Venezuela, USA, Brazil, always with oil in the background
Aram Aharonian
Trade embargoes, vetoes in economic bodies, freezing of assets, executive orders: all these measures may well be grouped under the generic term “sanctions”, actions that seek to weaken a country’s economy, undermine its sovereignty and limit its access to investments and financial resources.
International sanctions are political instruments of international law whose application has become widespread in the system of international relations. However, the imposition and implementation of these sanctions have effects not only on the recipient country, but also on the countries of the region to which it belongs, and on the relations between them.
Shortly before this year’s elections in Venezuela, the United States once again resorted to economic sanctions as a measure of pressure against the government of Nicolás Maduro, trying to tip the balance towards the opposition candidate Edmundo González and his promoter María Corina Machado.
A few days before handing over to Donald Trump, Antony Blinken, Joe Biden’s Secretary of State, tweeted about Venezuela, qualifying the former candidate of the far-right, Edmundo González, as “president-elect”. Something he had been very careful to do.
In 2015, under Barack Obama, the US imposed the first measures under the Venezuelan Human Rights and Civil Society Defense Act, which sought to punish those identified as responsible for violations of fundamental rights.
The first sanctions of an economic nature date back to 2017. The Treasury Department at the orders of Donald Trump imposed restrictions on operations, transactions and negotiations between U.S. entities and individuals and the Venezuelan government.
This led to a policy of over-compliance in the legal departments of U.S. banks in relation to transactions involving Venezuelan citizens. That year Venezuela defaulted on its debt payments.
In the following years, specific sectors and agencies were added. In 2019, in the midst of the struggle between the puppet-president Juan Guaidó and Maduro, Washington hit the state-owned Petróleos de Venezuela (PDVSA), weakened by the economic crisis. For the first time, the oil exchange between Venezuela and the US, a traditional client and payer of the Venezuelan oil company, which at the time was shipping some 500,000 barrels per day, was suspended.
In 1976, Juan Pablo Pérez Alfonzo, former Venezuelan Minister of Mines and Hydrocarbons and known as the father of the Organization of Petroleum Producing Countries (OPEC), described oil as “the devil’s excrement”, alluding to the danger it represented for a society to have a reservoir of natural resources that could provide easy money, without much effort.
License 44
The road to the easing of these blockades to the sale of Venezuelan oil began on February 25, 2022, when Russia invaded Ukraine. Six meetings in Doha, hosted by Qatar in parallel to negotiations with the opposition that had begun a year earlier in Mexico, led to the Barbados Agreements, with a series of political commitments, and the implementation of License 44, which opened the door to the production, extraction, sale and export of oil or gas from Venezuela.
Together with these sanctions, known as “primary”, the so-called “secondary sanctions” were applied, which threaten with a veto in the US financial system, not only to US citizens but also to foreign citizens and entities that “materially assist, sponsor or provide financial, material or technological support, or goods or services to the sanctioned Government of Venezuela”.
This prohibition complicated the commercialization of PDVSA’s crude oil in the international markets and led the Caribbean country to resort to the black market of oil, trading it at great discounts, and to tricks such as the use of ghost ships to ensure the sale or barter for goods or hydrocarbon derivatives of the barrels that remained in PDVSA’s docks.
The change in Venezuela’s sanctioning regime had a previous movement at the end of January, when the Supreme Court ratified the disqualification of María Corina Machado, the candidate preferred by Washington: the Treasury Department ordered to close all operations with Minerven before February 13, 2024, which had been allowed with the issuance of license 43A last October.
Venezuela once exported more than three million barrels per day, but it has not exceeded one million barrels per day since it registered its minimums at the time of the greatest crisis in the operations of the state-owned company, which worsened with the US veto on Venezuelan oil. Today between 800,000 and 850,000 barrels per day are produced.
Brazil, the U.S. partner in the Brics
The BRICS, for their part, pursue the promotion of investments, the strengthening of industry, energy and agriculture in their member countries. In this context, Brazil’s surprising and surprising veto of Venezuela’s entry into the bloc represents a blow to its economy, which inevitably affects the living conditions of its population and drives migration.
