“Hostile Takeovers”: As U.S. Claims Venezuela’s Oil, Trump Seeks “Vassal States” Across the World

AMY GOODMAN: We begin today’s show looking at the Trump administration’s tightening grip on Latin America and the aftermath of the abduction of the Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and his wife Cilia Flores. On Thursday, Venezuela’s interim leader, Delcy Rodríguez, signed a law that will open Venezuela’s oil industry to privatization, reversing a key principle of the Chavista movement that’s persevered in Venezuela for more than two decades. This is Delcy Rodríguez speaking from Caracas.

INTERIM PRESIDENT DELCY RODRÍGUEZ: [translated] In this law is President Nicolás Maduro’s vision for the future, because there are those who think we pulled this law out of nowhere. No, we had already studied this law, its reform, together with President Maduro. I feel moved to be able to tell him from Caracas, his birthplace: President Maduro, we are delivering for you. We are delivering for the first combatant Cilia Flores. And we are delivering for the people of Venezuela.

AMY GOODMAN: Soon after the legislation was signed, the Trump administration lifted some sanctions on Venezuela to facilitate access to the country’s crude oil reserves for U.S. companies to buy, sell and store. President Trump also said Thursday the United States plans on opening up Venezuela’s airspace. Trump spoke following a Cabinet meeting yesterday.

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: And I just spoke to the president of Venezuela, informed her that we’re going to be opening up all commercial airspace over Venezuela. American citizens will be very shortly able to go to Venezuela, and they’ll be safe there. … We have the major oil companies going to Venezuela now, scouting it out and picking their locations.

AMY GOODMAN: This all comes as President Trump Thursday signed an executive order that would impose tariffs on goods from countries that sell or provide oil to Cuba, as Trump intensifies efforts to topple the Cuban government. The move appears to be intended to put pressure on Mexico, which has been an oil lifeline for Cuba as the Island has been devastated by decades of U.S. economic sanctions. Trump said Thursday, quote, “Cuba will not be able to survive,” unquote. Meanwhile, the Financial Times reports Cuba only has about 15 to 20 days left of oil.

For more on this and other issues, we’re joined by Greg Grandin, Yale University history professor, Pulitzer Prize-winning author, whose latest book is America, América: A New History of the New World, his recent op-ed in The New York Times headlined “Trump Picked the Right Stage to Act Out His Imperial Ambitions.”

So, we last spoke to you, Professor Grandin, when Maduro and his wife were abducted. They’re sitting not far from here in a Brooklyn detention center, expected to be in court, I believe, in March.

GREG GRANDIN: March, yeah.

AMY GOODMAN: But talk about what’s happening now. It surprised many when the Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum announced that Mexico would be cutting off oil supplies, but then she had to clarify her comments. I want to see if we can go to a clip of President Sheinbaum talking about exactly what Mexico would be doing.

PRESIDENT CLAUDIA SHEINBAUM: [translated] It is Mexico’s sovereign decision to send humanitarian aid, and Pemex fulfills its obligations under the contract once it ships. I never said it had been suspended. It had not been suspended. That was a later interpretation based on a newspaper article. Therefore, humanitarian aid to Cuba, as to other countries, continues.

AMY GOODMAN: So, it’s not exactly clear what she’s saying there, that oil for humanitarian reasons would continue. But if you can explain what’s happening and the connection between — it’s something you’ve long said — Venezuela and Cuba, especially U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, the Cuban American’s complete focus?

GREG GRANDIN: Yeah, well, just to put it into larger context, I mean, Trump came into power saying, with a kind of buffoonish change of the name of the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America, and within a year, he had launched this campaign of chaos and murder, in terms of the speedboat operators and pilots, over a hundred dead, and then — you know, and then this fast strike into Venezuela. And he built up a military naval presence in the Caribbean that is still there. It hasn’t wound down since the kidnapping of Maduro. So the pressure is still on Venezuela, because Delcy Rodríguez, as Marco Rubio said the other day, is basically governing under the blade. You know, she could be in fear of — you know, he’s basically threatened to take her out if they didn’t — if they’re not happy or satisfied with the level of cooperation that they’re showing.

AMY GOODMAN: She’s the interim president.

