Trump wants Venezuela’s oil. What happens next?

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0:27There is not such a thing as regime change. Don't even mention those words anymore. They just decided to maintain a dictatorship as long as that dictatorship do whatever the Trump administration wants. An extraordinary rendition in every sense of the term. Maduro may be out, but the plan for the day after the American coup in Venezuela is still up in the air.

1:05It's Monday, January 5th, and this is Here and Now Anytime from NPR and WBUR. I'm Chris Bentley.

1:14The U.S. has deposed the president of Venezuela after months of threats, military strikes, and a partial naval blockade on its oil tankers. Now President Trump says we're in charge of Venezuela and plans to seize the country's oil industry. Venezuelans in exile are celebrating Maduro's ouster, but somewhat uneasily because most of Maduro's government is still in power. We'll hear from some of those exiles in a few minutes. But first... We want justice, you say how? We want justice, you say how? Free Maduro right now! Free Maduro right now! Protesters and counter-protesters gathered today outside the federal courthouse in New York, where Nicolas Maduro and his wife Celia Flores faced narco-terrorism charges.

2:05two days after American troops abducted them and deposed the president in a coup. Venezuelan officials said at least 40 people were killed in the attack, including civilians. Maduro pleaded not guilty, saying in court, I am a decent man, the president of my country. He also called himself a prisoner of war and said he was kidnapped. The next court date isn't until March. So many are wondering, who is in charge of Venezuela? Maduro's vice president, Delce Rodriguez, is acting in his stead. But President Trump says the United States will run the country. Tom Cotton, who chairs the Senate Intelligence Committee, told CNN yesterday, it's not so much that the U.S.

2:50will run Venezuela as control it. When the president said the United States is going to be running Venezuela, it means that the new leaders of Venezuela need to meet our demands. Our demands are now what they were before yesterday, that we want them to stop the drug trafficking. We want them to stop the weapons trafficking. Drug trafficking was one reason the administration gave over the last few months for its military campaign against Venezuela, which included blowing up fishing boats it said were carrying drugs, killing at least 110 people. But more recently, Trump's been giving other reasons, oil and projecting American power.

3:27On Saturday, he said, quote, our dominance in the Western Hemisphere will never be questioned again, end quote. He also said this. We're going to have our very large United States oil companies, the biggest anywhere in the world, go in, spend billions of dollars, fix the badly broken infrastructure, the oil infrastructure, and start making money for the country. The U.S. had already seized oil tankers off the coast of Venezuela, an extraordinary move in and of itself. Now the president says the country will take control of the world's largest oil reserves off Venezuela. But Francisco Manaldi says getting that oil is no simple thing.

4:12He's director of the Latin America Energy Program at Rice University, and he spoke with Scott Tong. Venezuela sits atop vast reserves of crude oil. Its production, though, has really fallen in the last several years. Do you anticipate the big American oil companies are ready to go and jump in and drill? I think they will take some time to do it. The dust has to settle, and there has to be a lot of preconditions aligning in terms of political risk contract institutions for them to do that. Perhaps the only one who could move relatively fast is Chevron, because they already are there. They already have contracts, and they can increase production swiftly.

4:57But, you know, oil companies, they invest for, you know, for the long term. These projects take a long time and they need things like political stability, don't they? exactly i mean the the problem of course is that if you're going to invest billions of dollars of fresh capital you have a horizon of you know 30 40 years and so you will not do that if you don't know exactly where you're standing in terms of the political situation and even if you perceive political stability to be, you know, clear in the future. Yeah. Years ago, Venezuela produced a lot more oil. Now it's down to, you know, under a million barrels per day.

5:42By contrast, the U.S. produces about 21 million barrels per day. The Saudi Arabia, 11 million. Russia, 10 million per day. Briefly, what happened in Venezuela? Well, it was a combination of things. As you point out, Venezuela is not an issue about resources. Venezuela has plenty of resources, and it did produce three and a half times more than it produces today. But during President Chavez's tenure and then Maduro, there was expropriation of private companies. They also fired half of the employees of the national oil company because of political intervention. And eventually, you know, they took so much money from the oil sector that they didn't have the capacity to invest.

