US secures 65-billion-barrel Venezuelan oil deal amid fierce criticism of 'colonialism'

In January, when elite American troops removed Nicolás Maduro from power in Caracas, President Trump was explicit about what would follow: the United States would control Venezuela's oil. He said it plainly. The country would be run by Washington, and the sale of Venezuelan crude would be managed by American interests for years to come.

On Wednesday, that vision became contractual reality. A US-led company signed a deal in Caracas granting it 100-year concessions over 17 Venezuelan oilfields—a total of 65 billion barrels of crude, representing more than one-fifth of the nation's proven reserves. The agreement pairs the American government with a private Venezuelan firm called North American Blue Energy Partners, the country's second-largest oil producer after Chevron. Under the terms, the US government retains veto power over any board appointment at the company, and a majority of the board must be American citizens.

Both governments framed the arrangement as transformative. Trump called it "the biggest oil deal in world history." Delcy Rodríguez, Venezuela's interim president, described it as historic and projected it would attract $100 billion in investment and generate more than $200 billion in tax revenue. Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgess told Fox Business the pact was shifting global energy markets away from Middle Eastern "choke points" and back toward the Western Hemisphere—a strategic realignment made urgent by the ongoing US conflict with Iran and its effect on fuel prices.

But the deal has fractured Venezuelan politics and drawn withering criticism from unexpected quarters. Elliott Abrams, Trump's former special representative on Venezuela and Iran, called it a "terrible deal" in which Rodríguez had "given away 20% of the national patrimony for nothing." He acknowledged the logic—Gulf supplies are unreliable—but said the terms were so lopsided they amounted to "a kind of fever dream of what colonialism looks like." The White House itself invoked the Monroe Doctrine, the 19th-century principle of American dominance over the hemisphere, describing the agreement as "re-established" and aimed at "purging foreign malign influence from our backyard."

The Venezuelan opposition sees betrayal. María Corina Machado, a Nobel Peace Prize winner and presidential contender, has remained publicly silent, needing Trump's support. Others have not. Ricardo Hausmann, a Venezuelan economist, posted on social media that the US had chosen "not to liberate Venezuelans, but to ally yourself with our oppressors," and had opted for "an unconstitutional agreement with an illegitimate and oppressive government" rather than restoring democracy first. The absence of any clear path toward elections in Venezuela compounds the sting.

The criticism cuts across ideological lines. While the governing socialist party backed Rodríguez, many Venezuelan socialists view the deal as capitulation—a surrender of the nation's most valuable asset to the power they have spent nearly three decades resisting. Rafael Ramírez, who headed the state oil company PDVSA under Hugo Chávez, said the agreement "hands over [the oil] and opens the doors to a new colonialism of the United States." The contrast is stark. In 2008, Chávez had stood in the Orinoco River Belt, on land expropriated from ExxonMobil, and declared to PDVSA workers: "We have the reins in our hands and we won't ever let them go again." He denounced how previous Washington-aligned governments had made Venezuela "a nation of gringos." Now his handpicked successor's successor has signed away those reins.

Yet the deal faces practical obstacles that may prove as consequential as the political ones. Trump has said profits will materialize within two or three years. Energy experts say that is fantasy. Luis Pacheco of the Baker Institute at Rice University told BBC Mundo that Venezuela's oil sector is in such dire condition that a decade is more realistic—and that the country needs to invest roughly $100 billion over eight years just to return to production levels from 30 years ago. Pacheco posed a harder question: who will manage those resources, and for what purpose? "Are they going to put the same people in charge of managing that money who already squandered the biggest oil boom of the century?" The deal is silent on governance, on accountability, on how Venezuela's history of mismanagement will be prevented from repeating itself under new ownership.