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Having amassed an enormous combined arms force off the coast, placed the Venezuelan President on the US list of known terrorists, and closed the airspace to commercial flights above Venezuela, all signs point to the White House’s intention of attacking the Venezuelan regime.
The war would be fought to steal Venezuela’s oil and other natural resources: if that sounds illegal or below the moral standard of the US military, consider that the presidents of both Colombia (a NATO partner) and Venezuela, a sitting US Congresswoman, and the former Commander of Southern US Command, have all said that the US would fight a war in Venezuela to take its oil and other natural resources.
Modern American history is replete with military actions sanctioned on poorly substantiated evidence, liberal interpretation of US law, and complete disregard for international law. But could the Pentagon and White House really bomb or invade another country for such a blatantly base and illegal justification?
The answer is that they could if they face no resistance or punishment.
WaL has reported that since the beginning of the Pentagon’s build-up in the southern Caribbean, Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro has stayed on message that the war is an imperial attempt to seize the country’s oil reserves: larger as they are than even Saudi Arabia’s. Following the first of Trump’s 21 lethal attacks of fishermen and boats in Venezuelan and international waters, Maduro told his people “they want our oil for free”.
On November 26th in an interview with Fox Business, Florida Congresswoman Maria Salazar was asked why Americans should support an aggressive war in Venezuela that could leave American soldiers and sailors dead, and she responded “for the American oil companies, [it] will be a field day”.
“Venezuela, for those Americans who do not understand why we need to go in… Venezuela, for the American oil companies, will be a field day, because it will be more than a trillion dollars in economic activity,” said the daughter of Cuban exiles.
Salazar made more absurd claims—that Maduro is transferring uranium to Iran and Hezbollah, without citing any evidence, but she was only taking the line that former Commander of US Southern Command said at the Aspen Security Forum in 2022—that South America is rich in resources and “adversaries” take advantage of that “every single day”.
“[O]ur competitors and adversaries also know how rich in the resources that this region is. 60% of the world’s lithium is in the region, you have heavy crude, you have light sweet crude, you have rare earth elements… and there are adversaries that are taking advantage of this region every single day right in our neighborhood,” said General Laura Richardson in her opening remarks of a QA in which she was asked how she viewed the SOUTHCOM Area of Responsibility in terms of national security. The terms are of resources, and of adversaries having them.
The heart of the matter
Others who see that oil is the reason behind the uptick in threats and violence against the South American country include the Gustavo Petro, the President of Colombia, a major non-NATO ally nation.
“(Oil) is at the heart of the matter,” he told CNN in an interview, adding that US President Donald Trump is “not thinking about the democratization of Venezuela, let alone the narco-trafficking”.
He said that Colombian investigations have not found any major link between narco-trafficking and Venezuela. The problem with his eastern neighbor, he said, was a “lack of democracy,” not narcotics.
Oil has consistently featured in Washington’s narrative around its problems with Venezuela. During the Trump Administration, when the 2018 Venezuelan presidential elections saw Maduro receive a second term, Washington backed a political nobody with a penchant for street fights named Juan Guaido, whom 81% of Venezuelans had never heard of, and whose political party received just 2% of the vote, to be a so-called “Interim-President”.
Putting aside the matter of whether Maduro rigged the election as some in Washington have accused, and others have denied in testimony to the UN, in 2019 Vice President Delcy Rodriguez released a recorded phone message between Guaido’s close aid in-country Manuel Avendaño and his party’s top envoy in London, Vanessa Neumann, in which the envoy explains that London won’t back Guaido’s claim to the presidency unless he “drop the topic” of Essequibo, a disputed oil-rich border area with Guyana.
Neumann tells her party ally that she’d been told in talks with the British Foreign Commonwealth Office and Guyana’s high commissioner that “they won’t support [Guaido’s efforts to overthrow Maduro] while we continue [that] line,” the line being that “we want to take control of the Essequibo from Guyana”.
In 2015, ExxonMobil, whose former legal advisor Carlos Vecchio was Juan Guaido’s ambassador to the US, discovered some 12.8 billion barrels of oil in the Essequibo region. It was first concluded to belong to Guyana in 1899 at a conference when no Venezuelan envoys were present. That agreement was annulled at a Geneva Summit in 1969. In 2023, after years of hearing evidence and statements, the International Court of Justice concluded that it did have jurisdiction to rule on the disputed territory. No ruling has yet been made.
Venezuela’s Attorney General Tarek William Saab launched an investigation into Juan Guaido over the phone call and other charges which he said amounted to “high treason”. Reported on worldwide, the video of the phone call recording on YouTube has been removed, but is available here on the Way Back Machine.
While there is a lot of accusations coming out of the US of Nicolas Maduro running a narco-state, Venezuela and Colombia dispute this. There’s only one casus belli that everyone in the region can agree on: Venezuela has lots of oil, and the US wants it. WaL
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PICTURED ABOVE: President Gustavo Petro at a speech in Bogota, 2015. PC: Gustavo Petro via Flickr CC BY-NC 2.0.
