Trump Takes Vzla Oil, For Their Own Good
Jan. 8, 2026
U.S. President Donald Trump said ohe expected the United States would be running Venezuela and extracting oil from its huge reserves for years. In an interview with the New York Times, he insisted that the interim government of the country — all former loyalists to the now-imprisoned Nicolás Maduro — is “giving us everything that we feel is necessary.”
“We will rebuild it in a very profitable way,” Trump said, again focusing on oil (the terms “democracy” and “transition” don’t appear in the interview). “We’re going to be using oil, and we’re going to be taking oil. We’re getting oil prices down, and we’re going to be giving money to Venezuela, which they desperately need.” (New York Times)
Yesterday, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio outlined a three-phase plan for stabilizing and rebuilding Venezuela, in Congress. Central to the long-term effort is a tightened quarantine on Venezuelan oil, aimed at ensuring the Trump administration’s control of the sector.
“We are in the midst right now and in fact about to execute on a deal to take all the oil,” Rubio said. “We are going to take between 30 and 50 million barrels of oil. We’re going to sell it in the marketplace at market rates, not at the discounts Venezuela was getting,” he added. “That money will then be handled in such a way that we will control how it is disbursed in a way that benefits the Venezuelan people, not corruption, not the regime.” (New York Times)
The U.S. seized a Russian oil tanker in the North Atlantic, yesterday. Officials said the ship was part of a shadow fleet carrying oil in violation of US sanctions. The US military had pursued the Marinera tanker from the coast of Venezuela, reports AFP.
After a chase that lasted two weeks, the oil tanker was intercepted in North Atlantic waters near Iceland in a joint operation between the Coast Guard and the U.S. military, with UK assistance. (El País)
U.S. forces also intercepted another tanker sailing in the Caribbean, according to the U.S. Southern Command. “The Trump administration has faced questions about the legality of the ship seizures and whether they could provoke intervention from Russia or other countries.” reports the Washington Post.
Trump plans to use Venezuela’s vast crude reserves to establish control of most of the western hemisphere’s oil in an attempt to drive the market price down to about $50, according to the Guardian.
U.S. opposition lawmakers criticized the Trump administration’s plan to control Venezuela’s oil revenue, saying the president had no constitutional authority for such an undertaking, reports the New York Times.
Indeed, the Trump administration’s plan to “run” Venezuela through Rodríguez is in deep tension with the first Trump administration’s signature policy of not recognizing the Maduro government’s legitimacy, a stance that for a time allowed opposition leaders to “control various extraterritorial Venezuelan assets and interests, including control of oil-related assets, interests, and institutions,” notes Scott Anderson in a Brookings Institution commentary. The shift “has the potential to cause confusion regarding who controls the oil industry the Trump administration wishes to reform.”
Separately Senate Democrats launched an investigation into what U.S. oil companies may have known before the Trump administration’s intervention in Venezuela, reports the New York Times.
Western oil companies have been fighting to recoup tens of billions of dollars that they say Venezuela owes them — the debts could play a prominent role in Trump’s efforts to compel U.S. businesses to produce more oil in the country, reports the New York Times.
U.S. officials are banking that the oil blockade and the threat of a future military raid are enough to contain Venezuela’s remaining Chavista leadership, “but they should also know that each additional military raid makes it harder to control the situation in the country without boots on the ground,” argues James Bosworth at Latin America Risk Report.
“Bringing Mr. Maduro to justice will not be enough to call his removal a success. The Trump administration still needs to show that the United States is acting in the interests of regional stability and of Venezuelans themselves. That starts with installing the country’s rightfully elected leaders,” writes Republican U.S. congressman Don Bacon in the New York Times.
“While Maduro’s ousting marked a win for Rubio — the son of Cuban immigrants who has spent his career warning of Latin America’s communist regimes — it has left him with a unique level of public responsibility for what comes next,” reports the Financial Times. “It is unclear how much Rubio, who harbours his own presidential ambitions, will be able to control.”
