operation and building and installing two others.

“The network must currently have at least ten operational stations, in addition to several accelerometers and satellite GPS stations in service,” Singer explained in an interview with Runrun.es, adding that this was only possible due to a recent restoration effort.

During a forum on July 2, Dr. Raúl Estévez, founder of the Geophysics Laboratory at the Universidad de los Andes (ULA), asserted that this reduction in stations occurred due to “an absolute lack of budget and technical support.” He added that the western regional network, managed by ULA—which at one point operated 25 of its own stations—became completely inoperative due to a lack of resources.

In Sucre, the Venezuelan state with the highest seismic risk, the UDO Seismology Center is also inactive, its director, Janette Castillo, confirmed to Runrun.es. The institution previously managed a network of stations covering the northeastern region.

The specialist explained that they were severely affected following the pandemic by the dismantling of UDO’s Sucre campus and a dwindling university budget. However, she noted that efforts are currently underway to try and recover the institution. She emphasized that local networks are vital for enabling more detailed monitoring and study of seismic activity in each region of the country.

The closure of flagship public spaces

Following the 1967 Caracas earthquake—a magnitude 6.5 event that left approximately 283 dead and 2,000 injured—the need arose to create a specialized institution for the study and investigation of earthquakes. Thus, Funvisis was born in July 1972. Following the 1997 Cariaco earthquake, which claimed 73 lives, the entity modernized how earthquakes were recorded nationwide, transitioning from heat-sensitive paper to the digital-satellite screens still used today.

In 1998, one of the institution’s flagship programs was created: the Madeleilis Guzmán Seismic Classroom, named after the schoolteacher who died during the Cariaco earthquake after saving two of her students. It served as a laboratory to understand how different sectors of the population responded to tremors, allowing the institution to tailor training and prevention guidelines accordingly.

Through this program, seismic classrooms managed by local authorities were established across various corners of the country’s seismic geography, including Cariaco, Lagunillas de Mérida, El Tocuyo, and at the Cagigal Observatory, before the former Seismological Museum of Caracas ceased operations, Singer detailed.

The program was shut down in 2018 under the administration of Vice Admiral Roberto Antonio Betancourt Arocha, the man photographed above. The space where it operated was converted into an auditorium.

In 2018, former Interior Minister Néstor Reverol promised to strengthen Funvisis’ stations and guarantee their security. After the June quakes, Funvisis reported the theft of a vital seismological sensor.

A former employee with experience in the comprehensive management of socio-natural and technological disaster risks explained that under that administration, the goal was to commercialize training and charge for workshops. “That was the reason I resigned from Funvisis, because knowledge and learning are universal rights,” they told Runrun.es.

Despite five separate sources reporting the suspension of the program, Funvisis claimed in a press release on February 16 of this year that they were celebrating the 28th anniversary of its creation.

It was also under this military administration that the Seismological Museum of Caracas was closed. The museum operated out of the historic Juan Manuel Cagigal Observatory, where, among other equipment, a mid-20th-century Wiechert seismometer was preserved.

“That museum featured a seismic simulator so the public could experience the shaking of an earthquake, along with instructors, specialized technical personnel, and a library maintained by Funvisis. It fulfilled a major role in addressing the social demands of the communities most in need of seismic prevention, specifically the working-class areas surrounding the Cagigal Observatory and western Caracas,” Singer detailed. He added that some of the instruments and personnel from that museum were transferred to a room at the Museum of Natural Sciences in Bellas Artes.

According to the former worker who preferred to keep their name confidential, the free 0800-TEMBLOR telephone service was also suspended during the tenure of Vice Admiral Betancourt. Runrun.es called the number multiple times during the first week of July, but the calls went unanswered.

The dwindling financial lifeline

The former president of the institution during the 1990s explained that “Funvisis’s deficit-ridden budget situation has been a recurring ailment throughout its history.” He recounted facing these difficulties firsthand and avoiding the technical shutdown of the entity through a budget rectification and the support of lawmaker Walter Márquez across political factions in Congress. He added: “The institution was sustained by income generated from contracts for seismic hazard studies, which the oil industry continuously requested for over 20 years starting in 1980 to ensure the safety of its installations.”

“During the peak demand for contracted studies, that revenue source represented nearly half of Funvisis’s annual budget,” he said.

However, over the last 15 years, this funding stream dried up in tandem with the collapse of the oil industry. Consequently, Funvisis came to depend almost exclusively on the budgets of the ministries to which it was subordinated.

“There was very little qualified staff left [when Jiménez Villarruel took over last year] given that most had been made persona non grata by Vice Admiral Betancourt (…) to the point where he blocked visits from anyone wishing to use Funvisis’ public library.”

In 2015, while attached to the Ministry of University Education, Science, and Technology, the institution acknowledged among its obstacles that “delays in foreign currency liquidation have paralyzed the purchasing processes for technological equipment acquired abroad, leading to delays in the physical execution of projects, as well as hindering the proper tracking of national seismic activity by Funvisis.”

By decree of then-President Nicolás Maduro, Funvisis was transferred in 2018 to the Ministry of Internal Relations, Justice, and Peace, which was then headed by Néstor Reverol. The minister at the time indicated that the change aimed to strengthen the National Seismological Service with investments in various stations across the country and to guarantee their security.

Nonetheless, this security guarantee was far from absolute. Just days after the June 24 earthquakes, Funvisis geologist Franck Audemard reported the theft of a sensor installed to monitor tectonic movements along the Boconó fault, which is linked to the first of the earthquakes recorded last month. The equipment had been installed in 2013 in the La Chicharronera sector, between Morón and Barquisimeto, on a property owned by former Venezuelan Major League Baseball player Melvin Mora. “The data from this equipment is vital for what is happening seismically in the country,” Audemard said in a video shared on social media.

A critical shortage of specialists

One of the interviewed sources pointed out that in September 2025, the current president of Funvisis, Major General (G/D) Luis Alejandro Jiménez Villarruel, took command.

“He inherited the hardest part, because he took over a foundation already lacking supplies, equipment, tools, and logistical materials. Furthermore, there was very little qualified staff left, given that most had been made persona non grata by Vice Admiral Betancourt and the majority of his executive team—to the point where he blocked visits from anyone wishing to use the foundation’s public library,” the source expressed.

Estévez, from ULA, agreed that there is a severe shortage of experts in the field nationwide, attributing it to a brain drain caused by the financial asphyxiation of universities and research centers. “The next generations in this field have left. Only us retirees remain,” he lamented during a forum at the Mérida College of Engineers.

Days after the dual earthquake, geological engineer Luiraimar Salazar denounced via her X account that the deterioration of Funvisis directly aligns with the military management that took over in 2017. During this period, she alleged that experienced scientists were forced to retire, while other specialists were pushed out of the institution, and the personnel who remain working do so under precarious salaries and with increasingly limited resources.

The expert insisted that citizens have the right to question what decisions were or were not made, and how those actions impacted the country’s capacity to monitor and study seismic threats.

Runrun.es visited the Funvisis headquarters in Caracas to seek an official statement. The staff at the entrance indicated that no one was available to address the request. They stated they would contact the outlet to arrange an interview, but at the time of this publication, no such call had been received.

In Venezuela, the focus has shifted from rescue to rebuilding three weeks after devastating earthquakes killed at least 4,829 people. But for many affected communities, uncertainty remains over how and when the government’s reconstruction plan will take shape.

Caracas, July 13, 2026 (venezuelanalysis.com) – The Venezuelan government has approved a new set of oil industry regulations that prioritize the “economic and financial viability” of private sector investment.

Acting President Delcy Rodríguez signed the statute on Wednesday, July 8, and it was published in the National Gazette. Rodríguez hailed the directive a “historic step” that will “transform our energy reserves into development.”

“These norms establish clear rules, greater legal certainty, and a favorable environment for the cooperation between the [Venezuelan] state and national and foreign capital,” the acting president said.

Western oil executives and Trump officials have aggressively lobbied to tailor the new rules to their interests after seeing preliminary drafts. White House energy advisor Jarrod Agen stated that he had contact with Rodríguez and her team “multiple times a day” to offer input on the regulations and contract models.

The 122-article text establishes the framework for the implementation of the reformed Hydrocarbon Law approved by the Venezuelan National Assembly in late January. The legislative overhaul replaced the 2001 Hydrocarbon Law approved by former President Hugo Chávez and subsequent decrees that established a leading role for the Venezuelan state in the energy sector.

Under the new law, private sector companies can take over oilfield operations and sales as minority joint venture partners, or via concession-type agreements.

The legislation also slashed royalties and fiscal contributions. The former was capped at 30 percent, and a former extraction tax was replaced by an “integrated hydrocarbon tax” with a 15 percent maximum.

However, the new statute defines a “combined contribution” of royalties and the integrated tax ranging from 20 percent for undeveloped greenfields to 35 percent for currently active brownfields, meaning an effective 10 percent further reduction from the 45 percent maximum defined under the law.

Companies are eligible for additional 5 percent discounts in their combined contribution if they run offshore operations or if their business plans include “building or amplifying crude transformation, upgrading, or refining plants.”

Income tax was lowered from 50 to 34 percent for greenfields under the 2026 legislation. But the regulations establish that companies can request further reductions to their royalty, integrated tax, and income tax contributions if necessary to attain “economic equilibrium.” The decisions will be taken by the Venezuelan executive on a case-by-case basis without any mandatory oversight from the National Assembly.

The reformed energy law allowed legal disputes to be settled by international arbitration bodies, with Venezuelan officials promising  “legal certainty” to investors. The new norms permit arbitration re via “alternative mechanisms,” with analysts suggesting that the vague language aims to avoid any clashes with US sanctions.

The directive also set an obligation to capture “associated gas” in oil extraction operations, which can be used for reinjection or transformed into cooking gas. Historically, it has been mostly flared. Oilfield operators are likewise mandated to secure their electricity supply. The Venezuelan National Assembly is presently working on reforms to open electricity generation, transmission, distribution, and commercialization to the private sector.

The enacted framework goes on to establish environmental responsibilities, oversight mechanisms, and penalties for non-compliance. State oil company PDVSA is not mentioned at all in the text.

Venezuelan oil expert Blas Regnault told Venezuelanalysis that the new norms risk turning the oil sector into an “enclave.”

“The regulations organize oil activity but do not guarantee that it will be integrated into the national economy,” he explained. Regnault warned that empowering corporations to negotiate royalties on an individual case-by-case basis “turns a sovereign right into a flexible variable in a contractual regime” in what is an “unusual” practice for oil-producing nations.

“Royalties are not taxes. They represent the sovereign right of the owner of the resource, and thus should be universally established, not negotiated project by project,” he underscored.

The pro-business opening of Venezuela’s most important industry has seen major Western corporations, including Chevron, Shell, and BP, ink agreements or memoranda of understanding with the acting Rodríguez administration to develop new projects or establish more favorable conditions in existing ones.

For its part, the Trump administration has kept in place sanctions against the Venezuelan oil industry, though it has issued a number of licenses allowing US and Western enterprises to enter into agreements with Caracas. However, the waivers mandate that all royalty, tax, and dividend payments be deposited in a US Treasury-run account, while also blocking transactions with firms from China, Cuba, Iran, North Korea, and Russia.

The maintenance of US sanctions has slowed new investment, while the Trump administration has so far returned only a fraction of Venezuelan export revenues to Caracas. 

The dire economic situation is indexed in persistent inflation and stagnating oil production. Venezuela’s crude output plateaued after four consecutive months of growth, with June’s 1.070 million barrel-per-day (bpd) output virtually unchanged from May, according to OPEC secondary sources. The figure remains the highest since early 2019.

