CAMBRIDGE, Massachusetts – Shortly after the seize of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, U.S. President Donald Trump praised the nation’s new rulers. Delcy Rodriguez, Maduro’s vice chairman who assumed energy after his arrest and switch to the USA, was “doing an important job,” Trump mentioned, including that “oil is beginning to stream and enormous quantities of cash, unseen for a few years, will quickly be significantly serving to the folks of Venezuela.”
Judging by Trump’s pronouncements, Venezuela should be booming. And by Trump’s favourite metric, it’s: oil manufacturing has elevated, albeit modestly, from 908,000 barrels per day in late 2025 to 1.03 million in April. With the U.S. successfully overseeing the nation’s oil revenues, Venezuelan crude — as soon as bought at steep reductions beneath American sanctions — is now priced a lot nearer to the unusually excessive worldwide benchmarks, courtesy of the Iran battle. In concept, Venezuela ought to be awash in {dollars}, however is it?
The macroeconomic knowledge inform a radically totally different story than the triumphalist narrative popping out of Caracas and Washington. Since Maduro’s elimination, the official change charge has depreciated by greater than 70%. Over the identical interval, the parallel-market value of the greenback has climbed from 585 Venezuelan bolivars to greater than 730 bolivars — a 32% premium over the official charge.
That isn’t what an oil increase seems like. When nations expertise a surge in export revenues, international change pours in and currencies are likely to stabilize or admire. Venezuela is shifting in the wrong way: its forex is quickly depreciating, inflation is accelerating, financial exercise is weakening and {dollars} have gotten scarce.
The place are Venezuela’s petrodollars? Outdoors Trump’s and Rodríguez’s interior circles, nobody is aware of. And neither administration has cared to share that fundamental info.
This opacity has turn out to be the defining function of Venezuela’s new political economic system. The nation’s oil revenues are actually flowing into accounts managed by the U.S. Treasury on the route of Secretary of State Marco Rubio, with nearly no public accounting of the sums concerned or how these funds have been used.
The only exception got here in February, when congressional stress compelled Rubio to reveal the switch of $500 million in oil revenues to Venezuela. However that quantity represents solely a fraction of what the nation’s oil exports ought to have generated. Since then, no extra figures have been launched.
Operational management of Venezuela’s oil sector seems to be concentrated throughout the White Home, with Trump’s newly established Nationwide Vitality Dominance Council taking part in a central position. The identify alone makes the administration’s priorities abundantly clear: Venezuela isn’t considered as a democratic reconstruction undertaking, however as a strategic hydrocarbon asset within the service of American energy.
In political methods organized round rents, opacity is a…
