Last month, following his announcement of a “total blockade” on sanctioned oil tankers, Donald Trump took to TruthSocial to declare that the blockade will remain until Venezuela returns “to the United States of America all of the Oil, Land, and other Assets that they previously stole from us.”
Yesterday, in a press conference following his military strikes on Venezuela and the kidnapping Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Trump doubled down on this rhetoric. Speaking to the press, Trump explicitly stated that the United States would “run Venezuela until necessary,” and promised that American oil companies free reign of the country’s assets that he deems was “stolen” from the United States. “We’re going to have our very large United States oil companies, the biggest anywhere in the world,” he said, “go in, spend billions of dollars, fix the badly broken infrastructure, the oil infrastructure, and start making money for the country, and we are ready to stage a second and much larger attack if we need to do so.”
But these are not mere ramblings, but an explicit declaration of Trump’s neocolonialist offensive. It is, in his own words, the 21st-century revival of the 200-year-old Monroe Doctrine — or, what he calls the “Donroe Doctrine” — updated with Trump’s transactional, thuggish logic of “peace through strength,” in which Latin America is not just a backyard, but a resource colony to be seized by force.
The Myth of “Stolen” Oil
At the conference, Trump asserted that it was “American talent, drive, and skill” that built Venezuelan oil and the consequent nationalization of those resources was the “largest theft of American property.” These are but lies that serve as as a dangerous justification for Trump’s current neocolonialist offensive against Latin America and ignores a century of blood-soaked exploitation in the region.
Indeed, the history of American oil in Venezuela is a history of plunder. In the early 20th century, under the military dictatorship of Juan Vicente Gómez, foreign oil companies controlled the country’s newly discovered oil reserves and were granted massive concessions under terms that were essentially gifts. By the 1930s, three foreign oil companies controlled about 98% of production. One of them was British-Dutch: Royal Dutch Shell; and the other two were American: Gulf Corporation, and Standard Oil (now ExxonMobil). These companies essentially wrote Venezuela’s early petroleum laws themselves, ensuring that the vast majority of the wealth flowed to New York and Houston while the Venezuelan working class lived in poverty.
This imperialist plunder wasn’t limited to Venezuela either, but was a continent-wide project for foreign capital. As Leon Trotsky writes in 1938, in an essay in defense of the expropriation of Mexico’s oil and mineral assets,
BLOCKQUOTE “A small clique of foreign magnates, in the full sense of the word, pumps out the living sap of Mexico as well as of a series of other backward or weak countries. The solemn speeches about foreign capital contributing “civilization,” about its assisting in the development of national economy, and so forth, are the sheerest Pharisaism. The question, in actuality, concerns plunder-ing the natural wealth of the country. Nature required many millions of years in order to deposit gold, silver, and oil in the subsoil of Mexico. The foreign imperialists wish to plunder these riches in the shortest possible time, making use of cheap labor power and the protection of their diplomacy and their fleet.”
The two major waves of nationalization — first in 1976 and again in 2007 — were not acts of “theft,” but attempts by the Venezuelan state to reclaim its primary resource from almost a century of imperialist drainage.
Crucially, despite the “revolutionary” rhetoric, neither wave involved expropriation without compensation. In 1976, under Carlos Andrés Pérez, the government paid over $1 billion to foreign firms — a staggering sum considering those companies had already extracted profits that were many times their investment. In 2007, under Hugo Chávez, the state again sought to negotiate buyouts. Even as companies like ExxonMobil and ConocoPhillips pursued multi-billion-dollar international arbitration, the Venezuelan state continued to recognize the “rights” of capital by paying out massive settlements. The tragedy is that these nationalizations were not a tool in the hands of the working class that could transform society. Instead, they transformed the state-owned PDVSA into a tool for the state bureaucracy to negotiate its own place within the global capitalist order.
Furthermore, while Trump screams about “theft,” the reality is that American capital never truly left. Even after the 2007 nationalization wave, Venezuela’s oil sector remained a playground for “Mixed Enterprises,” or joint ventures, where foreign capital held significant stakes and enjoyed legal protections. Even today, as U.S. blockade chokes the Venezuelan people, a glaring exception remains: Chevron. With special licenses, Chevron continues to pump over 120,000 barrels of Venezuelan crude oil per day, exporting it directly to U.S. refineries. These exemptions serve a dual purpose: they ensure a steady flow of oil to the United States while keeping a foot in the door for when the United States is able to expand its influence in the region.
Down with U.S. Imperialism and Intervention!
Trump’s current offensive in Venezuela and Latin America follows a bloody playbook. For over a century, in the name of “manifest destiny,” which posited that the United States had the divine right to spread and possess the whole of the continent, the United States has treated Latin America as its own playground — its region and its peoples as resources for its own exploitation and benefit. From the 1954 CIA-backed coup in Guatemala to the 1973 coup in Chile, the United States has overseen the overthrow of dozens of governments in Latin America to secure its interests.
In Venezuela the goal is clear: exclude rivals like China from the region’s resources, dismantle the state-owned PDVSA, and hand the world’s largest oil reserves to the same companies that spent the last century sucking the country dry.
From the heart of U.S. imperialism, we must repudiate Trump’s neocolonialist offensive, which is nothing but a desperate gambit to recover U.S. hegemony in the midst of its historic decline. Indeed, any U.S. intervention, whether through blockade, bombardment, or the installation of a puppet regime, is fundamentally designed to serve American capital, not the working class on either side of the border who are made to pay for their gains.
As the multi-millioned working class in the United States, we must unite our ranks and mobilize against this offensive, in solidarity with our class siblings in Venezuela to demand that the United States stay out of Venezuela. The land and the resources of Latin America belong to its peoples, who have the right to forge their own destiny, free from the clutches of imperialist violence and subjugation.
The post No, Venezuela Did Not “Steal” American Oil Assets appeared first on Left Voice.
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