For its part, PDVSA reported 1.187 million bpd in June, up from 1,179 million bpd in May. Direct and secondary measurements have historically differed over disagreements on the inclusion of condensates and natural gas liquids.

The South American country’s main crude extraction areas, in the eastern and western regions, were largely unaffected by June 24’s double earthquake, with no major disruptions to operations reported.

Edited by Lucas Koerner in Caracas.t issued a number of licenses allowing US and Western enterprises to enter into agreements with Caracas. However, the waivers mandate that all royalty, tax, and dividend payments be deposited in a US Treasury-run account, while also blocking transactions with firms from China, Cuba, Iran, North Korea, and Russia.

Venezuela’s oil production has stagnated after four consecutive months of growth, with June’s 1.070 million barrel-per-day (bpd) output virtually unchanged from May, according to OPEC secondary sources. The figure remains the highest since early 2019.

For its part, PDVSA reported 1.187 million bpd in June, up from 1,179 million bpd in May. Direct and secondary measurements have historically differed over disagreements on the inclusion of condensates and natural gas liquids.

The South American country’s main crude extraction areas, in the eastern and western regions, were largely unaffected by June 24’s double earthquake, with no major disruptions to operations reported.

Edited by Lucas Koerner in Caracas.

The first days after the earthquake were defined by what had been lost. Apartment blocks lay in ruins, entire neighborhoods disappeared beneath the rubble, hospitals overflowed, hundreds of thousands of Venezuelans found themselves without a home. Yet as the emergency slowly gave way to recovery, another realization has emerged, one less dramatic but perhaps more consequential. 

Venezuela did not only lose buildings: it is now discovering that it has very little left with which to rebuild them.

Reconstruction is often described as something that begins after disaster strikes. In reality, it begins years earlier, with the reserves a country accumulates while times are good. Wealth matters, but so do things that rarely appear in economic statistics: functioning institutions, domestic industries, engineering firms, construction companies, reliable electricity, access to credit, insurance markets, emergency planning, skilled workers and the public trust needed to mobilize them all. These are the hidden reserves that allow societies to absorb shocks. The earthquake revealed that Venezuela had spent much of them long before the ground began to shake.

That depletion has become evident in almost every aspect of the response. Venezuela imports a significant share of the food it consumes and much of its medicine. The emergency quickly exhausted whatever inventories existed. Heavy machinery needed to clear debris had to be sought abroad. Medical supplies became scarce almost immediately. Temporary shelters proved insufficient, forcing thousands of survivors to remain in tents erected in parks and public spaces weeks after the disaster. The government is now considering housing many of them in schools, an understandable emergency measure made possible only because classes are suspended for the summer.

Temporary solutions, however, have a habit of becoming permanent in Venezuela. Families displaced by the Vargas Tragedy of 1999 and by the 2010 floods spent years, in some cases decades, living in shelters that were never meant to become homes. The earthquakes risk repeating a familiar pattern, not because Venezuelan authorities necessarily want it to, but because they have long lacked the capacity to offer anything else.

The Venezuelan diaspora contains an extraordinary concentration of precisely the human capital required to rebuild the country. Whether that expertise can be persuaded to return, even temporarily, remains an unlikely scenario.

Some will inevitably attribute this lack of preparedness primarily to sanctions. It is an understandable argument, but one that struggles to explain what the earthquakes actually exposed. The collapse of domestic industry, the deterioration of public infrastructure, chronic underinvestment in the electrical grid, the shrinking of Venezuela’s manufacturing base and the erosion of emergency response capacity all began years before oil sanctions were imposed.

Recent research has also challenged the idea that sanctions caused a discrete collapse in access to food and medicine, showing instead that essential imports had already fallen dramatically before sanctions and later stabilized as the government dismantled some of its own economic controls. The sanctions era itself demonstrated that Venezuela retained the ability to import consumer goods. Supermarkets gradually refilled for those able to pay. Construction cranes returned to Caracas’ wealthiest neighborhoods. Restaurants multiplied. Consumption recovered far more quickly than productive capacity.

The earthquake exposed the difference.

The destruction of resilience

Disasters ask questions that ordinary economic life does not. They care little about how many imported products sit on supermarket shelves or how many luxury apartments are being built in eastern Caracas. They ask whether a country can mobilize excavators, engineers, trauma surgeons, logistics networks, emergency housing, electricity, financing and public institutions at scale. They ask whether resilience has been accumulated or consumed. Venezuela’s answer has been painfully clear.

That is perhaps one of the least understood legacies of chavismo. Much has been written about the destruction of wealth, the collapse of oil production or the country’s prolonged recession. Less attention has been paid to the destruction of resilience itself. For years, the Venezuelan State approached institutions with the same extractive logic that governed its relationship with oil. Productive assets became sources of immediate political or fiscal returns rather than investments to be maintained and strengthened. Private companies were expropriated rather than incorporated into development. Public enterprises became instruments of patronage rather than production. Infrastructure was consumed faster than it was repaired. The country did not merely become poorer. It gradually spent the reserves that societies rely upon when catastrophe arrives.

Resources that may have financed future growth must now finance immediate recovery.

The consequences extend far beyond physical infrastructure. Reconstruction is ultimately carried out by people, and Venezuela has spent the last two decades exporting many of those it now needs most. Engineers who now design highways in Spain, petroleum specialists managing fields in Texas or Guyana, architects working across Latin America, doctors practicing in Colombia and Chile, electricians, project managers and construction supervisors who left because opportunities disappeared at home. The Venezuelan diaspora contains an extraordinary concentration of precisely the human capital required to rebuild the country. Whether that expertise can be persuaded to return, even temporarily, remains an unlikely scenario.

Money presents an equally daunting challenge. Before the earthquake, Venezuela’s slow economic reopening had begun to attract cautious international interest. Much of it remained exactly that, cautious. Memoranda of understanding outnumbered signed investment agreements, access to financing remained limited and investors continued to price Venezuela’s political risks accordingly. The expectation, however tentative, was that new investment would increasingly flow toward rebuilding the electrical grid, expanding oil production and modernizing neglected infrastructure. The earthquake has fundamentally altered those priorities. Resources that may have financed future growth must now finance immediate recovery. Every home rebuilt is a home that cannot wait. Every hospital repaired is indispensable. Every bridge reconstructed delays another project that might otherwise have expanded productive capacity. Reconstruction does not replace development. It postpones it.

Reconstruction-era uncertainty and challenges

The financing challenge has also become more complicated politically. Investors had already approached Venezuela with understandable caution. The humanitarian emergency has increased the country’s fiscal needs precisely as political uncertainty has deepened. The constitutional arrangements established after Nicolás Maduro’s removal were always presented as exceptional. As they become more prolonged and their legal basis increasingly contested, companies considering long-term reconstruction projects must ask whether contracts signed today will remain secure under whatever government eventually succeeds the current one. Investors do not need constitutional certainty, they simply need enough legal certainty to believe that agreements lasting ten or twenty years will survive political change. Venezuela offers remarkably little of it.

This is also why Delcy Rodríguez’s recent call for the lifting of sanctions misunderstands the country’s central problem. Whatever benefits further sanctions relief might provide, it cannot eliminate the uncertainty surrounding Venezuela’s legal and political environment. Investors deciding whether to finance ports, housing developments or power plants are unlikely to base their decisions on sanctions alone. They also ask whether contracts will survive a change of government, whether courts will enforce them and whether today’s authorities will still possess the legal authority to honor them tomorrow.

Reconstruction depends on trust, functioning institutions, access to capital, legal certainty and a productive economy capable of sustaining the effort long after international solidarity inevitably fades.

There is another irony hidden beneath the rubble. The Venezuelan insurance industry will likely survive this catastrophe better than many expected, not because losses have been modest, but because so much of what was lost was never insured. This was an under-insured disaster. Homes, businesses and families that lacked coverage will inevitably look toward the state for assistance. Yet the state that spent years hollowing out its own fiscal and institutional capacity now finds itself acting as insurer of last resort, precisely when it possesses the fewest resources to fulfill that role.

Natural disasters often become moments of national renewal. Reconstruction can modernize infrastructure, attract investment and accelerate reforms that politics alone struggles to produce. Those opportunities exist in Venezuela as well. Rebuilding cities will require new housing, new roads, new power systems, new telecommunications infrastructure and new industries capable of supplying them. But opportunities are only as valuable as a country’s ability to seize them. Reconstruction depends on trust, functioning institutions, access to capital, legal certainty and a productive economy capable of sustaining the effort long after international solidarity inevitably fades.

The earthquake destroyed thousands of buildings. Rebuilding them will take years. What it ultimately revealed, however, is something far more difficult to reconstruct. Over the last quarter century Venezuela has steadily depleted much of the industrial, institutional, financial, human and political capital that countries quietly accumulate before disasters occur. Those invisible reserves are what determine whether recovery becomes a matter of years or generations. They cannot be imported as easily as food or medicine. They have to be rebuilt, patiently, one institution at a time.

Since last week, the world’s attention has been set again on Venezuela just like six months ago.

Of course, the differences between the events of January 3rd and the terrible disaster of June 24th could not be more stark, even if both evenets have massive implications for the country’s future.

Most coverage coming from international media these days has highlighted two things: first, the terrible devastation seen in worst-hit areas like parts of Caracas and especially in La Guaira State (formerly known as Vargas); and second, that many are complaining about the official response and even calling it “negligent”, like in this report from BBC News correspondent Yogita Limaye.

Interestingly enough, in recent months there has been a reopening to the presence of foreign reporters in the country, a shift from the heavily restricted access during the Maduro years. A larger number of reporters and media crews arrived in the last few days. They have been mostly allowed to do their job (unlike Sky News’ Trump 100 podcast, interrupted by government officials while recording), but they’ve been facing their own set of specific challenges.

Earlier this week, NGO IPYS Venezuela offered a summary of some apparent restrictions from the Communication and Information Ministry to international media workers, like indicating that they could be mobilized to affected areas only through State-authorized buses and establishing a schedule for those trips from the Media Center established at La Carlota Airport in Caracas.

One person quoted in the summary is British freelance journalist Catherine Ellis, who’s covering the disaster for Al-Jazeera and UK weekly magazine The Spectator while also doing some radio interviews for other outlets. She has worked in Venezuela since 2023 and, before that, volunteered for an NGO in Colombia and Spain, helping Venezuelan immigrants. It was Ellis who published on X a picture of the buffet the regime was offering to foreign correspondents while thousands of people were thirsty and hungry.

At the time of writing, several international reporters told Delcy Rodriguez during her recent press conference what they’ve seen firsthand. She minimized those criticisms against the official response and pointed her finger at “media matrixes created in laboratories” (matrices de opinión is a popular term in Venezuela to describe artificial narratives in journalism or social media). 

Caracas Chronicles interviewed Ellis earlier this week to discuss what she recently witnessed.

How has it been for you and other international correspondents to cover the disaster on the ground? Have there been any limitations by government officials and particularly from the Communication and Information Ministry?

The experience so far as a journalist in terms of getting in and communicating with the Ministry has been quite strange in some ways. It needs to be said that it has been much more open than it usually is. Quite often, if I come to Venezuela, I can’t really do any reporting or get a journalist visa; they give very few journalist visas, and it’s particularly hard for freelance journalists when you’re not a fixed employee for a certain media outlet. But this time they let journalists in. They’re letting foreign journalists in without visas. On one hand, it’s been much, much better. This time journalists are actually allowed into the country, and access is not restricted, although we don’t know how long that will go on for. Communications have been terrible and completely lacking to the point of being almost non-existent. 

How was your experience with the bus trip to La Guaira the day after registering at La Carlota airbase in Caracas? 

