[This article is an AI translation of the original version in Spanish.]

Trump said he will use Venezuelan oil to fill the US strategic reserve and that it is a gift. Delcy Rodríguez maintains that the 25-year agreement covering 17 oil fields keeps the Venezuelan state in ownership.

The numbers and the law behind the largest energy deal signed by Caracas in three decades.

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Donald Trump announced on Sunday that he will use Venezuelan oil to replenish the United States’ Strategic Petroleum Reserve, which is currently at its lowest level since 1982, having fallen below 300 million barrels. The president described the supply as “a gift from Venezuela to the American people.”

Two days earlier, he had presented the agreement as the largest oil deal ever reached. On the other side, Delcy Rodríguez insists that Venezuela retains ownership and sovereignty over its resources.

The agreement, signed on Friday, August 28, covers 17 oil fields for 25 years, with a production target exceeding 1.5 million barrels per day. Rodríguez calculated Venezuela’s total tax revenue at $209.335 billion, using $65 per barrel as a benchmark price, which leaves $19 per barrel going directly to the state.

The acting president framed the agreement within an idea she has been repeating since Saturday. “It’s no use having our oil reserves underground if they don’t translate into development,” he said, adding that the binational project seeks to convert that wealth into social welfare, industrial development, and long-term economic stability for the South American nation.

Trump had framed the agreement in different terms. According to White House officials cited by CNN, Washington gains effective control of 55% of the new joint venture’s production and 100-year concessions, not 25, to exploit the oil fields. The president himself spoke of majority control over 65 billion barrels of proven reserves. The same document, two accounts that barely share any figures.

The announcement came via Trump’s social media, the channel he has used all year to manipulate oil prices and exert political pressure. On the Thursday before the signing, Brent crude reached $89.70 and WTI $83.53, a surge that the market itself attributed both to the situation in the Strait of Hormuz and to the initial reports of the agreement with Venezuela. By the end of that week, both crudes had given back much of that gain. Secretary of State Marco Rubio had promised that the agreement would bring “low-cost oil” and lower gasoline prices in the United States, a promise that the market, for now, has not borne out.

This pattern is not new. Reuters revealed that U.S. regulators are investigating at least four trades totaling more than $2.6 billion that traders placed minutes before Trump’s previous announcements regarding the war with Iran—bets that accurately predicted the market’s direction. Oil analyst Rory Johnston explained to Fortune magazine that verbal pressure alone from the White House is enough to push prices below what the actual physical shortage would suggest, without any change in supply.

In his own country, Trump is promoting a deregulation agenda under the banner of energy dominance. In February, he repealed the environmental ruling that had sustained two decades of climate regulation and relaxed rules on wastewater and industrial emissions to accelerate onshore extraction, some of which is destined for artificial intelligence data centers. The Department of Energy reports record production of 13.6 million barrels of crude oil per day and nearly 109 billion cubic feet of natural gas per day.

In June, with gasoline nearing $4.53 per gallon, Trump downplayed the increase and accused Exxon, Chevron, Shell, and BP of artificially inflating prices, demanding a price of $2.25. Refining costs and the risk premium resulting from the Iran-Contra trade war kept the national average above $4 for much of the year—the same shortage he is now trying to address with Venezuelan crude.

The political cost of this divide has been measured by pollsters for several months. The Reuters/Ipsos poll of August 17 placed Trump’s approval rating at 33%, the lowest of his second term, with eight out of ten Americans convinced that the war with Iran will drag on indefinitely. For the first time in a decade, voters trust Democrats more than Republicans to manage the economy. Political scientist G. Elliott Morris showed that not even a sustained drop in prices had previously managed to recover those numbers. Economic malaise, once established, cannot be reversed with a single announcement.

Analyst Franco Vielma interpreted that calculation from a different angle. He linked it to the war in the Persian Gulf and the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, a route through which a fifth of the world’s oil previously flowed, and to Trump’s urgency to show energy results before Republicans gauge his unpopularity at the polls in November.

On the legal front, Vielma emphasized a point that rarely makes the headlines. The Organic Hydrocarbons Law declares underground deposits, which belong to the nation, to be non-transferable and limits what the State grants in exploitation rights. Venezuela has declared 350 oil fields nationwide and possesses more than 300 billion barrels of proven reserves, the largest on the planet. The 17 fields now under scrutiny represent just over 20% of that total.

Venezuela: From 3.4 Million Barrels to Less Than 400,000

Venezuelan oil production exceeded 3.4 million barrels per day in the late 1990s. Following the Bolivarian Revolution, the oil strike of December 2002 to February 2003, when business associations and PDVSA executives, invoking the defense of meritocracy in the industry against state control, paralyzed production, sabotaged the company’s electronic systems, and forced the dismissal of more than 18,000 skilled workers, triggered a crisis.

This technical breakdown fueled a media battle that Washington cited as a precursor to the oil sanctions imposed starting in 2017, which ultimately led to production falling below 400,000 barrels per day in 2020. In August 2026, production surpassed 1.23 million barrels per day, its highest level since February 2019, in a country that has been under hundreds of sanctions for more than a decade.

