COMMENTARY The rotting effects of Venezuela's half-century-long oil corruption made its industry easy prey for Trump — whose real outrage is blocking the re-democratization that could fix that flaw.
I’m certainly no fan of the “Donroe Doctrine,” President Donald Trump’s claim that the U.S. should own the western hemisphere the way Jeffrey Epstein owned a Caribbean island.
But I admit that, at least in one respect, I don’t find myself as stunned as so many others are this week by the neo-imperialist oil deal Trump just struck with Venezuela.
The one that gives Emperor Donald dominion over much of Venezuela’s oil after his victorious capture of its dictator, Nicolás Maduro — a Donroe Doctrine-meets-Landman acquisition that makes Venezuela look like Trump’s petroleum subsidiary.
I’m not astounded because, frankly, Venezuela’s been inviting this humiliation for half a century.
READ MORE: The Machadyssey: How long will Venezuela's democracy hero — and democracy — be forced to wander?
That’s right: what’s gotten lost in the cacophonous debate about the Trump transaction is the fact that this year marks the 50th anniversary of Venezuela’s sovereign nationalization of its oil reserves, the world’s largest.
And what that milestone reminds us most of all is what a corrupt oil steward Venezuela has been ever since then.
Yes, I’m fully aware that in the 20th century, Venezuela’s state-run oil monopoly, Petróleos de Venezuela, or PDVSA, was a production showcase that put other national crude corporations, like Mexico’s shambolic Pemex, to shame. I was there in Venezuela back then. I saw it.
Here’s what I also saw: the brazen plundering of PDVSA’s prodigious wealth by a political and economic elite in Venezuela that left half the population — half the souls in a country with the world’s largest oil reserves — in poverty.
Trump knows that once democracy owns Venezuela again, he won’t — and that will mean one fewer Donroe Doctrine trophy he'll get to show off.
As a correspondent on assignment in those days, I remember sometimes riding in the plushy Falcon jets PDVSA executives and engineers had at their disposal.
I just as vividly recall visiting vast Caracas slums like Catia.
By the 1990s, residents there were banging pots and pans to protest the inexcusable chasm between PDVSA’s heaven of leather-seat luxury and their hell of tin-roof deprivation — often void of schools, clinics, bodegas and potable water, which they fetched with buckets after long treks down their hillside communities.
Refinery explosion
It’s no coincidence Catia was the cradle of the movement that brought Hugo Chávez and his socialist Bolivarian Revolution to power in 1999.
Chávez did steer the petro-riches to Venezuela’s barrios for a change. But he also managed to turn PDVSA into just another, well, shambolic national oil company.
I remember watching the first potable water pipelines being laid in Catia after his election.
I just as vividly recall visiting oil facilities like the Paraguaná refinery complex.
I listened to personnel warn me, sotto voce, how little Chávez’s regime was investing in their upkeep — largely because, in the 21st century, the corrupt Bolivarian elite was bleeding PDVSA even drier than before.
In 2012, a gas leak explosion at Paraguaná killed 48 people. It was the worst refinery disaster in Venezuela’s history.
Today, PDVSA is a decrepit relic of what Venezuelans envisioned 50 years ago.
So please don’t feign shock and tell me Venezuela’s oil wasn’t ripe for the grubby orange fingers of a freebooter like Donald Trump should he someday, somehow become America’s president.
The junk bond-style takeover he’s leveraged is just a Darwinian consequence of Venezuela’s Dantean corruption, 1976 to 2026.
What, then, does offend me about the plan?
That would be the reality that Trump intends to use it not just to hasten the flow of petroleum to the U.S., but to stall the return of democracy to Venezuela.
That was made jaw-droppingly clear when Trump jaw-droppingly called the woman he inked the oil agreement with, acting Venezuelan President Delcy Rodríguez, “Highly Respected” on his Truth Social account.
In social truth, Rodríguez is a widely disrespected if not hated holdover from Maduro’s thug dictatorship.
But Trump adores her because she’s cooperating with his oil grab in the hope it will keep her in power indefinitely — meaning, it will keep Trump from pushing for democratic elections she and her cabal would surely lose.
That’s the real outrage.
Without the restoration of democracy in Venezuela, the country has no chance of rehabbing the crude-and-corruption addiction that made its life-blood resource such easy prey for Trump in the first place.
Trump knows that. He knows that once democracy owns Venezuela again — he won’t.
And that’s one fewer Donroe Doctrine trophy he gets to show off.