6:32And when the price of oil collapsed in 2014, production started to collapse even faster. And then, of course, U.S. sanctions also affected the oil sector. Wow. So, you know, I've heard oil analysts talk about risk. Sometimes there's below-ground risk, or how easy it is to kind of get to the energy, which I gather is not a big problem in Venezuela, but it's the above-ground risk. I mean, it's the politics, it's the policy, it's the expertise. That's the problem? Yes. First of all, you know, because the national company has a dominant role and private companies can only be minority shareholder. That's a big issue.

7:13Then, you know, the legal framework, there has been all sorts of reneging on contracts in the country. Companies have not been able to repatriate their money. So you're exactly right. Above ground risk, the big issue. And if those are not reduced significantly, we will not see a significant investment and recovery in the sector. And in the global oil market, does the world need a lot more Venezuelan crude? Well, right now there is a surplus of oil in the world, but Venezuela's oil is highly demanded by refineries in the U.S. Gulf Coast because they are designed to process heavy oil. And moreover...

8:00That's the kind of oil that Venezuela produces, right? Kind of thick and heavy, takes a lot of processing? Exactly. But it's sold usually at that discount and refiners in the U.S. make significant profits on that type of oil. And in the longer run, Venezuela could be a big help if the demand of oil continues to grow because there are very few other places in the world that can increase production the way Venezuela can. We've been talking to Francisco Manaldi, director of the Latin American Energy Program at Rice University. Francisco, thank you once again. Thanks. Lots more on Venezuela coming up after a short break.

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9:38Celebration in Doral, Florida over the weekend, where Venezuelan expats danced around waving American flags. Adeliz Ferro told Scott Tong she's feeling relief that Maduro may face justice. but says she worries what will happen under the new president, stepping up to fill Maduro's shoes. Farrow is an immigration activist in Florida. She was born in Venezuela. And this morning, she said her thoughts today are with the family of Neomar Lander, a 17-year-old anti-Maduro protester who was killed in 2017. He was a child. He used to march with every single march. He was very involved, even though he was really, really young, tiny, skinny.

10:24And he used to march with a helmet, like a bicycle helmet, and with this shield that he built with cardboard, making himself as a fighter for freedom, for democracy. And he was very popular in the march because everyone started to know him. And in one of the marches, Maduro's police shoot him point blank with tear gas can point blank to his chest and kill him. And he became this symbol of our fight for freedom. He's one of the examples of more of 400 people that has been killed during all of these years in these marches. I am not talking about political prisoners. I am not talking of extrajudicial executions that Maduro made.

11:24I can give you those numbers. At least 8 ,000 extrajudicial executions, more than 8 million people that fled the country. At this point right now, while we are talking, there are 1 ,000 Venezuelans as political prisoners in the hands of the dictatorship. And right now, like five minutes ago, the brand new, quote unquote, Congress in Venezuela, which just sworn Delcy Rodriguez as the new president of Venezuela. Delcy Rodriguez, yes. Yes, passed a law right now, just passed, to persecute anyone inside Venezuela who expressed support for the attack the U .S. just made to get Maduro out of Venezuela.

12:23So what does that mean? You're just telling me this and I'm trying to understand this. Does that mean the people are being warned to not support what the Americans just did? Not only that, what it means is that what they usually do, which is something that they do all the time, is they get this from nowhere. You can encounter a group of police on a traffic light or in a corner in any city of Venezuela, and they can stop you for no reason, with no reason. They don't need a reason. And they can ask you for your phone, and they can ask you to unblock your phone and check your chats. And if they read something that you wrote with your mom, with your sister, with any family member, with a friend in a chat group about what happened and they decide that what they are reading is something you are supporting what just happened, then you're going to be detained and you're going to be brought to justice for supporting the invasion.

13:24What you're saying, what you're suggesting is clues that the brutal regime minus Maduro is still in place. Is that what you're saying? Delcy Rodriguez, this person that is negotiating with President Trump and Marco Rubio and the U.S. government, is as bad or probably even worse than Nicolás Maduro. And this is the person that, as it is right now, basically is being recognized as the president of Venezuela. So there is not such a thing as regime change. Don't even mention those words anymore. No, they just decided to maintain a dictatorship as long as that dictatorship do whatever the Trump administration want.