We took the bus on June 28, the day after we registered in La Carlota. They told us they would take us there, and we left for La Guaira an hour and a half late. No problem, that happens sometimes, but there was no communication about what was happening. The following day was the worst because I arrived early thinking it might leave on time, only to wait for two hours with no explanation at all. Then we knew from other journalists that the trip was cancelled and access had been suspended for 48 hours for journalists. No one on the logistics team provided any explanation. They just said: “we are not in charge of it, we don’t know.” One person told me: “you have to be patient, you have to wait… This is a complex situation, and things don’t move quickly.”

How are you and your colleagues doing your work in the disaster area? 

We were completely given free rein… We were taken to a Misión Vivienda place, but we could go wherever we wanted, so I spoke to people from that place, and some were very critical of the government. I went to other buildings around, which were either for retired people or just normal apartment buildings, and I spoke to lots of people. I was very, very free to speak to people. So much that I missed the bus and the Guardia (Nacional) took another journalist and me to the next site to speak to people. 

Have there been any issues involving the police, the military, intelligence services or local officials?

Some people have been helpful, and some haven’t in terms of the authorities. In La Guaira, generally, no one stopped me from doing anything. Police and military pulled me away from a building because they were excavating to take bodies out, but to be honest, that was more for health and safety reasons, and I did understand. I went to the hotel in Caracas where the Venezuelan deportees were supposed to arrive after they got back, and the hotel collapsed. It was full of SEBIN agents. We weren’t allowed to pass because of “security reasons.” When I started to take photos, I was told off by SEBIN. That was interesting. 

Genuinely, I have to say the police and military have not stopped me speaking to anybody or stopping doing anything. And to be honest, some of them haven’t really been around. I think it’s because, as you wear the pink armband (identifying as foreign press), they know you’re press, that you’ve been approved, but getting to the hotel where the deportees were was impossible.

How has the relationship been with the civilians in the area? How do they react to the presence of the media?

Civilians have been brilliant. Absolutely brilliant. Everybody is very, very open to talking. Venezuelans are incredibly warm and open people. I have no problem chatting to people. If I see people who are visibly, incredibly upset, who have family (members trapped) in buildings, it’s not the right time to talk to them.

Sometimes, I’ve approached them very sensitively, and people have shared their stories, described the people they have lost, told about what they’re lacking or what they need. Some people openly criticize the government, but others who have criticized the government then say they don’t want their names used, and others are not thinking about politics. They’re just in shock.

How has the relationship been between international correspondents and Venezuelan journalists?

Venezuelan journalists are incredibly helpful. I think there has been a lot of solidarity between all journalists, between Venezuelan and international journalists and among the international journalists themselves. I’ve been speaking to people from the US, Canada, Argentina, parts of Europe, and they all want to help each other. 

On a critical note, there have been a couple of international journalists who either pushed me out of the way at certain sites because they want to film or come up to me when I’m interviewing people and taking my interviewees. This isn’t a show, people have lost (their) lives. I would encourage the international press to have a heightened level of sensibility and respect for all Venezuelans and all affected by this crisis.

Have you noticed the difference between how you see the situation on the ground, how it is covered outside, and how it is covered inside, how the government is presenting it? 

From what I’ve seen, Delcy and the government are trying to project an image of solidarity with the international community, thanking and praising them for being here and helping Venezuelans in their time of need. But not necessarily announcing tangible and concrete steps of what they’re actually putting in place. Someone put it to me like this: “The government has been very visible, key figures have been very visible in terms of presence on social media and even visiting sites, but there has not been enough concrete information about donation centers, about what’s happening next, about actually managing the actual crisis.”

How have people in La Guaira been coping?

A lot of people are still in shock. It’s very hard to process, but everybody seems to be very grateful to everyone who is helping them, either members of their own community or the international rescue teams. Some people have said, “Other governments are helping us more than our own government.” 

I think the most important thing to emphasize, which is non-political, is that people are saying “Venezuelans are helping Venezuelans, they’re helping each other.” Someone said to me the other day, “We are a family, this is what we do, we help each other, we won’t give up, and you know, keep going.”

I spoke to a guy who came from Valencia. He had three kids back home and said, “I couldn’t bear to think of my own kids lying somewhere like that and no one going to find them,” so he came on his way, he got lists from people, and he came so he can help with the search and rescue. 

There’s definitely a lot of shock. A lot of kids are still scared and adults feel that any movement or anything, not just aftershocks, mean something is going to happen again. People are getting through by supporting each other.

Is the aid arriving properly? Have you seen aid being delivered?

There’s so much aid everywhere. In Caracas, I’ve seen so many trucks coming in. The problem is that I can’t exactly say what’s happening to the aid. Some aid is getting through, but there seem to be a little bit of bottlenecks or bureaucracy; I don’t know the full reasons… It’s getting through to some people but isn’t getting through to other people, and they’re running out of some things. People want proper accommodation also. Definitely, in a lot of places there are now international NGOs setting up food points as well.

– 

Just yesterday, while covering relief efforts taking place at Parque del Este, Ellis was approached by a couple of suspicious looking fellows. This was the exchange:

I was in Parque del Este tonight speaking to volunteers and affected families camping there. I was chatting to one family when two men came over to look what was going on then left. I started helping the family move their stuff to the road (I was carrying the cat!) as they were moving somewhere else. The two men called me over, asked me if I was a journalist, to which I said yes and showed them my wristbands. Asked more questions, who I was, where from, what I was doing. I asked who they were, as they still hadn’t introduced themselves by this point. One (the politer one) said they were intelligence police, asked what I was doing, so I said speaking to the family etc. Asked if I knew them, I said no. Then asking qus like my age, which was weird as one had my passport which has my DOB. Took photos of my passport. Asked where I lived, said I didn’t want to give that info. I asked why they wanted to know all this, they said for security and that people were taking children, so I asked if they thought I was taking kids. They said no. I told me they were asking me because I was a journalist and there was not a real free press. One was fairly polite and said they didn’t want to make me uncomfortable. I said they already had. Eventually they gave me it back. It’s ok to check who someone is, check they have a wristband which you now should have in the park – but I did, and I showed them, so why the need for questionning and taking photos of my passport? And why was the first qu, are you a journalist? Does everyone who enters the park get that level of treatment?

It doesn’t take much for chavismo to step back into its old ways.

On June 24, Venezuela was struck by a devastating double earthquake that caused thousands of deaths and widespread destruction. In this infographic, we detail the facts and figures surrounding the disaster, as well as US military encroachment amid an ongoing sanctions regime.

(Click on the crosses for more information)

Click here to download the full infographic.

At first, Jesus did not believe it was possible, but then he heard his father shouting out from the rubble, saying: “Don’t leave me here.”

“I said, ‘Trust me: Stay calm. Keep the kids calm over there. I’m not leaving here without you,'” Jesus recalled.

Jose had been trapped for more than an hour by that point, unsure of his fate. He and his two younger sons had survived the collapse with relatively minor injuries, but dangers remained. The debris could still shift and crush them.

“The first thing I thought of was my children. I had the little one right here,” Jose recalled, lifting his hands to his chest. “And I still had the other one. He was right next to me but buried. I couldn’t see his face; I could only see one foot and one hand.”

Still, Jose put on a brave face for his boys. A friendly voice had pierced the rubble: Jesus’s friend, the firefighter.

He had been shouting for survivors. He had also brought Jesus’s old firefighting equipment to the site.

After finding out his father and brothers were alive, Jesus began desperately trying to get them out. But he realised he would have to wait until the next day for the sun to come up and, crucially, to get his hands on a jackhammer that could drill through the floors of rubble separating him from his family.

Finally, the next morning, a specialist squad from the police arrived with the gear they needed to carry out the rescue.

With the help of his firefighting team from La Guaira, who showed up to help their old comrade, Jesus was able to pull his father and two younger brothers from the rubble at about 3:30pm on June 25, more than 20 hours after the earthquakes.

He quickly swept Diego and Santiago into his arms.

“When I saw them, I hugged them, gave them a kiss, and said, ‘I love you, brother,'” Jesus recalled. “Then I stepped away for a moment and started crying.”

Jose is still shaken from the experience, which has changed his life forever. “I am someone who will be grateful for the rest of my life that I was given this opportunity. Not just me, but my two young children.”

Venezuela’s acting president Delcy Rodriguez, whose 180-day mandate ends Friday, dismissed criticism of the government’s earthquake response, saying rescue crews were deployed immediately with adequate equipment. Residents have said they were on their own for the first 48 hours.

Venezuela’s acting president Delcy Rodriguez, whose 180-day mandate ends Friday, dismissed criticism of the government’s earthquake response, saying rescue crews were deployed immediately with adequate equipment. Residents have said they were on their own for the first 48 hours.

The search for survivors continues in Venezuela after a powerful earthquake left hundreds dead and thousands missing. Al Jazeera’s Teresa Bo reports from one of the country’s worst-hit areas where many residents have lost their homes and are now sleeping outdoors.

Rescuers in Venezuela are racing against time to find survivors after twin earthquakes left thousands missing. International teams have pulled several people from the rubble alive, including 11-year-old boy Moises rescued after a six-hour operation and a newborn reunited with their family.

Originally published in Spanish on Asdrúbal’s personal Substack

There are weeks that change a government. And there are weeks that change a country. This is one of them.

Until just a few days ago, the economic debate regarding Venezuela revolved around how much we would grow this year. Around whether the figure would be 4% or 6%, and at what point that growth would materialize in people’s daily lives: exchange rate stabilization, the reestablishment of relations with multilateral organizations, and the possibility of slowly beginning a recovery process.

On the morning of June 24th, a Financial Times scoop centered the discussion on the actual size of our foreign debt. That was the horizon. Today, the horizon no longer looks like that. The earthquakes that struck this week not only leave a human tragedy of dimensions still difficult to quantify; they also profoundly alter the country’s economic outlook. International evidence shows that a major earthquake can generate losses equivalent to between 3% and 10% of GDP, depending not only on physical damage but on the State’s capacity to respond.

Anyone who thinks the problem is limited to the cost of rebuilding highways, hospitals, or housing is seeing only a part of the picture. Earthquakes destroy infrastructure, but they also destroy productivity, employment, tax revenues, logistical chains, and confidence. Thousands of businesses interrupt operations, families postpone consumption and investment decisions, and economic activity loses momentum for months or even years. The expectations and decisions of economic agents are disrupted by a widespread sense of loss and uncertainty.

The economic literature is quite consistent on this point. Studies by the World Bank, the IMF, and numerous academic papers conclude that the impact of a natural disaster depends far less on the intensity of the phenomenon itself than on the institutional strength of the affected nation. Economies with solid States tend to absorb the initial shock and recover relatively quickly. Conversely, in fragile States, a natural disaster often mutates into a prolonged economic crisis because institutional weakness amplifies the damage and delays reconstruction.

The economic agenda will no longer be dominated exclusively by growth, but by reconstruction. We need to prevent the disaster from destroying a large part of Venezuela’s remaining physical and human capital.

That is precisely Venezuela’s primary challenge. Over the years, the country lost fiscal, technical, and operational capacity. This is not a political assessment, but an observable fact. The State’s capacity to design public policy has been significantly reduced. The prolonged economic crisis and hyperinflation led us to a state of “save yourself if you can.”

The difficulties in maintaining basic infrastructure, public utilities, or the hospital network were already evident before the earthquake. Rebuilding cities like La Guaira demands far more than financial resources: it requires planning, engineering, contracting capacity, technical supervision, and a public administration capable of coordinating thousands of projects simultaneously. Today, the Venezuelan State lacks a good portion of those capabilities.

