Transcription
To talk more about this story, we can bring in Andrew Hillier from our international affairs desk. Hi, Andrew. Do we have more clarity then on who is running Venezuela?
We have a little bit of clarity at this stage in Venezuela. Deli Rodriguez, of course, now the uh interim leader, so nominally uh in charge of things. Uh initially defiant on Saturday following the capture of Nicholas Majuro. He's since shifted tone calling for collaboration uh between Washington and Caracas. On Sunday, as you can see on this screen here, she was backed by Defense Minister Vladimir Padrino Lopez. That's of course very important in Venezuela. Very important to have the support of the country's powerful armed forces.
But essentially what's going on in Venezuela is that Nicholas Maduro's allies, his inner circle, essentially the regime that was constructed by Hugo Chavez before Nicholas Maduro, it's still very much intact. And those figures that you just saw on your screen there, those are uh some of the key figures in Venezuela's ruling elite. It's evenly divided between civilian and military figures, mil Maduro's inner circle. So they really hold the reigns of power and under more than two decades of rule from first Hugo Chavez and Nicholas Maduro essentially the United Socialist Party of Venezuela took control of key institutions the national assembly uh the most of the judiciary the electoral council and of course uh the military so removing Nicholas Maduro from that power structure doesn't remove the power structure that's been built up over more than two decades.
But what is happening is that as we've seen, Donald Trump is exerting huge pressure on Venezuela's ruling elite to kind of essentially do what Washington wants. And we saw that with his latest comments to the Atlantic magazine, essentially telling Deli Rodriguez that she would pay a very heavy price if she did not do what was right. and Donald Trump and Marco Rubio, the US Secretary of State, they seem to have kind of differing narratives on the US's role in Venezuela. Does the Trump administration have a plan?
>> Well, yeah. I mean, as we've seen, there are indeed two very different takes on the US role going forward in Venezuela, playing out at the very top of the US administration. Um, Donald Trump on the one hand doubling down on his insistence that the US uh is running the show or will run the show in Venezuela. the Secretary of State Marco Rubio kind of taking offering a more nuanced take on the US role saying that it would uh exert levers leverage on Venezuela using for example oil blockades as leverage. Um what either way whichever way you look at it what Washington does appear to be doing clearly at this stage is leaning on the current power structure you using coercion to try and twist its arm into doing what it wants. uh you know those that ruling inner circle that we saw there, they've seen the pictures of Maduro blindfolded and taken into detention, they will be asking themselves, well, could we be next?
Um and why is Donald Trump doing this? Well, he's made it very clear he wants access to Venezuela's oil. He says US oil companies are going to invest massive sums of money to build up the oil infrastructure uh to get uh oil pumping again. Now, the problem here, as you're going to see on a a graphic I'm going to show you, is that decades of mismanagement and underinvestments have left Venezuela's oil industry in a cat fairly catastrophic state. You can see there how the production of B of of of Venezuela's crude oil production essentially has plummeted um falling to about 750,000 barrels per day in 2023. It's now hovering at around 900,000 barrels per day. That situation worsened by US sanctions, meaning that the only US oil company currently operating in Venezuela is Chevron. They are operating thanks to an exemption to US sanctions. Um, the reality is most oil companies uh unlikely to invest the massive sums of money required to rebuild Venezuela's oil industry unless there's political and institutional uh stability. Now, two companies, Exommobile and Konico Phillips, actually left Venezuela in 2007 and sued the Venezuelan government. That's after Hugo Chavez at the time demanded that they seed majority ownership of their Venezuela projects to the government.
Incidentally, another point I'll just make here is that, you know, Trump is openly framing this around oil. He's not really framing it around democracy and human rights. And that is likely to cause uh huge uh to stir huge animosity in Venezuela. You know, removing Nicholas Maduro is one thing. Some Venezuelans, a lot of Venezuelans even may be happy to see the back of Nicholas Maduro, but falling under the direct influence of Washington, that's something else.
>> And what message does this send to other countries, the US's actions in Venezuela? Because some observers have been saying that it sets a dangerous precedent.
Well, I mean, the first thing it does, not surprisingly, is it deals another hammer blow to the uh rules-based international order. Um, it is very difficult to find a legal justification for this. It uh it appears to violate the UN charter and Venezuelan sovereign sovereignty sovereignty. Uh on Sunday, uh six countries issued a joint statement. They are, you can see on your screen there, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Mexico, Uruguay, and Spain. kind of echoing the concerns of many countries and leaders around the world uh rejecting the military actions carried out unilaterally unilaterally by Washington on Venezuelan territory which they say contravene fundamental principles of international law.
Now what happened on Saturday was of course a remarkable display of US military power. There were no American lives lost on the Venezuelan side. There were dozens of lives lost from what we know. Um, however, this has stirred, of course, a lot of dissenting voices within the US, unsurprisingly. Uh, and one comment I'll bring you from Senator Mark Warner. He's the Democratic vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, warning that because of this, what's to stop? He said, China claiming the same authority over Taiwan's leadership or he added, watch to stop Vladimir Putin. Putin using a similar justification to snatch Ukraine's president Vladimir Zalinski. You know, Donald Trump has clearly here demonstrated his belief um in the power of his of using his will backed by US military force. He's already shown that he believes that he can ignore laws that don't appeal to him. The fear is that he isn't taking into account the ripple effects of this move and and and that of course leaving many to worry that this could indeed set a precedent for other leaders, authoritarian leaders in particular.
All right, Andrew Hillier, thank you very much for your analysis on that.