Under protracted and extreme socio-economic pressure arising out of Washington’s measures to remove his government from office, Venezuela’s President Nicolas Maduro has wasted no time in welcoming the removal of the Trump administration from office in the United States.
On Sunday, Maduro dispatched a congratulatory letter to President-elect Joe Biden in which he made clear his administration’s wish for an adjusted relationship with Washington as a corollary to the removal of sanctions that have targeted his country’s oil industry and sent its economy into a tailspin.
News of Trump’s electoral loss coincided with reports that Venezuela’s official oil exports in October had plummeted to a new low of 359,000 barrels per day as most of the country’s long-term major clients appeared to be demonstrating increasing responsiveness to Washington’s sanctions-related pressures in an effort to remove Maduro from office.
Last month the United States set an October-November deadline for major importers of Venezuelan oil including Italy, Spain and India to bring an end to ‘oil swops’ which it had green-lighted earlier this year as exceptions to the broader swathe of sanctions which the Trump administration had imposed on Venezuela. This month’s all-time record decline in the country’s oil exports point to the fact that Washington has gotten its way.
Reports emanating from Caracas days ago indicated that companies from the named countries loaded no cargo from Venezuela, a move that reportedly further shrunk PDVSA’s continually dwindling portfolio of customers.
Vessel-tracking technology has been in place to monitor the movement of oil vessels in and out of Venezuela. The tracking indicates, according to media reports, that twenty-six vessels left Venezuela with oil in October and that the 359,000 barrels per day shipped abroad during that period represented the lowest in monthly average for more than seventy-five years, a statistic attributed to the country’s oil Ministry.
Figures for preceding months indicate that PDVSA exported 381,000 bpd in June, 388,000 bpd in July, 440,000 bpd in August and 703,000 bpd in September.
Mindful that the end of the Trump administration might be the best hope yet for a thaw in relations with Washington, Maduro earlier this week dispatched a congratulatory note to Biden in which he expressed an interest in what he described as “decent dialogue” with the new administration.
“In time,… we will work, hopefully, to resume decent, sincere, direct channels of dialogue between the future government of Joe Biden” and Venezuela, Maduro said, dropping a broad hint that his administration is hopeful of a new pathway for relations between Washington and Caracas that will result in the restoration of Venezuela’s oil industry and by extension, the country’s economic fortunes.
Almost two years ago, in January 2019, the Trump administration broke off diplomatic relations with Venezuela, having deemed Maduro’s 2016 re-election to office fraudulent.