Much to the disappointment of a number of countries in the hemisphere, the administration of President Joe Biden has opted to ‘pile on the pressure’ on Venezuela by moving to renew a licence that imposes only a partial exemption on the US company, Chevron Corporation’s workings in Venezuela’s oil sector.
A new licence, setting out the paradigms of Washing-ton’s expectations of Chevron’s relationship with the oil industry in Venezuela reportedly retains the US oil company’s partial exemption from sanctions that are in place in order to allow for the company to keep operating in Venezuela.
Analysts see the Biden administration ‘hedging of bets’ in the matter of the involvement of US companies in seeking to keep Venezuela’s oil industry going in the hope that the country’s vast oil reserves may serve as an important factor in determining the security of oil supplies to the west in circumstances where pressures on Moscow to end its hostilities against Ukraine have to be further stiffened by the imposition of the further targeting of oil exports from Russia.
A licence issued to Chevron by the US Treasury Department a week ago reportedly allows the oil major, along with other US companies, to perform what is described in one report as the “basic upkeep of wells” which the company runs along with Venezuela’s state-run oil company, PDVSA.
The position of the Biden administration will come as a disappointment to the Maduro administration which would have been hoping for a resumption of exports in order to help salvage what, in recent years, has been an economy devastated by the US-imposed blockages that have seriously impacted on both the functioning of Venezuela’s oil & gas infrastructure as well as on its ability to export oil.
Just months ago it appeared to have been thought that the targeting of oil supplies from Russia for sanctions might have led to a softening by the Biden administration of the long-standing policy of his predecessor’s administration of strangling Venezuela’s oil exports. Things appeared to be ‘looking up’ in that regard when, in March, senior US officials met with Venezuela’s President Nicolas Maduro, apparently to seek to have him return to the negotiating table with the country’s US-backed, Juan Guaidó-led opposition. That ploy, it now appears, has failed, and in the meanwhile, President Maduro has strengthened Venezuela’s bilateral ties with Iran, a move out of which he has secured support for the country’s ailing oil industry.
US sanctions against Venezuela have been in place since 2019.
Indications of what had been a seeming willingness on the parts of both Washington and Caracas to negotiate their way out of the crisis appear to have been a ‘false alarm.’ In the wake of the stalemate, hardliners in the US Congress have waded into President Biden’s administration for what they see as attempts to placate President Maduro in circumstances where little if anything has been secured from that approach.