GREG GRANDIN: Yeah, she’s the interim —

AMY GOODMAN: Yet President Trump already tweeted that he was the interim president.

GREG GRANDIN: Yeah, right.

AMY GOODMAN: President Trump himself.

GREG GRANDIN: Right. So, basically, what we’re seeing is a kind of new form of imperialism, where Trump is treating these countries like hostile takeovers, where — you know, whether it be Venezuela, whether it be Gaza, whether it be Haiti, whether it be Libya. These are all kinds of — in which these countries go into receivership. And Venezuela really is the most striking example, because it was — it’s a big country. In the past, in the 19th century and early 20th century, the United States would take over the customs house of the Dominican Republic or something like that. But what the United States is planning for Venezuela is basically to run the country as a vassal state, basically giving it an allowance, taking its revenues, approving its budget. The money is going to be deposited in some fund in Qatar. This is an arrangement with kind of transactional details that we’ve never seen before.

And yes, oil is key to it in terms of isolating Cuba — or, oil as a weapon, not oil as profit, oil as a way of isolating Cuba, because Venezuela, in the mind of Marco Rubio and the greater Florida constituency within the Republican coalition, wants the end of the Cuban Revolution. They want regime change in Cuba. And it seems like Trump has openly stated that that’s the next goal. And they’re putting pressure on Mexico to cut off oil to Cuba, and it seems like Mexico is caving to that pressure. Whatever Claudia Sheinbaum has said, the fact of the matter is that oil, the Mexican oil, has been dropping, has been decreasing, that it’s been exporting and transporting to Cuba over the last couple of months. So she’s under enormous pressure. And Cuba does have, apparently, a few weeks without oil, and it has very few friends. Brazil is not helping. Carney in Canada, for all of the strong words in his speech at Davos, they’re not saying anything about this action in the Western Hemisphere. It’s really a — it’s really criminal. It’s just straight-out criminal activity.

AMY GOODMAN: Why criminal?

GREG GRANDIN: Because it’s based on no international law. When the United States says that Venezuela has sanctioned oil, that’s just the United States asserting it. It’s not — it’s not ratified by any international body.

AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to go to new information, the Trump administration reportedly planning to establish a permanent CIA presence on the ground in Venezuela following the abduction of President Maduro. That’s according to CNN, which spoke to several anonymous sources that outlined talks between the State Department and the CIA have weighed short- and long-term schemes to foster U.S. influence in Venezuela. One source told CNN, quote, “State plants the flag, but CIA is really the influence.” CIA officers were in Venezuela in the months leading up to the U.S. military strike targeting Maduro and his wife. The agency covertly installed a small team inside Venezuela in August to surveil Maduro, providing key intelligence for the attack on Caracas earlier this month. One CIA source reportedly operated within the Maduro government.

GREG GRANDIN: Yeah, well, we could assume that in the Rodríguez government, the CIA is interpenetrated on all levels. I mean, the CIA has a presence in Latin America. That’s not new. Every embassy has CIA staff operating out of the basement office. But this is envisioning an upscaling of the objective, of the mission of the CIA. It’s basically turning the CIA into a colonial office, you know, how to run an informal empire.

AMY GOODMAN: Let’s go to Secretary of State Marco Rubio Wednesday refusing to rule out further U.S. attacks on Venezuela. His threat came during his testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, where he told lawmakers that Venezuela’s interim government has agreed to submit a monthly budget to the Trump administration, which will release money from an account funded by oil sales and initially managed by Qatar.

SECRETARY OF STATE MARCO RUBIO: On the third point of use of force, look, the president never rules out his options as commander-in-chief to protect the national interests of the United States. I can tell you right now with full certainty, we are not postured to, nor do we intend or expect to have to, take any military action in Venezuela at any time. The only military presence you will see in Venezuela is our Marine guards at an embassy.

AMY GOODMAN: Greg Grandin?

GREG GRANDIN: Well, and they haven’t drawn down the naval presence. About a 10th of the naval fleet is in the Caribbean, you know, doing — you know, both threatening Mexico, threatening Venezuela and isolating Cuba. So, they have many more ships in the Caribbean than they have in the Persian Gulf going into Iran. Again, this is a new form of — this is some kind of weird hybrid of imperial — informal imperial rule. It’s kind of like — it’s kind of like the hostile takeovers of nations and turning them — and putting them in receivership, in which the United States takes the power to administer the funds, to run them transactionally, but not take any responsibility.