Our recent history shows how society has demonstrated resilience where the State has lost capacity. The private sector, non-governmental organizations, churches, universities, and multiple civil society initiatives have, through years of crisis, developed a remarkable ability to organize, mobilize resources, and respond swiftly to emergencies. We saw it during the pandemic, during the landslides in Las Tejerías, and in so many other humanitarian crises. And we are seeing it now. This accumulated experience will be one of the most critical assets in confronting this tragedy, though on its own, it remains insufficient to undertake a reconstruction of this magnitude.

It would be a mistake to turn international aid into a battleground for confrontation. Venezuela doesn’t need speeches on sovereignty, but engineers, heavy machinery, hospitals, drinking water, electricity, and the capacity to rebuild.

That is why I maintain that this earthquake completely changes the economic conversation. Just a few weeks ago, we were discussing how to accelerate growth, attract investment, or deepen reforms. We argued that institutional reform was necessary for Venezuela to achieve sustained and inclusive growth. Today, the priority has shifted to preventing the disaster from destroying a large part of the country’s remaining physical and human capital. The economic agenda will no longer be dominated exclusively by growth, but by reconstruction.

An inevitable conclusion emerges from this: Venezuela cannot face this challenge alone. This is not merely a matter of securing financing. It will be indispensable to mobilize technical assistance, specialized teams, field hospitals, temporary infrastructure, fast-access credit, and international coordination mechanisms. International cooperation will cease to be a mere complement and will become a necessary condition for recovery.

There’s some good news, however: for the first time in many years, the conditions exist for such cooperation to be possible. The reestablishment of relations with international financial institutions opens a window that until a few months ago seemed firmly shut. It would be a mistake to turn this aid into a new battleground for political confrontation. Countries do not need speeches on sovereignty after an earthquake. They need engineers, heavy machinery, hospitals, drinking water, electricity, and the capacity to rebuild.

The country needs to design a roadmap to achieve broad political agreements, leading to a democratically elected government able to drive the necessary reforms.

Economic history demonstrates that major disasters can become turning points. Some countries seized these tragedies to modernize their infrastructure, strengthen their institutions, and build more resilient economies. Others remained trapped for decades in a cycle of destruction and precariousness. The difference was never solely the magnitude of the earthquake, but the quality of the collective response.

Beyond the immediate emergency, this tragedy also leaves a political lesson that is impossible to ignore. The reconstruction of Venezuela demands more than financial resources or international assistance. It requires leadership with democratic legitimacy and the capacity to build consensus. The country needs to design a roadmap to achieve broad political agreements, leading to a democratically elected government and providing it with the necessary backing to drive the economic and institutional reforms that recovery demands. No reconstruction program will be sustainable unless it rests upon legitimate institutions, clear rules, and a political pact that offers stability, generates trust, and allows for the mobilization of support from the international community and private investment.

That is why I believe this earthquake has not only moved the earth. It shifted Venezuela’s economic horizon. The projections we made just a week ago likely no longer describe the country we will have at the close of this year. The Venezuelan economy has just entered a new phase, and the speed with which we manage to combine the efforts of the State, the proven capacity of the private sector and civil society, and the decisive support of the international community will determine not only the economic performance of 2026, but the real possibilities for recovery over the next decade.

President Donald Trump has posted a video of a ‘swift and lethal’ US strike he claims has killed the leader of Venezuela’s Tren de Aragua gang. Trump said Venezuela helped the US with the strike on Hector Rusthenford Guerrero Flores.

Caracas, May 19, 2026 (venezuelanalysis.com) – Venezuelan Acting President Delcy Rodríguez held a meeting with a World Bank delegation at Miraflores Palace on Friday.

In a statement, Caracas described the summit as “cordial and constructive,” with both parties “exploring possible collaboration in matters of technical assistance.”

“The Venezuelan government and the World Bank agreed on the need to deepen dialogue and agreed to work together to establish concrete areas for technical collaboration for the benefit of the Venezuelan people,” the communiqué read.

Rodríguez was flanked by Economy Vice President Calixto Ortega and Finance Minister Anabel Pereira. The World Bank delegation was led by Susana Cordeiro Guerra, the US-based organization’s vice president for Latin America and the Caribbean.

The Rodríguez administration recently reestablished ties with both the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund following a seven-year hiatus due to Washington’s non-recognition of Venezuelan authorities. However, relations with the two institutions had been frozen several years prior. Former President Hugo Chávez disengaged Venezuela from the multilateral bodies in 2007, calling them “weapons of US imperialism,” though the country remained a formal member.

Since the January 3 US attacks and kidnapping of President Nicolás Maduro, Caracas has fast-tracked diplomatic rapprochement with the Trump administration, which recognized Rodríguez as Venezuela’s “sole leader” in March. The Venezuelan government has launched a series of pro-business reforms and struck agreements with Western energy and mining corporations.

On May 13, Venezuela’s acting president announced the launch of a debt restructuring process as part of efforts to return the Caribbean nation to global financial markets. Venezuelan authorities plan to present a macroeconomic framework and debt sustainability analysis to stakeholders next month.

Venezuela’s foreign debt is estimated as high as US $170 billion, from a combination of defaulted bonds and loans with accrued interest, as well as international arbitration awards. US financial sanctions from 2017 severely exacerbated Venezuela’s economic crisis and blocked the country from fulfilling its debt obligations.

The acting Rodríguez administration has vowed that the country’s priority is to access $5 billion in IMF Special Drawing Rights and that there are “no plans” to contract IMF loans. Venezuela’s Central Bank President Luis Pérez recently announced that a delegation will head to Washington to meet with IMF officials by the end of May.

Trump billionaire allies move in

Caracas’ opening to Western conglomerates has seen multiple Trump officials visit the country alongside business executives to discuss investment opportunities.

Erebor Bank, backed by far-right tech mogul and close Trump ally Peter Thiel, has reportedly pitched its services to Venezuelan officials to restore the country’s access to the US financial system. According to Bloomberg, Erebor co-founder Jacob Hirshman has made several trips to Caracas in recent weeks and met with Central Bank authorities and private bank executives.

Hirshman reportedly told Venezuelan authorities that he counts on US government support. For its part, Erebor confirmed that it held “preliminary conversations about correspondent banking and related financial services” with Venezuelan counterparts. 

Erebor is a digital-only bank registered in Ohio that received its US banking charter in February.

The lure of lucrative investment prospects has also attracted smaller players such as Yorkville Advisors, a New Jersey-based financial firm with ties to Trump’s family, which plans to raise $200 million for acquiring assets in Venezuela.

The company created a special purpose acquisition company (SPAC) and stated that businesses in Venezuela will require “substantial capital investment […] to capitalize on improving macroeconomic conditions.”

In April, Acting President Rodríguez installed a commission to evaluate the “strategic” value of Venezuelan state assets and their possible privatization. Venezuelan private sector companies have begun raising funds ahead of potential sell-offs.

Caracas’ pro-business overtures have also caught the eye of US billionaire investor Fred Ehrsam. The co-founder of crypto exchange Coinbase has likewise made multiple visits to Venezuela in recent weeks to explore “investments ranging from oil and gas to fintech and digital payments,” according to Bloomberg.

Ehrsam held discussions with Venezuelan government officials and reportedly argued that the present moment was ripe for investment as Venezuelan assets remained “deeply undervalued.”

Edited by Lucas Koerner in Caracas.

MOLLY Mae and Tommy Fury have been spotted out together a day after his niece Venezuela’s wedding to groom Noah Price.

The lavish nuptials took place in the Isle of Man with both Molly and their daughter Bambi, 3, in attendance – but Tommy was forced to skip the family affair due to ‘boxing camp’.

The two were seen walking with their daughter Bambi, who had a special role on the big day as one of Venezuela’s bridesmaids.

Pregnant Molly, 26, who is due to give birth soon, stepped out in a casual look, donning black tracksuit bottoms and a black coat, with a grey t-shirt that struggled to contain her bump.

The expectant mum finished her look with sunglasses and some UGG boots for maximum comfort.

Tommy also dressed down amid the reunion, in joggers and a hoodie, with Bambi looking sweet in a candy striped co-ord as she held on to her parents’ hands.

TOMMY’S NO-SHOW

Paris Fury reveals truth about why Tommy was no show at Venezuela’s wedding

WEDDY TO GO

Molly Mae gets off private jet with bridesmaid Bambi before Venezuela wedding

Despite Tommy’s absence it’s clear that Molly enjoyed Venezuela’s special day as she shared a number of sweet photos from the event afterwards.

Taking to her Instagram Stories, the Maebe founder shared some adorable snaps of Bambi in her pale blue bridesmaid dress.

Bambi was one of 13 bridesmaids, who matched Mother of the Bride Paris Fury in the same blue hue.

In one sweet photo, Bambi is seen being held by Venezuela who Molly dubbed ‘beautiful bridey’ in the caption.

Another photo saw Bambi pucker up for a kiss with her mum, who wore ablack jumpsuit, with a floral mesh style top for the occasion.

The tot was also seen looking with awe at Venezuela and groom Noah’s incredible blue cake that was almost three times the height of her.

The cake boasted five tiers and was accompanied with an impressive blue and yellow floral display.

“WOW,” read Molly’s caption as Bambi gazed up at the towering creation.

Venezuela stunned in a lace fishtail wedding dress with elaborate sleeves and a train spanning 50ft.

In a sit down chat with Sun Club ahead of the nuptials she told us exclusively how she designed the gown herself at Ava Rose Hamilton bridal boutique in Colne.

“I described what I wanted and it was as if they could see what was in my mind.

“You slip on these big sleeves and then they flare out and they’re like wings.”

Of the dress, mum Paris added: “I told her she was being eccentric, but the seamstress made her these beautiful big draped sleeves, they are like wings, they’re beautiful.”

Dad Tyson donned a black Tuxedo for the day, while Venezuela’s husband stood out in an ivory tux.

Clearly ready to become a married woman, the bride changed her surname from Fury to Price a mere hour after tying the knot.

PARIS Fury has revealed why Tommy Fury wasn’t at Venezuela’s wedding after his pregnant fiancée Molly-Mae Hague flew to the venue by private jet.

The proud mother-of-the-bride showered Molly, 26, with praise for going above and beyond to make it to Venezuela’s big day, while Tommy was nowhere to be seen.

Molly, who is heavily pregnant with her second child, was seen stepping onto the runway with her daughter Bambi, 3, and sister Zoe Rae.

The extravagant soiree is taking place at The Comis Hotel and Resort on the outskirts of Douglas, Isle of Man.

In awe of Molly, Paris told The Sun: “She is incredible. She is being fully supportive, and she is bringing Bambi over, so that Bambi could be a bridesmaid with the kids.

“But I have got to throw her props. She is making that journey while heavily pregnant and I wouldn’t have been able to face that while I was at her term of pregnancy.

“It’s very good,” Paris added.

Molly’s fiancé, Tommy, 27, Tyson’s younger brother, wasn’t able to join in the festivities.

Tommy, who Molly met on the reality TV hit in 2019, had to stay in Manchester for his boxing training camp.

She says: “I’m very glad that they are coming. It means a lot. It’s a big journey for anyone to come from home to here.

“It’s lovely that they are making the effort. It’s lovely that Bambi and the other little girls all get to be bridesmaids. They are all cousins and it’s sweet that they‘ll make memories together.”

Bambi is one of 13 of the child bridesmaids, including Venezuela’s little sisters Valencia, eight, and Athena, including four of Noah’s cousins, and family members, as well as five grown up bridesmaids.

Venezuela revealed: “I chose powder blue cupcake dresses for the little ones, they’re really cute, and fitted gowns for my friends.”