More Venezuela
In a speech to lawmakers yesterday, interim Venezuelan president Delcy Rodríguez referred to the “kidnapping” of Nicolás Maduro as “a stain” that contaminates the relationship between the two countries and asserted that drug trafficking and human rights “were an excuse” for the U.S. intervention, “because the real motive is Venezuelan oil.” (El País)
Rodríguez is balancing cooperation with the U.S. with maintaining the Chavista hardline discourse nationally. “While the Maduro regime, in the absence of Maduro himself, consolidates its control and repression in the streets, with armed groups of motorcyclists roaming freely through Caracas, the external reality is aligning itself with U.S. tutelage,” reports El País.
Trump claimed yesterday that a notorious “torture chamber” in Caracas is being closed, apparently in reference to El Helicoide. Human rights groups are awaiting to see if prisoners from the infamous intelligence agency’s detention center, estimated to be 65 people, are released, reports Efecto Cocuyo.
“From the beginning, Donald Trump’s pressure campaign against Maduro raised numerous questions about the fate of Venezuela’s political prisoners. Inside detention centers, rumors spread that an American intervention would trigger a killing spree. Family members worried that their relatives could be held hostage or disappeared by the regime,” writes Stephania Taladrid in the New Yorker.
All eyes internationally are on Delcy Rodíguez, “but the newly installed president — alongside her brother Jorge, president of the Venezuelan National Assembly — represents only the political sphere,” reports the Washington Post. “The country’s other power centers… are commanded by Padrino and Cabello — hard-line, old-school Chavistas who came of ideological age in the socialist movement and accrued significant power and wealth through continued loyalty to the cause.”
Venezuela’s military held a mass funeral in Caracas yesterday, as it began to bury dozens of soldiers slain during the United States’ military operation to abduct Nicolás Maduro, reports the Associated Press.
Businesses and street traffic in Caracas, Venezuela, picked up yesterday, four days after the U.S. airstrikes and commando raid that deposed Maduro, but the mood remained wary amid tight security, reports the New York Times.
Petro and Trump About-Face
U.S. President Donald Trump invited his Colombian counterpart, Gustavo Petro, to the White House, yesterday, just days after threatening him with military action over alleged drug trafficking.
After Trump accused Petro of being involved in drug trafficking and hinted at future military actions against Colombia, Sunday, Colombia’s leader had said he was ready to “take up arms” in the face of such threats. While most of the region’s leaders have been cautious in their language criticizing the U.S. military incursion in Venezuela, Petro has been a vocal critic.
Petro called the U.S. operation in Venezuela an “abhorrent” violation of Latin American sovereignty. He also suggested it was committed by “enslavers” and constituted a “spectacle of death” comparable to Nazi Germany’s 1937 carpet bombing of Guernica, Spain. (Associated Press)
Petro and Trump spoke by phone yesterday for the first time since Trump took office a year ago. Petro “called to explain the situation of drugs and other disagreements that we have had,” Trump said in a post on his Truth Social platform. “I appreciated his call and tone, and look forward to meeting him in the near future” at the White House, he added. (Le Monde)
The phone call — of an unusual length, lasting an hour — appeared to defuse a crisis and lift a looming sense of peril for the Colombian president, who had told the New York Times earlier in the day that he feared he might be extracted like Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro, and that he planned to sleep in the presidential palace next to the sword of Simón Bolívar, the South American independence hero.
Petro had called for demonstrations across Colombia yesterday in rejection of Trump’s threats. Thousands of Colombians gathered in public squares across the country “to defend national sovereignty” against Trump’s military threats, chanting “Long live free and sovereign Colombia!” (Associated Press)
Speaking after the call, Petro told a rally of supporters he planned to attend the White House meeting. He said he asked Trump for the two countries, traditionally close allies, to “re-establish direct communications between their foreign ministries and presidents,” adding “If there is no dialogue, there will be war.”
The New York Times was interviewing Trump when the phone call took place, after the call the U.S. president told reporters: he believed that the decapitation of the Maduro regime had intimidated other leaders in the region to fall into line.
