Adelmo Becerra serves as a Venezuelan trade union activist connected to the National Institute for Training and Socialist Education (INCES).

In mid-June, Adelmo informed Truthout that modifications to a hydrocarbons statute, enacted following the abduction of President Nicolás Maduro in January, have pushed Venezuela to retreat more than a century to the period of Juan Vicente Gómez, when foreign firms dominated petroleum and the nation secured little revenue while those entities claimed nearly all earnings.

Gómez held power in Venezuela from 1908 until his passing in 1935. Venezuelan President Rómulo Betancourt (1945-1948, 1959-1964) labeled him the tool of external domination over the Venezuelan economy and the partner of influential overseas interests, including the Rockefeller-owned Standard Oil Company that evolved into ExxonMobil.

Describing Gómez predecessor Cipriano Castro, who resisted U.S. commercial interests, as an unspeakably villainous little monkey, President Theodore Roosevelt dispatched gunboats to Venezuela in 1908 to aid Gómez rise to power, while the Taft administration offered key backing to block a rival from removing him.

By 1929, U.S. oil firms held 50 percent of Venezuela oil output after Gómez permitted the companies lawyers to shape petroleum rules. Gómez also enacted a mining statute that sharply reduced taxes on overseas firms and strict labor rules that banned the right to strike.

To shield U.S. investors and a small circle of Venezuelan newly wealthy elites, Gómez permitted a U.S. naval mission into Venezuela and placed the army under a West Point graduate, General Francisco Linares Alcántara. The State Department further suppressed reports of Gómez misdeeds so the American public would not call for his ouster.

A century later, Venezuela seems once more to bend under U.S. influence as it loses grip on its oil, minerals and foreign policy.

The Washington Post reported that since Maduro abduction a Wild West marketplace in Venezuela swarms with U.S. companies and investors.

Mauricio Claver-Carone, a close ally of Secretary of State Marco Rubio who acted as a top envoy to Latin America during the first Trump administration, has emerged as the unofficial U.S. viceroy of Venezuela, aiding the Trump administration plan to work with Delcy Rodríguez and tap the country vast oil wealth.

Operating from his home office in South Florida, Claver-Carone is said to issue directives to Rodríguez by phone and has helped select winners and losers among hopeful investors.

These investors include Centerview Partners, a New York-based financial firm that obtained a multi-million dollar contract without competitive bidding to assist in restructuring Venezuela 170 billion dollar debt and support the country return to global financial markets.

In an interview with the Post, Claver-Carone portrayed himself as a connector and likened his role to that of Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner in the Middle East.

The Post article indicated that Claver-Carone and his business and romantic partner, Jessica Bedoya, who has visited Caracas multiple times this year to meet Rodríguez, have worked for both the U.S. State Department and CIA.

Claver-Carone formerly led the U.S.-Cuba Democracy Political Action Committee (PAC), a lobby group advocating regime change in Cuba.

The group received funding from José Pepé Fanjul, a Cuban-American billionaire and major Trump political donor whose family-run sugar company, Florida Crystals, has polluted the Florida Everglades, harming millions of acres of public land and vital natural resources while exploiting migrant workers.

Claver-Carone now runs a private equity firm with Bedoya that invests in energy, infrastructure and industrial assets across Latin America, presenting a clear conflict with his Venezuelan viceroy duties.

The new hydrocarbon law signed by Rodríguez permits the Venezuelan government to lower taxes and royalty payments and reverses a step taken by Hugo Chávez in 2006-2007 that required foreign oil companies in the Orinoco Belt to turn their projects into mixed enterprises where Venezuela state oil company would retain at least 60 percent ownership.

State royalties for granting firms the right to extract and sell oil under the law depend on a company profitability, which experts note will let U.S. firms attempt to use U.S. courts to evade royalty payments.

Among these firms is Chevron, with which Rodríguez has signed fresh deals, stating that with more than a century of presence, Chevron exemplifies an oil company dedicated to Venezuela.

Elías Jaua, former vice president under Hugo Chávez, stated that the Trump administration controls Venezuela oil sales and places the income into a U.S. Treasury Department administration fund, a claim confirmed by U.S. Secretary of Energy Chris Wright.

According to Jaua, only some funds will return to keep the Venezuelan state operating, which amounts to tutelage under coercion and the neo-colonial administration of one government by another.

Under the direction of Delcy brother Jorge Rodríguez, who claimed Venezuela was becoming quite sexy from the point of view of foreign investment opportunities, the Venezuelan Congress approved a law privatizing gold and other strategic minerals.

Venezuela holds vast deposits of rare earths, niobium and platinum group metals that Washington seeks, particularly in sensitive ecological zones like Cerro Impacto in the Amazon rainforest.

The new mining law ends exclusive state control and sets up a system for 30-year concessions to private corporations, with royalties that can be paid in kind, effectively allowing them to be avoided.