Paris said: “Evangeline Designs in Liverpool made the bridesmaid dresses and every day there it was like, ‘There’s a new little dress, there’s a new dress there’s a new dress, because we ended up having a few extra little bridesmaids’.

“They’re wearing flowers in their hair.”

Paris revealed: “We found £120 shoes for the little ones, and the only shoes we found in the right shade of blue for the women were stunning shoes that were £13 from Shein.”

Paris stored all the wedding party outfits in a specially allocated wedding room in the basement of their home.

Paris and Venezuela thoughtfully put together goodie bags, which included diamante Primark flip flops, matching pyjamas, a hairbrush, sweets, Doll beauty make up and a “little dolly” for each of the younger bridesmaids.

And it wasn’t just the women who dazzled on Venezuela’s big day. The men were looking just as dapper.

“The men are in black tuxedos, Tyson too and Noah is in an ivory tuxedo. Noah picked it,” Paris said.

“Collecting everything wasn’t easy. I felt like I was doing circles on ferries with carloads.”

Photo by Rodrigo Abd for The Associated Press, May 2019 

The window international operators had waited years opened overnight in Venezuela. The interim government has signed new hydrocarbon and mining laws. US officials have been in and out of Caracas. The government of Delcy Rodríguez has landed several new deals in a matter of months. Everything is happening so fast that elements that seemed obvious when Nicolás Maduro was in charge are suddenly overlooked or underdiscussed.

For the last thirteen years I have worked in indigenous communities in the Venezuelan Amazon, in border towns along the Colombian border, and in barrios in and around Caracas. The Venezuelan towns and territories are not the ones the companies coming back will remember.

Almost eight million people left Venezuela during the crisis, one of the largest displacement events in history. The oil-dependent towns of Zulia, Anzoátegui, and Monagas were not spared, nor were mining communities in Bolívar and Amazonas. In some places, a large share of the working-age population is simply gone. What remains is older, poorer, and more dependent on informal survival than the country they left.

Institutions have followed. Hospitals in oilfield regions operate, where they operate at all, at drastically reduced capacity. Schools have hemorrhaged teachers. Local government in many areas has ceased to perform basic functions. Chronic blackouts compound everything. Formal PDVSA employment, the organizing principle of community life in these regions, collapsed along with the company. In many places there are no longer legitimate interlocutors left to negotiate with as the local civic infrastructure that companies elsewhere take for granted has been hollowed alongside everything else.

Once the rigs come back, however, these towns will not stay hollow. They will hastily be filled with returnees, prospectors, informal traders, and internal migrants chasing rumored hiring. The Mining Arc has already shown what this looks like: since 2016, gold has pulled in shifting populations of miners, intermediaries, and military protection chains, with towns like Tumeremo and El Callao expanding and contracting to the rhythm of the frontier economy.

A criminalized operating environment

In most resource markets, companies enter with a clear distinction between the formal environment and the informal risks around it. That distinction broke down in Venezuela a long time ago.

Research by Insight Crime and the International Crisis Group has documented how, over a decade, the line between State oversight and participation in illicit extraction dissolved. Individuals linked to the military and the ruling party benefited from illegal mining, using it as political currency and to cement alliances with Colombia’s ELN and FARC dissident factions. Gold mining was estimated to generate more than $2.2 billion last year, much of it through channels that evaded oversight. In the oil sector, criminal groups have been documented siphoning roughly 30% of fuel in some regions.

“There is deep political skepticism in the communities. Many do not believe that this time will actually bring lasting reforms,” a senior humanitarian told me.

The Rodríguez-led interim government intends to change this, and the foreign policy pressure behind the new laws is real. But the continuity problem deserves precision. The recent turnover at the top of the security apparatus—Defense, military intelligence, the presidential guard—was a selective reshuffle within the chavista system, not an outsider takeover or institutional rupture. The personnel and chains of command sitting inside this supposedly new architecture are not new. Informal structures built over a decade do not dissolve with a reshuffle among the same political elite.

Informal actors are not parallel to the formal system, but intertwined with it, which presents a complex practical consequence to the investors. Companies entering these zones will negotiate, in practice, with all of them at once: the local political boss, the garrison commander asking for vacuna, the colectivo that controls the access road, the gestor who can speed a permit, the sindicato, the guerrilla commander. The single regulator is a fiction.

What communities remember

These are not communities without prior experience of extraction. Many have decades of it, enough to have formed hard views about what operators promise, what they deliver, and what gets left behind. Those views were then tested against a decade of watching investment withdraw, oil spills go unaddressed, and industry jobs disappear.

The environmental record is severe and specific. Aging pipelines and wells around Lake Maracaibo, once the engine of the Venezuelan oil industry, have left slicks visible from the air, fishing communities along its shores watching their catch collapse, and a persistent green bloom of algae fed by untreated sewage and hydrocarbon residue. In mining regions, studies have found that up to 90% of Indigenous women in the Orinoco Mining Arc carry dangerously high mercury levels. These are not abstract concerns. They are the lived experience of the population any operator will meet.

The damage is also in the memory of being told it would be different. Communities have seen “openings” before. A senior humanitarian, who has spent years working on community engagement throughout the country, put it to me while I was writing this piece: “There is deep political skepticism in the communities. Many do not believe that this time will actually bring lasting reforms, and that hardens their initial positions. Even well-intentioned and hopeful promises can be met with radical distrust.”

Sanctions, fiscal terms, and reservoirs can be modeled from afar. The social landscape of a specific Zulia oilfield town or a Bolívar Indigenous territory cannot.

For an operator arriving with standard community-engagement  language, the problem is not that the offer isn’t understood. Other versions of it have been heard before, and the probability it fails to hold is being priced in.

Skepticism in Venezuela also comes pre-supplied with vocabulary. Almost three decades of State rhetoric have framed foreign extractive capital as imperial extraction (saqueo, entrega). People do not have to believe the framing to use it. Many will reach for it because it is the only available vocabulary for criticizing a returning company. The corporate language that lands well in a boardroom across an ocean arrives into a discursive space that has been filled for a generation.

None of which prepares an operator for the deepest mismatch. Where the State has withdrawn from basic services, foreign companies will not be received as purely economic actors. They will be received as potential substitutes for the State and expected to provide what the hospital, the school, the utility, and the municipality no longer do. A company arriving to play a bounded role (taxes, permits, a defined social investment envelope) may find the limits it has drawn around itself are not recognized on the other side of the gate. Conflict may rise not because the company has done something wrong, but because the role it is willing to play is smaller than the role it is being asked to fill. And past experience tells people that the only leverage they have, when promises don’t hold, is disruption.

The carpentry problem

In their 1984 book El caso Venezuela: una ilusión de armonía, Moisés Naím and Ramón Piñango argued that Venezuela had lived for decades in an unsustainable harmony, oil revenue papering over political frustrations. Today there is no harmony and there is no illusion. The arbiters are weaker than they have ever been. The redistributive cushion is gone.

In a 2024 retrospective, Naím and Piñango named a specific mode of failure: the neglect of what they called, in a deliberate understatement, la carpintería, the carpentry. The unglamorous work of implementation, where plans either succeed or quietly fall apart. Small, dismissed flaws in execution had repeatedly proved fatal. When everything was a priority, nothing was.

This is where the current opening risks repeating the failure, transposed from public policy to private investment. A former senior executive at a major international oil company recently told me that the industry’s preference for offshore projects in Venezuela is shaped to a meaningful extent by a desire to avoid the social dynamics on land, not only by reservoir quality. Sanctions, fiscal terms, and reservoirs can be modeled from afar. The social landscape of a specific Zulia oilfield town or a Bolívar Indigenous territory cannot, and the speed of the opening is pulling capital past the groundwork that determines whether a project actually runs.

The contracts will be signed in Caracas and approved in Houston or London. They will fail or hold somewhere else: at the gate of a refinery in Anzoátegui and on the road into a mining town, in front of a hospital that hasn’t run a power generator in a year. The plans are moving faster than the country they describe. That is the carpentry. That is where the projects will come apart: not on the page, but among neighbors more changed, more skeptical, and more demanding than the plan assumed.

THE HAGUE — Venezuela ’s acting President Delcy Rodríguez told journalists Monday that her country had no plans to become the 51st U.S. state after President Trump said he was “seriously considering” the move.

Rodríguez was speaking at the International Court of Justice in The Hague on the final day of hearings in a dispute between her country and neighboring Guyana over the massive mineral- and oil-rich Essequibo region.

“We will continue to defend our integrity, our sovereignty, our independence, our history,” said Rodríguez, who assumed power in January following a U.S. military operation that ousted then-President Nicolás Maduro. Venezuela is “not a colony, but a free country,” she added.

Speaking to Fox News earlier on Monday, Trump said he was “seriously considering making Venezuela the 51st U.S. state,” according to a post by Fox News’ co-anchor John Roberts on social media. The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the matter.

Trump has made similar comments about Canada.

Rodríguez went on to say that Venezuelan and U.S. officials have been in touch and are working on “cooperation and understanding.”

Before addressing Trump’s comments, Rodríguez defended her country’s claim to Essequibo at the United Nations’ highest court, telling judges that political negotiations — not a judicial ruling — will resolve the century-old territorial dispute.

The 62,000-square-mile territory, which makes up two-thirds of Guyana, is rich in gold, diamonds, timber and other natural resources. It also sits near massive offshore oil deposits currently producing an average 900,000 barrels a day.

That output is close to Venezuela’s daily production of about 1 million barrels a day and has transformed one of the smallest countries in South America into a significant energy producer.

Venezuela has considered Essequibo its own since the Spanish colonial period, when the jungle region fell within its boundaries. But an 1899 decision by arbitrators from Britain, Russia and the United States drew the border along the Essequibo River largely in favor of Guyana.

Venezuela has argued that a 1966 agreement sealed in Geneva to resolve the dispute effectively nullified the 19th-century arbitration. In 2018, however, three years after ExxonMobil announced a significant oil discovery off the Essequibo coast, Guyana’s government went to the International Court of Justice and asked judges to uphold the 1899 ruling.

Tensions between the countries further flared in 2023, when Rodríguez’s predecessor, Maduro, threatened to annex the region by force after holding a referendum asking voters if Essequibo should be turned into a Venezuelan state. Maduro was captured Jan. 3 during a U.S. military operation in Venezuela’s capital, Caracas, and taken to New York to face drug trafficking charges. He has pleaded not guilty.

Rodríguez did not address the referendum in her remarks, but she told the court that the 1966 agreement is designed to allow negotiations between Venezuela and Guyana to resolve the territorial dispute. And she accused Guyana’s government of undermining the agreement with the “opportunistic” decision to ask the court to address the dispute.

“At a time when the mechanisms established in the Geneva agreement were still fully in force, Guyana unilaterally chose to shift the dispute from the negotiating arena to a judicial resolution,” she said. “This change was not accidental; it coincided with the discovery in 2015 of the oil field that would become world-renowned.”

When hearings opened last week, Guyana’s foreign minister, Hugh Hilton Todd, told the panel of international judges that the dispute “has been a blight on our existence as a sovereign state from the very beginning.” He said that 70% of Guyana’s territory is at stake.

The court is likely to take months to issue a final and legally binding ruling in the case.

Venezuela has warned that its participation in the hearings does not mean either consent to, or recognition of, the court’s jurisdiction.

Quell and Cano write for the Associated Press. Garcia Cano reported from Mexico City.

Caracas, May 5, 2026 (venezuelanalysis.com) – Venezuelan Acting President Delcy Rodríguez called US President Donald Trump a “man of action” and reiterated her commitment to long-term relations with Washington during a ceremony at Miraflores Palace on May 1.