14:15And the Venezuelan people, the Venezuelan democracy, the Venezuelan immigrants are not in the picture. We are not part of this. They don't care about any human being that has been affected by everything that is happening. Now, briefly, Adelisa, you work with Venezuelans in America who face deportation, being sent back home to Venezuela. Kristi Noem, Homeland Security Secretary, has said Venezuela is more free than it was yesterday. Is it safe for Venezuelans in Florida and the U.S. to go back? Scott, I cannot even talk with my mom who is in Caracas about what is happening because she can be in prison today because of the law that they just passed.

14:58Nothing has changed. The only thing that has changed is who is speaking from the top of the dictatorship in Venezuela. It's not Maduro. It's Elsie Rodriguez. Everything else is the same. Diosdado Cabello is still there. Padrino Lopez is still there. Right. These are people in the inner circle, Maduro's inner circle. The whole inner circle is there. The persecution is there. Everything is exactly the same as it was three days ago. There is not such a thing as safer or a safer country to go back to. We've been talking to Adelise Farrow, an immigration activist in South Florida, born in Venezuela.

15:38Adelise, thank you very much. Thank you.

15:51Faro was just one of many people Scott spoke with when he was in Doral a few months ago. If you want to hear what they were saying in the lead up to this weekend's events, check out our previous episode all about Venezuelan expats in Doral. We'll link to that one in the show notes.

16:11Time for one more short break, and we'll be right back.

16:17The U.S. attack that took down Maduro was audacious. It was also illegal, says Jeffrey Korn, an Army veteran who teaches a Texas Tech's school of law. I, along with I think most international law experts, believe that the United States did not have a plausible legal justification for conducting a military operation in Venezuela to get Maduro, even though I have no sympathy for him and I think that the ends are potentially positive for Venezuela, it is a violation of Article 2-4 of the Charter of the United Nations, which prohibits states from using or threatening force against other states unless they're acting in self-defense or they have Security Council authorization.

17:07The rationale, I'm sure, that the operation was supported by within the government was that Maduro was complicit in drug trafficking, that the administration has characterized as an attack on the United States, thereby justifying action in self-defense. That's at the very core of their legal theory, and that's the aspect of the legal theory, that has been widely criticized since the beginning of the drug boat operation. Arguably, the intervention violated international law, but that will have no relevance on whether or not he's going to stand trial in a U.S. federal court. We will follow that trial, of course.

17:49But more pressing than Maduro's case in U.S. court is what happens next in Venezuela, a country of 28 million people. Even former Trump administration official Elliott Abrams, who was part of the American pressure campaign against Maduro in Trump's first term, and who advocated for regime change across Latin America and the Middle East before that, told us Trump's assertion that the U.S. will run Venezuela is ridiculous. We can't run it. It's a country twice the size of California, and we should want the Venezuelan people to have control of their own future. Venezuelan opposition leaders have said they should be the ones to guide that future, But they remain out of power, even with Maduro gone.

18:33Many of them are in exile, like Vanessa Neumann. She's the former special envoy to the UK for Juan Guaido, who was the face of a U.S.-backed campaign to force Maduro from power after his disputed re-election in 2018. Neumann told us it's possible the authoritarian regime will outlive Maduro. Yes, and that is everybody's worst nightmare. I mean, prior to this, the Venice One's worst nightmare was that Trump would get bored and remove the Armada and not really do anything and not even remove Maduro. Now, the removal of Maduro and the sight and the pictures of him, you know, blindfolded and on the Iwo Jima and handcuffed on the Iwo Jima, it was like seeing a guard fall from Mount Olympus and make you realize that this is possible, that it is possible to get rid of these people, you know, that have oppressed us so long.

19:22But, you know, now there is confusion and people in Venezuela are telling me that not only are they confused, but they are also, they're sick of it. We've got lots more from her and all the voices you heard today on the show right now at hereandnow.org. Follow this podcast for lots more to come. But that's it for today.

19:54Here and Now Anytime comes from NPR and WBWR Boston. Today's stories were produced by Jenna Griffiths, Julia Corcoran, and Ashley Locke. Our editors were Mark Naven, Michaela Rodriguez, Michael Scotto, and Kat Welch. Technical direction from James Trout and Matt Reed. Our theme music is by Mike Moschetto, Max Liebman, and me, Chris Bentley. Our digital producers are Alison Hagen and Grace Griffin, and Here and Now's executive producer is Alan Price. Thanks for listening. check out hereandnow.org for lots more and we'll be back with you tomorrow