In case you are wondering what is happening with oil in venezuela, and who owns it, here is the story. This author thinks it's a distraction....
--Kim
Okay - Trump just declared Venezuela's government a "foreign terrorist organization" and announced a naval blockade until they return "all of the Oil, Land, and other Assets that they previously stole from us."
So what the hell is he talking about?
Well, in the 1990s, Venezuela did something countries do all the time when they want foreign investment but don't have the technical expertise to extract their own resources. They invited American oil companies in.
ExxonMobil and ConocoPhillips got stakes in the Orinoco Oil Belt, which sits on some of the largest heavy crude reserves on the planet. The companies brought technology, expertise, and capital. Venezuela got production flowing. Everyone made money. Standard arrangement.
Then Hugo Chávez got elected in 1999 and decided the deal needed renegotiating. Sound familiar?
By 2007, he passed a law requiring that Venezuela's state oil company PDVSA hold at least 60% of all oil projects. Foreign companies could stay as minority partners. Most did. Chevron, BP, Statoil, Total - they grumbled, reworked their contracts, and kept operating.
ExxonMobil and ConocoPhillips said no.
They wanted majority control or nothing. So they got nothing. Venezuela took over their operations.
Here's the part that matters: this went to court. Not some kangaroo tribunal in Caracas. International arbitration at the World Bank's ICSID and the International Chamber of Commerce. The same system American corporations rely on constantly to protect their overseas investments.
And the corporations won. ConocoPhillips got an $8.7 billion judgment in 2019, recently upheld on appeal. ExxonMobil got $1.6 billion back in 2014. These are enforceable awards. ConocoPhillips is actively pursuing Venezuelan assets to collect, including trying to force the sale of CITGO, Venezuela's U.S. refinery subsidiary.
So when Trump says Venezuela "stole" American oil and assets, he's describing a nationalization that went through nearly two decades of international legal proceedings. The arbitration tribunals already decided what Venezuela owes. The mechanisms for collection already exist. One of those tribunals even found that Venezuela's expropriation of Exxon's assets was lawful under international law - they just owed compensation.
What Trump is doing is taking a commercial dispute that's been working its way through courts for 18 years and reframing it as theft that justifies military blockades. The "stolen oil fields" language suggests Venezuela is sitting on property that belongs to America. It doesn't. Those fields always belonged to Venezuela. American companies had contracts to extract oil from them. When the contracts were terminated, they were owed money. That's it.
The blockade and terrorism designation aren't about getting ExxonMobil paid. The arbitration system handles that. This is about creating a justification framework for something else entirely. When you call a government a terrorist organization and surround it with warships demanding they return "our" oil and land, you're not describing debt collection - you're setting up a distraction.
I wonder what for?
What could possibly be such a big deal that this clown would be willing to start a war to distract you from it?
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