Rodríguez received a delegation of US officials and business executives led by Jarrod Agen, executive director of the Trump administration’s National Energy Dominance Council.

“Please tell President Trump, who is a man of action, that in Venezuela there are men and women of action, but also of their word,” she told the US guests during a televised broadcast. “And we have made a commitment to build solid, long-term relations between the US and Venezuela.”

For his part, Agen first referred to Trump as a “man of action” and claimed that US-Venezuela relations are currently moving at “Trump speed” and that the White House is looking to promote oil, gas, and mining investments in the Caribbean nation.

The public statements followed the signing of contracts with Overseas Oil Company and Crossover Energy Holding for oil and gas projects in Anzoátegui, Barinas, and Monagas states, with investments of up to US $2 billion planned. Venezuelan authorities provided no details about the ventures, with Rodríguez only stating that the natural gas output would be used to strengthen the country’s electricity generation.

According to Argus Media, the two corporations will “work with” Venezuelan state oil company PDVSA on extra-heavy crude projects in the Orinoco Oil Belt. Venezuela’s recent pro-business overhaul of the Hydrocarbon Law allows PDVSA to lease out projects in exchange for a portion of the output.

While Crossover Energy does not have a track record of any past energy initiatives, Overseas Oil is a subsidiary of Hunt Oil, a 90-year-old company founded by Texas magnate H.L. Hunt. Hunt Oil previously used its close ties to the George W. Bush administration to secure oil contracts in Iraqi Kurdistan following the 2003 US invasion.

The latest oil agreements follow major energy deals struck by Chevron, Eni, Repsol, and Shell under the favorable conditions of the reformed Hydrocarbon Law, which include expanded control over operations and sales as well as reduced taxes and royalties.

On May 1, the acting Rodríguez administration also signed a memorandum of understanding in the mining sector with the US’ Heeney Capital and Switzerland’s Mercuria Energy Group.

In a statement, Mercuria, one of the world’s largest commodity traders with a history of involvement in international mining projects, explained that it had entered into “a series of strategic offtake agreements” to purchase around $2.2 billion a year of Venezuelan bulk commodities and gold. 

“The transactions align with ongoing efforts by US authorities to encourage responsible foreign investment in Venezuela’s extractive industries and to facilitate offtake structures that prioritize supply to Western markets,” the communiqué read.

Mercuria and Heeney likewise expressed interest in aluminum, nickel, and ferrous products “opportunities” that could represent a further $3 billion in annual exports.

Heeney co-founder and partner Sean Pi, who signed the agreement on behalf of the foreign companies, thanked Trump for his “leadership” in defending US access to critical minerals. Pi testified before the US House of Representatives in February to back legislative initiatives deregulating and streamlining mining projects to bolster the US supply of critical minerals.

Venezuelan Mining Minister Héctor Silva hailed the deal a “first step for the strengthening of mining ties between the US and Venezuela.” The Venezuelan National Assembly recently approved a new Mining Law that establishes incentives for Western conglomerates to exploit the South American country’s vast mineral resources.

The US delegation for the energy and mining deals with Caracas arrived on board the first direct flight between the US and Venezuela. American Airlines will hold a daily Miami-Caracas connection and will add a second one beginning on May 21 due to high demand.

US Chargé d’Affaires in Venezuela John Barrett held a ribbon-cutting ceremony alongside Venezuelan Transport Minister Jacqueline Faría to mark the resumption of the direct flights. 

Addressing reporters, Barrett stated that the reestablished air connection was a “milestone” and a “clear sign that Venezuela is open for business.”

Caracas and Washington fast-tracked a diplomatic rapprochement in the wake of the January 3 US military strikes and kidnapping of President Nicolás Maduro. Acting President Rodríguez has hosted several White House officials and touted investment opportunities for US corporations. For its part the Trump administration has issued sanctions waivers allowing select Western companies to participate in the Venezuelan energy and mining sectors but imposing control over Venezuelan export revenues.

Edited by Lucas Koerner in Caracas.

Venezuela’s recent Hydrocarbon Law reform has sparked fierce debates about its short- and long-term implications. In this essay, Blas Regnault, an energy policy analyst and researcher, offers an in-depth analysis of the new legislative framework, from the significant changes to the state’s governance over its natural resources to his perspective on a sovereign recovery of the oil industry.

The recent hydrocarbon reform: an overview

It is important to distinguish between two closely connected but analytically separate developments: first, US oversight of Venezuelan oil revenues after Maduro’s kidnapping; and secondly, the new Hydrocarbon Law itself. The first is an externally imposed mechanism that conditions oil sales, revenue collection, transport, and the distribution of oil proceeds to US interests. The second is a domestic legal reform whose constitutionality and political legitimacy have been widely questioned.

It remains unclear whether the new law is fully operative in practice, or whether it is only being applied selectively while its fiscal substance is displaced by the US revenue-control mechanism. ^{But the outcome is largely the same: a loss of fiscal automaticity and a form of fiscal sovereignty under tutelage in relation to Venezuelan oil income.}

In other words, the crisis of governance in the Venezuelan oil sector, together with its chronic lack of transparency since 2017, now culminates in a profound loss of sovereign control over all three dimensions of the business: its rentier dimension, belonging to the nation; its fiscal dimension, belonging to the state; and its shareholder dimension, linked to the role of the state oil company PDVSA as principal participant in extraction and commercialisation.

Therefore, the new law is not simply a technical reform. It is not merely about updating contracts, modernising procedures, or making the sector more attractive to investors. The deeper issue is that the reform changes the way the nation is compensated for the use of the subsoil and therefore alters the very governance of the sector. What is at stake is the relationship between sovereignty, ownership of the subsoil, and public income.

It is true that, on paper, the law formally preserves state ownership over the resource. But the business models it opens weaken the practical substance of that ownership. And that is the crucial point. Ownership is not a decorative legal formula. Ownership means that the state, acting on behalf of the nation, has the right to decide whether the resource remains underground or is extracted; and if it is extracted, under what conditions, with what public charge, and for whose benefit. The recent reform softens the link between ownership and the nation’s participation as owner of the subsoil, turning something that was once grounded in a general rule into something negotiable, adjustable, and highly discretionary.

A useful way of understanding the economic and social significance of the reform is to distinguish the different streams of public income historically associated with oil in Venezuela. Under the former hydrocarbon law, the nation participated in the oil business through three distinct channels: as owner, as tax authority, and as shareholder. The first channel, corresponding to ownership, was royalty. The second was taxation, arising from the state’s fiscal authority over the activity. The third was dividends, arising when the state participated through PDVSA and therefore received income in its capacity as stakeholder rather than as landlord or tax authority.

This distinction matters because the oil business has historically involved different claimants competing over the fruits of extraction. In a sector marked by extraordinary profitability and strategic importance, the owner of the rent, the fiscal authority, and the capitalist operator all seek to maximize their share of the value generated. In the Venezuelan framework that prevailed before 2026, those three roles were clearly present: the nation as owner of the subsoil, the state as fiscal authority, and the operator as capitalist actor. The new law alters the balance between them.

Royalty

The royalty is where the change is most revealing. As already noted, royalty is the clearest expression of ownership. It is paid upfront. It does not depend on profit. It is charged before taxes are assessed and before the remaining income covers the factors of production; that is, wages, interest, profits, and the other claimants on the project. In other words, royalty is not part of the production costs. If the oil price is 100 dollars per barrel and the agreed royalty rate is 30 per cent, the owner receives 30 dollars per barrel straight away. That is the proprietorial logic in its purest form.This has long been a battleground in the global oil industry. The dispute over rent has historically taken place between the operating companies, whether private national oil companies acting as operators, and the owner of the resource, that is, the landlord. Depending on the property-rights regime, that owner may be a private individual, as in parts of Texas, or the state, as in Venezuela and in most oil-exporting countries. Whether in Texas, Alaska, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Norway, the United Kingdom, Nigeria, or Venezuela, the property-rights regime has been the principal legal instrument through which the owner secures a share of the rent. It is a legitimate exercise of sovereignty, recognised by all parties involved in the global oil business.

And yet the new law, in practical terms, empties out that proprietorial logic by turning royalty into a negotiable variable within a range of zero to 30 per cent, something highly unusual in the global oil business. The potential scale of the loss becomes immediately clear once one thinks in terms of export volumes. At an oil price of 86 dollars per barrel, a 1 per cent royalty leaves the nation with less than one dollar per barrel, whereas a 30 per cent royalty yields 25.8 dollars. If Venezuela exports 800,000 barrels per day, that means roughly 688,000 dollars per day under a 1 per cent royalty, compared with 20.64 million dollars per day under a 30 per cent royalty. This is a dramatic compression of the owner’s income. It shows that a high oil price cannot compensate for the hollowing out of the royalty. Put simply, under the new law, higher oil prices will no longer automatically translate into greater income for the nation if royalties are arbitrarily lowered to the benefit of transnational capital. This is not a marginal fiscal concession; it is a radical compression of the nation’s proprietorial income. 

Taxes

Turning to taxes, under the previous legal framework, the fiscal regime included not only taxes on profits, but also local and municipal taxes on oil activity, together with other parafiscal charges and special contributions linked to extraordinary profits. These different channels gave the public side several routes through which to capture value from extraction. Under the new law, much of that architecture is displaced and compressed into an integrated tax on gross income that will also be set in a discretionary fashion up to a fixed ceiling. According to supporters of the reform, this new framework is designed to ensure the project’s “economic equilibrium.” But the political significance of that shift is considerable. What was previously structured through several distinct legal claims can now be more easily absorbed into a flexible package, negotiated project by project. In that sense, this is not simply simplification; it is a substantial thinning of the fiscal claim. Once the fiscal architecture becomes thinner, the public claim over oil value becomes weaker, more flexible, and ultimately more negotiable.

Table 2 illustrates the magnitude of the change using the March 16, 2026, marker Merey 16 price. Under the previous regime, taxes and parafiscal charges alone could amount to about $31 per barrel, or 36 percent of the barrel price. Under the post-reform interim scenario, that could fall to about $17.6 per barrel, or 20.5 percent.

Dividends

Finally, there are dividends arising from state equity participation, and these too must be distinguished from both royalty and taxation. Dividends are not paid because the nation owns the subsoil, nor are they collected because the state exercises fiscal authority over the activity. They arise because the state participates in the business as shareholder and therefore receives part of the profits in its capacity as investor. In other words, dividends represent the state’s participation in the profits of the business itself. But that income is not necessarily available for immediate public use in the same way as royalty or taxation. Part of it may be retained within the company, used for reinvestment, capital expenditure, debt service, or the wider financial needs of the enterprise. So, unlike royalty, which expresses ownership, or tax, which expresses fiscal authority, dividends are tied to the corporate logic of the business. Depending on the ownership structure, this channel of participation may range, illustratively, from zero to 60 per cent of distributable profits.

International jurisdiction of potential oil litigation

There is also an important jurisdictional dimension. By reducing the fiscal share captured by the state and by placing greater weight on contractual flexibility, the reform moves the sector towards a framework that is more exposed to international arbitration. At the same time, the sanctions and licensing regime has become part of a broader architecture of control over the oil business: control over access to the fields, control over marketing channels, and control over financial access to revenues. So, this is not merely a domestic fiscal reform. It is also part of a broader reordering of the legal and financial chain through which Venezuelan oil is governed.

Key takeaways

Supporters of the new law argue that it delivers increased flexibility, greater operability, improved investment prospects, and greater bankability. And that is not a trivial argument. In a country that has experienced production collapse, sanctions, institutional erosion, and a loss of market share, it is understandable that policymakers would seek a framework that appears more attractive to capital. In that sense, the reform may indeed reduce perceived risk and make projects easier to finance. It may also simplify part of the gross take and make negotiations easier. In that sense, the reform should not be caricatured. But it also entails the abandonment of each of the nation’s and the state’s historic roles in the sector, undermining the institutional fabric that once gave the oil economy a degree of stability and rationality.