In 2020, in the midst of the pandemic, the United States vetoed Venezuela’s access to resources allocated by the International Monetary Fund to implement the necessary sanitary measures against Covid-19. This veto was added to the set of sanctions aimed at provoking a ‘regime change’.
Since the beginning of the 20th century, Brazilian foreign policy has shown a strategic alignment with the United States, in a phenomenon that historian Bradford Burns described as an “unwritten alliance” between the two nations. This alignment paved the way for Brazil to expand into Bolivian and Peruvian territories.
The link evolved over the years and has consolidated a relationship of dependence. Today, it is precisely in the Amazon, at the Alcantara aerospace base (one of the best places in the world for launching rockets into space), where there is a U.S. military presence. This presence represents not only a partnership, but also a form of broader subordination of Brazilian security and defense interests to those of the United States, within the framework of this “unwritten alliance”.
In the midst of the difficult economic situation and the post-electoral dispute, the Brazilian veto plays, like any political decision, a role within a broader strategy. Objectively, in the short term, this measure seems to have no other tactical purpose than to place obstacles to the January 10 swearing-in and create conditions for a ‘regime change’.
Celso Amorim exposed what could be considered the strategic goal behind the veto on Venezuela. During his intervention, Amorim stated: “The main interest is to prevent Venezuela from becoming the focus of geopolitical rivalries that threaten peace in South America and mean conflicts in the ‘heart’ of the Amazon”.
By singling out Venezuela as a latent threat to peace in the Amazon, Amorim not only connects the veto to Brazil’s interest in the Guianas, but also reveals the existence of a strategy that goes far beyond mere political disagreement.
Both the preservation of U.S. geopolitical interests in the region and Brazil’s expansion plans require a weakened Venezuela, a country that does not easily regain its economy and influence in the continent. That is the role of vetoes and weapons: two sides of the same coin. The veto is, thus, a tool that has been used as a function of this “main interest”.
When Amorim mentions the “heart of the Amazon”, it is inevitable to think of Brazil’s strategic interests and expansion plans. For Brasilia, the entire area represents its ‘natural zone of influence’. For this reason, Brazil does not look favorably on Venezuelan claims over the Essequibo and has promoted a policy of support for Guyana that includes military and diplomatic backing and road connection projects.
Rubio and what is to come
The appointment of Marco Rubio as Secretary of State in the incoming Donald Trump administration will not only have global diplomatic implications, but is itself a statement of purpose on Latin America. Rubio has played a central role in Venezuela policy and has adopted a constant position of “maximum pressure”.
It is not just his questioning of the Venezuelan government or his rejection of any easing of oil sanctions, but his political thinking is deeply marked by his Cuban background, which places him in a particular perspective on the region.
For Rubio, Venezuela’s realignment in the U.S. sphere of influence is part of a broader change in the Latin American landscape, a transformation that also encompasses Cuba. In this sense, his Venezuela policy is part of a vision that seeks to reconfigure power ties in the hemisphere under greater U.S. tutelage.
Although Trump made clear in his first term his interest in overthrowing Nicolás Maduro and applying a policy of “maximum pressure”, what is not clear is how he will address the situation now, whether he will continue or increase the pressure strategy, whether he will seek new alternatives, such as an agreement on oil supplies and licenses, or whether he will make some kind of direct or covert military intervention.
Rubio comes to the Secretary of State with the bias of a very particular view towards Cuba and Venezuela, that of a Cuban-American, which poses difficulties both for the fulfillment of his responsibilities and for his own political career. The problem for Rubio as a presidential aspirant is in achieving concrete results in Venezuela and Cuba, an issue that is not simple.
Increased sanctions on Venezuela would affect supplies of heavy oil so necessary for U.S. refineries and difficult to obtain in other markets. A more severe blockade than the current one would deteriorate the living conditions of the population and drive migration.
On the other hand, if a bloody military intervention, direct or covert, were to be chosen, whether in Cuba or Venezuela, Rubio would be facing a situation of unforeseeable consequences, both for the countries involved and for his presidential aspirations.
*Uruguayan journalist and communicologist. Master in Integration. Founder of Telesur. Presides the Foundation for Latin American Integration (FILA) and directs the Latin American Center for Strategic Analysis (CLAE, www.estrategia.la).