More Donroe Doctrine
The Trump administration is pulling the United States out of dozens of international organizations, including key UN agencies and the treaty underpinning global climate talks. It is the latest ratification of the U.S.’s retreat from multilateral cooperation, reports AFP.
Trump’s ouster of Maduro is less beneficial for the U.S. — and much more positive for China — than is initially apparent, argues Melanie Hart in the Atlantic Council.
“The US’s first overt attack on an Amazon nation last weekend is a new phase in its extractivist rivalry with China. The outcome will decide whether the vast mineral wealth of South America is directed towards a 21st-century energy transition or a buildup of military power to defend 20th-century fossil fuel interests,” writes Jonathan Watts in the Guardian.
Maduro’s ouster demonstrates the failure of sanctions to leverage change in Venezuela argue Dafna A. Rand and Kari Heerman in a Brookings Institution commentary. Twenty years of increasingly expansive sanctions against Venezuela by the U.S. “imposed real economic damage and narrowed the regime’s economic options. But they never generated decisive leverage sufficient to force a change in the regime’s core objectives or to improve U.S. security interests; efforts to escalate or ease sanctions over time instead underscored how difficult they are to calibrate in practice.”
“The ouster of Maduro highlights another Kremlin failure to support an ally, following the downfall of Syria’s former President Bashar Assad in 2024 and last year’s U.S. and Israeli attacks on Iran,” reports the Associated Press. But “Trump’s actions in Venezuela also are causing unease in Western nations and giving the Kremlin fresh talking points to defend its war in Ukraine.”
“One remarkable aspect of the Venezuela raid is how Trinidad and Tobago’s prime minister, Kamla Persad-Bissessar, has openly aligned with Donald Trump,” reports the Guardian. But it is an outlier in a region that has a debt of gratitude to Venezuelan Chavista aid. Nonetheless, Caricom countries have treaded carefully, likely out of fear of attracting Trump’s ire.
Cuba
With Venezuelan oil under blockade and the U.S. preparing to harden its stance against Cuba, Mexico has emerged as a key supplier of crude oil for Havana, reports the Associated Press. President Claudian Sheinbaum said that “no more oil is being sent than has been sent historically; there is no specific shipment.”
“Havana has traditionally been shy about admitting its security and intelligence support of the Maduro regime, but it has had to acknowledge 32 Cubans died in the US military attack on Venezuela,” reports the Guardian.
The high number of Cubans killed in the U.S. military’s raid to oust Venezuelan Maduro shows the island country’s level of involvement in the Chavista government. “The capture of Maduro was the culmination of a chain of glaring mistakes made by Cuba’s intelligence agencies, which had previously gained a reputation inside the U.S. intelligence community for its capacity to infiltrate the U.S. government and run spy networks around the world,” reports the Miami Herald.
Brazil
Former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro was granted a brief leave from his 27-year prison sentence for a coup attempt, yesterday, so that he could undergo medical tests at a hospital in the capital after he fell from his bed, reports the Associated Press.
Mexico
Mexican officials and environmentalists say Elon Musk’s Space X test launches in Texas have inflicted ecological damage over the border in Playa Bagdad, causing economic harm for fishers. (Washington Post)
Regional
The European Union is renewing internal negotiations over a free trade agreement with the South American Mercosur bloc. “Italy is seen as the linchpin of the deal. If Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni joins the deal’s supporters led by Germany, then it will pass over the objections of France and Poland,” reports the Associated Press.
Argentina
Argentina’s central bank secured a $3 billion loan from six major international banks, yesterday, allowing the country to make a big looming debt payment and boost its scarce dollar reserves, reports the Financial Times.
“A court in Bahía Blanca, Buenos Aires province, has ordered a local newspaper to publish a correction to an article printed in the 1970s, clarifying that 37 people it said had been arrested or killed during a military operation were actually kidnapped, tortured, executed, and disappeared by Argentina’s last dictatorship,” reports the Buenos Aires Herald.