For that reason, the disadvantages of the reform ultimately outweigh its potential benefits. What is lost is fiscal automaticity. That means the nation is no longer guaranteed a stable share by rule, but must now negotiate it, justify it, or recover it through more uncertain channels. Put differently, the reform replaces payment-by-rule with payment-by-negotiation on a case-by-case basis. In practical terms, each contract will generate its own conditions over each of the principal sources of public income arising from oil activity.

What is also lost is the clarity of a system in which the state charges because it owns the resource, not because the project happens to be commercially convenient. Once royalties become variable and fiscal terms are subordinated to the “economic equilibrium” of the project, the centre of gravity shifts. The guiding principle is no longer the nation as sovereign owner; it becomes the financial viability for the investor/operator. That is a profound political change presented as technical pragmatism.

In summary: the 2026 reform does not abolish formal ownership, but it hollows it out in practice. It replaces a more proprietorial fiscal logic with a more contractualized and discretionary one. That may attract investment, but it also weakens the automatic link between national ownership and national income. Whatever mechanism one chooses to emphasize, the result is much the same: 

• The nation no longer receives royalty by rule, but under externally conditioned arrangements. What is presented as flexibility is a retreat from ownership. 
• The state compresses its fiscal participation at every level. 
• The state oil company weakens its position as an investor. 

Once that happens, the central question is no longer simply, “How much is the state collecting?” but rather “Who decides, under what rules, with what traceability, and with what accountability?”

The historical context of Venezuela’s oil legislation

Venezuela’s oil history is not just a history of contracts or companies; it is a history of how the nation has tried to define its authority over the subsoil. Venezuela did not begin from the same position as many oil-exporting countries in West Asia or North Africa. It was already an independent republic when it developed its mining and hydrocarbons legislation. That matters, because it means Venezuela built a national jurisdictional framework around state ownership of mines and deposits, rather than inheriting a colonial concessionary order imposed from outside. That distinction is central.

From the early twentieth century onwards, successive legal frameworks progressively consolidated the republic’s sovereign claim over oil-bearing land. In other words, Venezuelan oil law was historically moving towards a more explicit assertion of the nation’s right to charge for the extraction of its natural wealth. This is one reason Venezuela mattered so much internationally: not only because it was a major producer, but because it became a reference point for fiscal regimes and sovereign oil governance, including later in the wider OPEC environment. In that sense, Venezuela’s experience was historically complete in a way that few other oil-producing countries were.

Nevertheless, there is a paradox surrounding the 1975-1976 nationalization of the oil industry. On paper, it ought to have marked the culmination of national control, but it did not deepen sovereignty. In practice, it helped produce a shift towards a more internationalized governance structure. The Ministry, as representative of the owner-nation, was gradually displaced by state oil company PDVSA, and PDVSA increasingly operated under a logic of global business rather than one of public sovereign rule. So instead of the owner-state speaking directly, the national oil company became the intermediary, and that had long-term consequences. Put differently, PDVSA, together with international oil capital, gained ground in the long struggle to reduce the landlord’s direct grip over rent.

This is where the historical relationship with Western transnational corporations becomes more nuanced than a simple story of foreign domination versus nationalist resistance. The issue is not merely the presence of Western companies, but the governance structures they operate under. Venezuela moved from a more classic proprietorial regime towards a more cessionary one, and later, especially in the late 1980s and 1990s, towards more liberal or non-proprietorial arrangements. The oil opening (“Apertura Petrolera”) of the 1990s is especially important here, because it reduced the fiscal burden and shifted the framework in a way that centralized the operator’s conditions. That was already a major break.

The Chávez years brought a partial reversal. The restoration of the property right was not merely ideological posturing; it was a restoration of a more classical fiscal logic, in which the sovereign character of the state take was reaffirmed. But that restoration took place amid other contradictions, including the politicization of PDVSA and the accumulation of debt. So even that phase did not resolve the deeper institutional tensions.

The 2026 reform, then, does not emerge from nowhere. It is a new chapter of a long historical movement: from national jurisdiction, to nationalization, to cessionary governance, to the oil opening, to partial reassertion, to crisis and collapse, and now to a new form of contractualization from a position of weakness. Venezuela’s oil history has been a struggle not simply over who owns the oil, but over who governs the terms on which ownership is exercised. The present reform is the latest chapter in that struggle, but it is a particularly radical one because it comes after institutional erosion and under a global order that is far more contractual, litigious, and externally structured than the one Venezuela faced in the mid-twentieth century.

Oil in the present geopolitical battle

The current geopolitical context of the US-Israeli aggression against Iran should, in principle, strengthen Venezuela’s bargaining position. When West Asia becomes more unstable, supply security rises as a strategic concern, and oil regains immediate geopolitical urgency, countries with large reserves and an established production history become more valuable. 

Venezuela has occupied that position before. Venezuelan oil played an important strategic role for the Allies during the Second World War, for example. Today, renewed disruption around Iran and the Strait of Hormuz has again tightened the market and raised the geopolitical value of accessible barrels.

That is precisely why the current outcome appears so paradoxical. If global conditions improve Venezuela’s leverage, one would expect the country to negotiate from a stronger position and to demand a larger participation. One would expect a legal framework that captures more rent, not less; that uses geopolitical scarcity to reinforce state take, not to dilute it. But the current reform, alongside the sequence of deals with foreign conglomerates, and combined with US control over revenues, seem to move in the opposite direction.

This leads to the second point: the geopolitical issue is not only price or supply. It is also about control. What is emerging is a form of sovereignty under tutelage. Venezuela may formally remain the owner of the resource, but effective control over commercialization, revenue channels, and external validation appears increasingly conditioned from outside. Whether one calls that tutelage, external supervision, or subordinated reintegration, the takeaway is the same: sovereignty over the resource is no longer identical to sovereignty over the business. Recent US licenses illustrate the point very clearly. Washington has opened the door to renewed oil transactions with PDVSA, but under Treasury oversight and with proceeds channelled into US-administered accounts. That is not normal sovereign control over national oil income.

This is where the distinction between the origin and the destination of rent becomes especially useful. Even before we ask what is done with oil income socially or politically, we first need to know how that income is generated: through what pricing, what discounts, what fiscal structure, and through which payment channels. If that first level is opaque, then both the origin and the destination of rent become politically indeterminate. In other words, the problem is not only that the country may receive less revenue. The problem is that the country may not even be able to clearly verify what it is owed, how, and why. That is a much deeper sovereignty problem.

As a result, a geopolitical context that would, in theory, favor Venezuela, sees the country re-entering global markets with weakened sovereignty, under a framework of greater flexibility for operators and less certainty for the nation. That is why the debate is no longer only about production volumes or export flows. The real debate is about the jurisdictional and political order that now governs Venezuelan oil: who authorizes, who commercializes, who arbitrates disputes, who tracks the proceeds, and who answers to the country.

What does a sovereign recovery look like?

Moving from critique to programme is difficult, and the first honest thing to say is that no one can predict the exact path ahead. Venezuela is emerging from collapse, sanctions, loss of market share, institutional erosion, and a deep social crisis. Any recovery scenario, therefore, is bound to be politically fraught. But one thing is clear: if the country does not rebuild the public intelligibility of oil income, then any so-called recovery may simply reproduce opacity, distrust, inequality, and social tension.

A sovereign recovery does not mean autarky. It does not mean excluding foreign firms, nor does it mean mechanically returning to an earlier model. It means something more precise: restoring the link between ownership, public rule, and accountable income capture. In other words, if the nation owns the resource, then the nation must be able to know, verify, and govern how value is extracted from it. That means transparency over net prices, discounts, taxes, royalties, exemptions, payment channels, and the destination of funds. Without that, there can be no recovery in any meaningful sovereign sense. It would simply be resumed extraction.

A sovereign recovery also requires stripping away some of the ideological confusion that usually surrounds debates on natural resources. As Bernard Mommer argued more than twenty years ago, the governance of natural resources is, in many ways, a more elementary question than the conventional left-right divide suggests. In the case of oil and minerals, the deeper divide is above versus below. It is the tension between those who live and work on the surface (the nation, society, the public realm) and those who make their living from the subsoil.

That is why the question of ownership comes before the question of distribution, that is, before the question of what is done with the income generated by oil activity. Only after establishing the governance over the resource and the rules over its extraction does the familiar left-right question properly arise: how that income is used, whether for social spending, public services, etc., or private accumulation. 

The first step, then, is transparency. Not as a slogan, but as an institutional obligation. Who is selling? At what net price? Under what discounts? With what deductions? Paid where? Audited by whom? These are not minor administrative questions. They are the very mechanics of sovereignty in an extractive economy. If the country cannot answer them, then the state is no longer exercising full command over its principal source of income.

The second step is to move away from excessive discretion and back towards intelligible general rules. Contracts will always matter in oil. But there is a difference between contracts operating within a strong public framework and contracts effectively replacing public rule. Once everything becomes negotiable in the name of investment or “economic equilibrium,” the public realm shrinks and the executive realm expands. That is politically dangerous in any country, but especially in one where oil historically underpinned a broader social pact.

The third step is to reconnect oil income with social legitimacy. This is not an abstract issue. It is whether oil wealth translates to salaries, living standards, public services, social protection, and some minimum sense of collective benefit. If the country enters a new extractive cycle in which more oil is produced but public income remains narrow, opaque, or externally conditioned, then social tensions are likely to intensify rather than diminish. That is why a sovereign recovery cannot be measured by production figures alone. It must be judged by whether the nation regains an intelligible and legitimate claim over the income stream.

In simple terms, the average Venezuelan citizen is aware of fluctuations in crude prices because they know they affect the national budget. Oil income is widely and legitimately perceived as income belonging to the nation, and therefore as something that ought to support public services and collective welfare. Even when that income is later misused (through corruption, clientelism, or mismanagement) the underlying perception remains: oil revenue belongs to all Venezuelans.

That is also why the current situation can be described as one of sovereignty under tutelage. The country may still be sovereign in formal terms, yet it operates under external supervision in practical terms. Unless that gap is closed, the language of recovery will remain politically fragile.

Blas Regnault is an oil market analyst and researcher based in The Hague, whose work explores how oil prices move across time and what they tell us about the global economy. Drawing on years of experience in central banking, energy research, and international consulting, he brings together political economy, business cycles, production costs, and petroleum governance in a way that is both rigorous and accessible.

He has spent much of his career studying the deeper forces behind oil price trends and fluctuations, always with an eye on the institutional and geopolitical realities of the global petroleum market. Later this year, he will publish his book, Political Economy of Oil Prices: Trends and Business Cycles in the Global Petroleum Market, with Routledge.

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

In an era of 150-page novels in 14-point font, and books on Venezuela’s recent history that feel like overly long opinion pieces, Ulises Milla’s Editorial Alfa opted for something entirely different: a chronicle of how chavismo took over the Venezuelan State between 1999 and 2004, the product of ten years of research, divided into two volumes totaling more than 1,400 pages.

It is titled La oscuridad no llegó sola (no English translation yet), taken from a line by a Colombian poet, and has a subtitle that speaks volumes: “chronicle of a Venezuelan tragedy.” Yes, it is a chronicle in the broadest sense of the term, a systematic and multifaceted account that protects a series of events from oblivion in a specific era. It is also a Venezuelan tragedy, one among many, in which everything leads to an unhappy ending that seems inevitable, as in those of Aeschylus or Sophocles.

