U.S. President Donald Trump said Wednesday that Venezuela has taken away oil rights from U.S. companies and he wants them back. “Don’t forget they took away all our energy rights. Not long ago they confiscated all our oil. We want it back. “They took it from us illegally,” the president told reporters from Andrews Air Force Base near Washington. “we want it back. They took away our oil rights, even though there is a lot of oil there, as you know, they expelled our companies and we want them back,” he insisted.
These statements come a day after Trump announced that ordered a total blockade entry and exit from Venezuela to oil tankers sanctioned by the US government. The president has stepped up pressure on Venezuela, a country dependent on the oil sector, after last week seizing a ship that had left the South American country and confiscate the crude oil he was carrying.
Shortly before Trump’s statements, White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller assured that the United States created the oil industry of Venezuela and called its nationalization “the greatest theft of American wealth and property ever recorded.”
The Venezuelan oil industry was nationalized on January 1, 1976, under the first presidency of Carlos Andrés Pérez, and reserved the exploration and exploitation rights of the country’s fields to the national company Petróleos de Venezuela (Pdvsa). In 2007, President Hugo Chávez changed oil industry rules to force transnational corporations to become minority partners of PDVSA or withdraw from the country.
Despite tensions between Washington and Caracas, the American company Chevron operates in Venezuela in association with PDVSA thanks to a license from the Treasury Department which exempts him from the sanctions imposed to Venezuelan crude oil.
Until now, the Trump administration assured that its strategy of pressure on Venezuela sought to combat drug traffickingsince he accuses the government of Nicolas Maduro of leading the Cartel of the Suns. In this sense, since September, the American armed forces have destroyed around twenty ships believed to be loaded with drugs in the Caribbean and the Pacific, extrajudicially killing at least 95 crew members.
Additionally, Trump promised launch attacks on drug trafficking “soon” on Venezuelan territory, while Maduro urged his citizens to join citizen militias to defend the country.
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