But the idea of nation building, of course, it’s not something that Trump ran on and his base is against. But this really kind of obliterates the idea of national sovereignty and the idea of citizenship. This is turning millions of people, Venezuela’s population — but again, it’s not just Venezuela — Venezuela, potentially Cuba, Gaza, Libya and so on, into interdependencies, you know, and kind of a new vassal — kind of technovassal imperialism.

AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to also ask you — a really, really unusual report. Atlantic magazine recently published an article headlined ”MAGA Thinks Maduro Will Prove Trump Won in 2020.” The article quotes MyPillow founder Mike Lindell saying, quote, “I’m hoping now that Maduro will actually come clean and tell us everything about the machines and how they steal the elections,” unquote. Some have speculated Trump could pardon Maduro in exchange for him stating that Venezuela interfered in the 2020 election, even though no evidence of that exists. And it might also explain why, when the FBI raided the election office this week in Georgia’s Fulton County, seeking computers and ballots related to the 2020 election, inexplicably, the head of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, who would be dealing with international issues, was there.

GREG GRANDIN: Yeah, apparently Tulsi Gabbard is going to be in charge of making the case that the 2020 election was rigged, drawing on all sorts of evidence. And there’s long been a conspiracy that the voting machines had — I’m not exactly sure, but there were some Venezuelans that were invested in the company that ran the machines. I don’t know the details.

But, I mean, anything could happen. Look, Trump pardoned Juan Orlando Hernández, who was convicted of drug running — he was former president of Honduras — basically as part of a deal to bring the conservative party in Honduras to power, to overthrow the left, and in alliance — if you read — there’s a great op-ed in The New York Times yesterday by Jean Guerrero about, basically, the MS-13 — Trump — were acting as election monitors, basically threatening people to vote for the conservative party or be killed.

AMY GOODMAN: Who Trump endorsed.

GREG GRANDIN: Right.

AMY GOODMAN: And again, just to make that point, as Trump says that Maduro is sitting in this Brooklyn jail because he is a narcotrafficker — 

GREG GRANDIN: Yeah.

AMY GOODMAN: — that President Trump pardoned Juan Orlando Hernández, the former president of Honduras, who was sentenced to something like 45, 46 years in prison for bringing in 400 tons of drugs into the United States.

GREG GRANDIN: Yeah. So, you could imagine — I mean, who knows? But you could imagine some deal being worked out with Maduro where he makes some statement. I mean, the point is just to flood the zone — right? — to create confusion, to raise the idea that the election was stolen. And this is a way of setting up to discredit whatever comes in the midterms and whatever comes next presidential elections.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, we will continue to talk —

GREG GRANDIN: I mean, but there is one thing: The oil wasn’t privatized. I do just want to make this point very quickly. The privatization in Venezuela happened in the 1970s, and the law that was passed yesterday doesn’t reverse that. What it does is it moves any kind of arbitration to international courts. It’s what oil companies want. It gives oil companies better control over their operations. And it reduces the amount of royalties and taxes that Venezuela would charge on oil. But it doesn’t quite privatize. Oil remains considered part of Venezuela’s national patrimony, so that will still be a point of contention in future Venezuelan politics.

AMY GOODMAN: I want to thank you for being with us, Greg Grandin, Yale University history professor, Pulitzer Prize-winning author, his latest book, America, América: A New History of the New World. We’ll link to your piece in The New York Times, “Trump Picked the Right Stage to Act Out His Imperial Ambitions.”

Coming up, the families of two Trinidadian men are suing the Trump administration for wrongful death. The men were killed by the U.S. in a military strike that the U.S. engaged in, in a boat in the Caribbean. But first up, a premiere of a song by Billy Bragg.

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AMY GOODMAN: That’s “City of Heroes,” a tribute to anti-ICE protesters in Minneapolis by the British folk singer Billy Bragg, the song written and released in response to the murder of Alex Pretti. In a note accompanying the release, Billy Bragg said, quote, “That these crimes can be committed in broad daylight, on camera and yet no one is held accountable only adds to the injustice.” We’ll play more of his song later in the broadcast.