There is a classical feel to Mirtha Rivero’s new work, not only because she has drawn on literary genres that are over two millennia old, but also because it is a book that took a long time to write, one made to transcend time. For this reader, it is another essential text about our past, like José Domingo Díaz’s chronicles of the First and Second Republics or Lisandro Alvarado’s Historia de la Revolución Federal, and certainly like Rivero’s previous work: the bestseller La rebelión de los náufragos, published in 2010. It does not attempt to impose a personal thesis, defend one side or one figure, or propose a solution to the nation’s ills. It is an effort to understand how things happened, on a scale vast enough to allow the patterns of behavior developed by political actors over those years to emerge.

For those of us who experienced these events firsthand, through the media, La oscuridad no llegó sola still reveals aspects of the story we didn’t know, thanks to the quantity and quality of its sources. For those who were too young, it is an unparalleled document on how the traditional political class underestimated chavismo, how chavismo took advantage of the negligence and frivolity of its adversaries to seize control of institutions, and how the anti-politics we saw explode in La rebelión de los náufragos helped demolish what little remained of that democracy, which committed suicide, or allowed itself to die. A tragedy that, with its variations, has happened before. And that will very likely happen again. La oscuridad no llegó sola by Mirtha Rivero is available on Amazon and in bookstores in Spain. From Monterrey, Mexico, where she has lived for several years, the economics journalist who is showing how Venezuela’s contemporary history must be written spoke with Caracas Chronicles.

I want to start with the moment when La rebelión de los náufragos was published, had the impact it did, and you began the journey that led to these two volumes. You addressed this in the preface to La oscuridad no llegó sola, but what was the process like for defining not only the 1999-2004 timeframe, but also the questions you wanted to answer?

After La rebelión de los náufragos was published, I didn’t immediately consider any other topics. It was the third book I had written, but it was the first one that was published, and its reception changed my way of working. It was like a shock. For a year and a half, I couldn’t think about another “topic” because I was adapting to that new reality. It was in mid-June 2011 that another topic emerged. I wanted to answer a question: What happened in the 2004 recall referendum? For me, it was personally very important because, as a result, my husband and I began looking for a new place to live. Did voting fraud occur or not? What was it like? How did we get to that point? So I marked the period: from Chávez’s inauguration on February 2, 1999, until the day of the referendum, August 15, 2004.

It wasn’t so much that chavismo was pressuring the Supreme Court, but rather that a large part of society favored a Constituent Assembly.

I had to go back quite far because Chávez didn’t appear out of nowhere. Nor did other figures: the architects who helped him set up his political machine, those who accompanied him from that day forward, and those who had been with him even before the 1992 uprisings didn’t appear out of nowhere. They all have a past and a reason for being there, just like the people who kept appearing in my research. I confirmed along the way that during those years, the foundations were laid and the entire structure that allows chavismo to endure was built. As I guide my narrative, I realize that I not only have to look back, but that I often force myself to project into the future. For example, I look back when I discuss the oil industry, which is an important topic in my chronicle, but I also look forward when someone talks about the changes in the judicial sphere that the 1999 Constitution imposed, and I’m going to the trial against Judge Afiuni in 2009.

I see. For me, La oscuridad no llegó sola is a twin of La rebelión de los náufragos, in its structure, its tone, and its intention: first, you show how the political class sacrificed democracy with Carlos Andrés Pérez and paved the way for chavismo, and now we see how it overestimated its own strength and underestimated Chávez. Was describing this hall of mirrors the plan, or did it emerge during the research?

It wasn’t the plan. I didn’t see it as a continuation, nor as a hall of mirrors: it turned out that way, the story led me there. Exploring the recall referendum was actually a pretext for me to delve into that era, which I was afraid of. What was important was what happened before the referendum. How the referendum was repeatedly postponed until Chavismo had all institutions and powers under its control, which culminated in the expansion of the Supreme Court, and how it was able to regain popular support through direct subsidies via the social missions. How the opposition promoted the recall referendum without having a candidate to challenge Chavismo if Chávez lost and elections were held.

What did you learn, while writing this book, about the ability of the various opposition leaders to interpret reality? Do you share the common opinion that popular support for Chávez was underestimated in 1998 and 1999?

I was very surprised by their inability to see what was right in front of them. We had already seen how short-sighted the political parties were, their reluctance to form and renew themselves, since the 1980s. This is evident in the conspiracy against Carlos Andrés Pérez in 1993, based on a check from the secret fund that had been annulled in 1989 and was used against him in 1992; in the corruption accusations made by (future chavista minister) José Vicente Rangel; in the resistance to the reforms of the Presidential Commission for State Reform; and in the insistence of the old leaders on remaining political bosses.

There were people who knew who this Hugo Chávez they were opposing really was, but even so, there were those clumsy last-minute maneuvers in the 1998 campaign, and they weren’t prepared for the scenario in which Congress would be eliminated, as Chávez himself had said would happen. They acted with great carelessness in the face of Chávez’s rise: society, the political parties, and even a political animal like Teodoro Petkoff underestimated him. I was very surprised that they didn’t know how to confront the lieutenant colonel, the authoritarian tendencies that came with him, the power-hungry Left that accompanied him, the people who applauded the military coup attempts of 1992. They offered no resistance when Chavismo abolished Congress, taking advantage of the anti-political sentiment that had also been brewing since the 1980s. The lack of vision, and even of any statesman-like discourse, on the part of the politicians, did surprise me greatly.

One of the book’s many achievements was to unearth and trace a somewhat forgotten but key episode: how the Supreme Court accepted the Constituent Assembly’s suspension of the Legislative Branch. Did that also surprise you, how they paved the way for the dissolution of the separation of powers? How much pressure was chavismo exerting on the Supreme Court?

It didn’t surprise me that much, because we experienced it firsthand. The chavistas had just come to power and were barely learning how to use it, and they couldn’t exert pressure before Chávez took office on February 2, 1999. It wasn’t so much that chavismo was pressuring the Supreme Court, but rather that a large part of society favored a Constituent Assembly, even though a constitutional reform would have sufficed. Many people believed that this Constituent Assembly would save the country, to create a new, bright, efficient nation. Everyone was riding that wave. As Simón Alberto Consalvi said, we cannot absolve the people of their decisions.

Some of your interviewees, as expected, fall into hindsight bias: assigning to certain moments a meaning that we see today but that wasn’t easy to discern then. For example, everyone in your book says they knew the 2002-2003 strike was a bad idea, but that “the majority decided”: Didn’t you yourself fall into hindsight bias? Because when I write about those years, I have to tell myself, “Remember what you thought then about the 2002 general strike, not what you think today.”

One can always fall into that bias because one isn’t objective, pristine, but I was very careful about that and made an effort to compare the accounts. Because many interviewees told me things that didn’t happen as they said; they were mixing what others had told them with what they would have liked to have happened. My own interpretations of a particular moment fell apart as I investigated. Sometimes the same scene had six different testimonies, and I had to cross-reference them, sometimes going back to the witnesses to confirm or discuss parts of their story. The good thing is that I encountered very little reluctance from the interviewees, although of course there were people who didn’t want to talk, who stood me up, and I even made trips for nothing. 

Both the oil workers and the dissident military officers were convinced they were right and that they could convince some people, while these people already had a plan in place.

With those I did talk to, I sometimes confronted them, because now it turns out, for example, that nobody agreed with the national civic strike, or as we called it then, the “oil strike.” But the investigation was able to determine who truly resisted, and how society pressured for a repeat of what happened on April 11, even though it was so unlikely to have any effect.

April 11, 2002, is like the novel Rashomon; the same event is seen differently depending on many perspectives. But it’s quite well documented; much less known is what happened within PDVSA, and you contributed a lot to those of us who aren’t familiar with the oil world. How do you see today the role played by the oil executives when they decided to step outside their bubble? 

Within that bubble were people like Edgar Paredes and Juan Santana who, having been involved in university politics, were politically savvy. They knew their place and what might happen, but also what they needed to do. They created that protest movement to rescue PDVSA. Society joined them because, in reality, it used the PDVSA conflict as an excuse to protest many other things, but the oil workers were trying to defend their company because, ever since Chávez was elected in ’98, they saw him as a threat. Naively, they believed they could change the policies because they came from a school of thought where debate and consensus were reached. But even during the 2002 strike, they continued fighting to rescue PDVSA. They were fighting for the country too, but to rescue the country, they believed, PDVSA had to be rescued. The same was true for the soldiers in Plaza Altamira. Right or wrong, they wanted to rescue the FAN (National Armed Forces) where they had made their careers, without understanding that they couldn’t, because the first political prisoners of chavismo were military personnel.

The idea that Chávez also provoked the April 11th march, or the movement to crush it, is a narrative he fabricated after those events.

Both the oil workers and the dissident military officers were convinced they were right and that they could convince some people, while these people already had a plan in place. They thought that the truth would prevail and that the people would act for the good of the country. But that wasn’t meant to happen. They suffered a lack of understanding of the country’s political history, of what the 1992 coups meant. Because they were caught up in their own business, in what they knew. In fact, not all the oil workers or the military saw Chávez as a threat and voted for him in 1998, like a large part of the country.

Reading the book, I came to feel more empathy for what the oil workers and even certain military personnel, did than for what the politicians did.

Because they actually did more than the politicians in terms of trying to rescue their respective organizations. With all their naiveté, the oil workers and the military did force others to act. They gave their all to try to save not only their professional world, but democracy itself.

The book makes it clear that Chávez sought out conflicts, he provoked them. Even the massacres, not to mention the strikes: he sought out battles because he saw them (and he was right) as opportunities to wipe out pockets of resistance. Right? Do you see this as a pattern that connects everything from the 2001 enabling legislation to the recall referendum?

Chávez sought out battles because it was his way of life. He always said, like Pinochet, that he was a soldier. I believe he launched the enabling legislation package in 2001 to impose his agenda, not to provoke, because I don’t think he knew it would generate such strong resistance, even though there had already been protests since 2000. He introduced those laws at the last minute and without consulting anyone because he was an authoritarian who believed he was the center of the world. The idea that he also provoked the April 11th march, or the movement to crush it, is a narrative he fabricated after those events. He knew there were disaffected military officers and expected a classic coup, which he planned to counter with civilians, but he didn’t provoke it, because in fact, his intelligence services ultimately failed him. Just as there are people who, after the strike failed, said they never agreed with it, he rewrote history to impose the narrative that everything was his agenda. But many things surprised him, even though he eventually managed to navigate each situation. However, after April 11th, he did dedicate himself to provoking conflicts, now with the advice of Fidel Castro, and surrounded by radicals like Alí Rodríguez Araque. 

Another pattern I noticed is the persistence of anti-politics, how distrust of political parties shaped different situations. And you get the feeling that this still resonates with people, that three decades after the 1990s, anti-politics continues to define us, right?

The parties were already badly weakened, following a decline that began in the mid-1980s, and even more so after what happened with Pérez II. Their crisis became impossible to hide by the second year of Chávez’s presidency, but anti-politics was very much present during Chávez’s election itself, before that night of April 11, 2002, when decisions were made driven by the desire to remove politicians from important matters. Although politicians met, participated in discussion groups, and sought solutions on their own, such as promoting Adán Celis as transitional president, anti-politics was pervasive across all sectors and prevailed among the main actors who attempted to remove Chávez from power in 2002. The book includes testimonies from politicians who recount how the media favored the opinions of emerging civil society actors who viewed politicians as corrupt and stuck in the past. And yes, as you say, this continues today. Those in power still promote this idea of ​​politicians as a corrupt caste that led the country to ruin. Because it’s very easy to blame politicians for something in which the citizenry also played a part.