Besides neo-liberal economic reforms, the Trump administration pressed the Rodríguez administration to enact new legislation granting amnesty to alleged political prisoners.

This move is viewed as another sign of Rodríguez capitulation because many of the so-called political prisoners took part in foreign-backed coup attempts or sparked uprisings against the government or carried out terrorist acts and crimes far worse than those linked to January 6 protesters in the U.S.

A body known as the Committee for Victims of the Guarimba has sought to hold accountable those behind ultra-right violence backed by the U.S. in 2014 that aimed to trigger regime change and caused dozens of deaths, hundreds of serious injuries and millions in property damage.

In May, Delcy handed over businessman and former Venezuelan Minister Alex Saab to U.S. authorities on questionable money-laundering charges. Claver-Carone business partner Bedoya helped arrange the de facto abduction of Saab.

The Colombian-born Saab was previously linked to the Maduro administration and had collaborated with Venezuelan allies like Iran to bypass U.S. economic sanctions and import food and medicine into Venezuela that were then distributed to the country poorest communities.

Saab had been held in Cape Verde in 2020 and sent to the U.S., with his wife noting that he faced inhumane treatment and torture.

The Maduro administration had pushed hard for his release, which occurred in December 2023 in exchange for the release of U.S. Silvercorp mercenaries who plotted a coup against Maduro with support from Juan Guaidó, who received financing from USAID and the CIA.

Maduro named Saab Minister of Popular Power for Industry and National Production, a post he held until Maduro abduction.

On May 21, Marco Rubio announced that Rodríguez was traveling to New Delhi to discuss oil sales before she herself revealed the trip. Rubio further stated he would personally oversee the negotiation, as if the U.S. State Department was directing Venezuela diplomacy.

Venezuela status as a de facto U.S. neo-colony was highlighted a few days later when U.S. military planes carrying General Francis L. Donovan, commander of the U.S. Southern Command (SOUTHCOM), flew provocatively low over Caracas before landing at the U.S. Embassy.

The World Socialist Web Site stressed that the show of force aimed squarely at intimidation and demonstrating who is in control.

Rodríguez government announced it had approved the humiliating exercise.

It is also permitting the Pentagon to use Venezuela as a base to project power in South America as the Trump administration ramps up preparations for a military assault against Cuba and continues Operation Southern Spear, the bombing of fishing boats on baseless drug-trafficking charges.

After removing pro-Maduro officials from her Cabinet, Rodríguez named as the new Defense Minister General Gustavo González López, who was trained in the 1990s in the notorious U.S. Army School of the Americas at Fort Benning, Georgia. The U.S. has since conducted military operations in Venezuela targeting drug traffickers, killing Tren de Aragua leader Héctor Niño Guerrero in southeast Bolívar state in an extrajudicial execution.

Reneging on a pledge to raise Venezuela minimum wage from its meager current level of 27 cents a month (130 bolivars), Rodríguez has started censoring left-wing journalists and canceling left-wing news programs on Venezuelan state TV.

Members of Rodríguez government have also met with officials from the International Monetary Fund (IMF), from which Hugo Chávez withdrew Venezuela in 2006, calling it a tool of U.S. imperialism along with the World Bank.

Adelmo Becerra said there is no transparent information but, based on global experience, it is clear that countries that negotiate with the IMF subordinate their economic policy to well-known neo-liberal measures that are contrary to the economic and social rights of the great majority of the population.

Truthout concludes its article by noting that it was IMF-imposed austerity measures that fueled mass protests in the early 1990s, which led to the rise of Chavismo. The same thing could happen again if Delcy continues to advance neo-colonialist policies and to undermine the Bolivarian Revolution from within.

U.S. Strengthens Military Grip After Severe Earthquake

Andrea Lobo reported in the World Socialist Website (WSWS) that the Trump administration seized on the humanitarian disaster resulting from the June 24 earthquake to tighten its military hold over Venezuela, sending warships, warplanes and a Commanding General of the Marine Corps, Kevin J. Jarrard, under the cover of a disaster relief operation.

Delcy Rodríguez for her part appointed the Commander of the Bolivarian National Guard as the sole authority for the emergency and placed the state of La Guaira under military administration.

According to Lobo, the configuration is stark: only six months after a US special forces operation abducted the Venezuela sitting president Nicolás Maduro, the commanding general of the US Marine Corps and the Commander of the Venezuelan National Guard are now in control. It is a military occupation wearing the mask of disaster relief.

A historical parallel occurred in Haiti when the Obama administration effectively occupied the country militarily following a devastating earthquake that resulted in over 100,000 deaths.

Under the Operation Unified Response, Obama dispatched over 15,000 U.S. troops who provided a cover for business rackets in which Clinton Foundation donors and Clinton cronies, like Hillary brother, Tony Rodham, reaped enormous profits from a reconstruction gold rush, as a cable from U.S. ambassador Kenneth Merten leaked by Wikileaks described it.