Much of this recovery is taking place in Zulia, which is the focus of a significant portion of the investment. Of the 17,000 wells the government is evaluating nationwide, 8,000 are located in Zulia and fall into the category of most immediate activation. More than 60% of these wells are situated in Lake Maracaibo, a basin still grappling with the spills caused by the storms at the end of August, which Governor Luis Caldera attributed to the bad weather, though this did not halt the official plans for the region. Zulia currently produces 34% of the nation’s oil and supports the agreement as a catalyst for infrastructure, healthcare, and tax collection on the eastern shore of the lake.

Chevron was the only American oil company that remained in Venezuela during the years of harshest sanctions. The licenses from the Office of Foreign Assets Control were expanded in stages to include Shell, BP, Eni, Repsol and Maurel & Prom. Bloomberg reported that the firms SLB and Hunt Oil Co. signed contracts with the Venezuelan government this month to develop two additional oil fields.

Belgian Eric Toussaint, economist and spokesperson for the international CADTM, documented that these incomes do not reach the Venezuelan Government freely. A US decree on January 9 deposited them in accounts managed by the US Treasury, first through a fund in Qatar and then directly. Washington legally presents these funds as Venezuelan property, but keeps them under its custody and control.

This financial control operates, however, on an unprecedented political basis. On January 3, 2026, a US military operation with 150 aircraft bombed Caracas and kidnapped President Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Representative Cilia Flores. The attack left a hundred dead, including 32 Cubans. Two days later, the Supreme Court of Justice appointed Rodríguez as interim president, citing the president’s forced absence. Washington is negotiating today with a government that came to power in the middle of that offensive.

The operation came just weeks after Venezuela closed its best economic year in a decade. ECLAC projected GDP growth of 6.5% in 2025, the highest in the region, following 8.5% growth in 2024, and the Central Bank of Venezuela recorded 18 consecutive quarters of expansion, driven in the third quarter by a 16.12% jump in the oil sector. The United Nations agency itself recognized Venezuela as one of the engines of the regional recovery, along with Paraguay and Argentina.

Campos Greenfield Al 16%

The idea of ​​oil sovereignty did not originate with this agreement. Chávez established its first version on November 13, 2001, when he decreed the Organic Hydrocarbons Law, effectively ending the oil liberalization of the 1990s. The law required the state to retain more than half of the shares in all joint ventures and raised the minimum royalties from 16.6% to 30%.

In 2007, the next step was taken. Decree 5200 nationalized the Orinoco Oil Belt and absorbed four heavy crude projects that had previously been operated by foreign companies. Chávez announced this on May 1st before thousands of workers gathered at the José Antonio Anzoátegui Complex and summarized the dispute in a single sentence: the previous liberalization was nothing more than an attempt by imperialism “to seize the world’s largest oil reserves.” That phase began with a royalty of just 1% for the first greenfield blocks in the Orinoco Oil Belt.

Eight of the 17 fields now under development are, in industry jargon, greenfield blocks—areas without drilled wells or transportation infrastructure, requiring massive capital investment before producing the first barrel. For each of those barrels, the private operator will pay a minimum royalty of 16% and an income tax of 34%, calculated after deducting production costs—figures that the January reform enshrined in law. The contrast that the government emphasizes most is that the last major greenfield block project in Venezuela, 30 years ago, was agreed upon with a royalty of only 1%.

Deputy and leader of the United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV), Francisco Ameliach, went further, defending the agreement as a deliberately unequal negotiation. Addressing the Chavista base most reluctant to accept it, he urged them to “know how to lose at first in order to win later,” arguing that ceding initial ground is not a betrayal of the sovereign legacy, but rather basic political realism in the face of a balance of power that, for now, favors Washington.

The financial blockade changed the rules of the game starting in 2017. In 2020, Maduro presented the Anti-Blockade Law to the National Constituent Assembly, published in Extraordinary Official Gazette No. 6,583. The law empowered the Executive Branch to disregard ordinary laws and sign oil contracts under confidentiality agreements. Maduro presented it as a shield against “the imperialist blockade.”

That assessment remains valid. The Vice Minister of Anti-Blockade Policies, William Castillo, reported in May that, of the 1,088 unilateral coercive measures applied against Venezuela in the last decade, 1,040 were still active. The Venezuelan Anti-Blockade Observatory, which Castillo directs, describes them as a multifaceted aggression directed against the country’s oil, banking, and financial system. Six years after the Anti-Blockade Law, the blockade that gave rise to it remains in effect; it has only changed form.

The National Assembly approved another reform on January 29, 2026, published in Official Gazette No. 6,978 and comprised of 35 articles. The text opened the door for international private capital to acquire a majority stake in crude oil marketing, a power previously reserved for the State. The reform came 26 days after the January 3 attack and seven months before the agreement with Washington.

The difference between the two periods is evident in the numbers. Chávez protected the State’s majority shareholding in 2001 and 2007. The 2026 reform allowed the opposite for commercial contracts, although it left intact the rule declaring the oil field non-transferable. Rodríguez maintains that both coexist without contradiction: ownership remains in the hands of the State, and operation passes into private hands.

Chávez himself, while denouncing imperialism, sold more than 1.4 million barrels per day to the United States during peak production years.

The revenue generated at that time financed the Housing Mission and the Barrio Adentro medical mission in the country’s poorest and historically excluded neighborhoods. This dependence on the US market is not new; it survived even periods of heightened rhetorical confrontation between Caracas and Washington.

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