Someone at the U.S. Embassy in Caracas sat down to write out what Venezuelans were saying online. Noted that most of them read Rubio’s words as damage control. Noted that they suspected the oil arrangement enriches the same people it always enriches. It was a short report, internal, with no public reader. It circulated for a few hours. Then they deleted it.
I don’t know if it was cowardice or routine (the two look a lot alike when there’s a cable involved).
A Venezuelan recognizes the gesture without having it explained. For twenty-seven years we have watched the country get written down and then unwritten: tally sheets that appear, tally sheets that never appeared, figures the Central Bank publishes when it suits and withholds when it doesn’t. What’s new isn’t the deletion. It’s who holds the eraser now.
In February, a poll made Marco Rubio the most popular political figure in Venezuela. Ahead of María Corina Machado. A foreign secretary of state leading the political affections of a country that is not his. That is not a poll: it is an electorate feeling around for the ballot box. By July he had slipped, and Machado and Edmundo González had passed him. An economist in Caracas called it “dilution.”
Venezuelans were not allowed to vote. They were surveyed. Between the two lies all the distance in the world.
The cheapest colony is the one with no capital: all of the rent, none of the duty.
Venezuela today is a colony without a metropole. The empire kept the rent and handed back the government: it refused to face the consequences of its own regime change and let the dictatorship reinvent itself as a satrapy. There is no viceroy with an office, no colonial budget, none of the old civilizing lie, which at least required an accounting before a parliament and the invention of a moral pretext. There is a concession. Last century’s colonialism pretended to a duty. This one pretends to nothing.
The company that will operate the seventeen fields was registered in Barbados in 2024. Two years old. It was guaranteed a hundred. Washington said a hundred. Delcy Rodríguez said twenty-five. The same contract runs four generations in one country and a mortgage in the other.
President Rodríguez is held in place by Donald Trump as “acting,” and the word itself warns that the power is on loan: a provisional regime no one elected has committed the subsoil of Venezuelans not yet born. The Defense Department is handed a third of the company without putting up capital, with the right to buy “at cost” a fifth of whatever comes out. No one bid. No one audited. No one asked the National Assembly even for a fig leaf, and it would have said yes anyway. The country that taught the world to split it fifty-fifty signed for sixteen, or forty at best.
Trump says the beneficiaries will be Venezuelans and Americans. Two nationalities and no list. The only beneficiary with a name has been under investigation in Switzerland and Spain for a decade, and no one has said how much the American taxpayer will have to put up for that name to produce. No one has said where this year’s sales money goes.
A beneficiary who cannot be named is an alibi.
Iris Varela, the chavista, has already explained that the agreement can be revoked because it was signed under coercion. She is right in law and lying in intent: the chavismo that ruined the industry is saving the argument it will use to expropriate it again. The contract carries its own annulment inside. And in July, as the biggest oil deal in history was being announced, a single month’s inflation was 19.9%.
The only truthful document this arrangement has produced lasted a few hours on an internal network. They wrote it. They deleted it.
It’s powerful and disturbing. Shocking and yet not surprising. As an American, I am both sorry and all too resigned. Thank you, Roger, for shocking my conscience.