The threat of Donald Trump to finish the licenses that allowed the operation to have completed. This Tuesday, the Treasury Department updated the rule to leave it without effect and order a “gradual cessation” of activities in the country that will be limited to April 3; That is, within a month you must dismantle your operations in the country. Until midnight that day, transactions of the company and its subsidiaries can be made, but nothing related to the payment of taxes, royalties and dividends to PDVSA. Chavismo has accused the opposition of having influenced this decision.
The stage is much narrower than what was foreseen when Donald Trump posted in a message on his Truth social network that would revoke the licenses. And he did it while the leader María Corina Machado in the absence of the official documents of the Office of Foreign Property Control of the United States that have appeared today, the license was automatically renewed on March 1, as established by its official mechanism. The Government of Nicolás Maduro was cautious in its reaction to the announcement and assured that the measure affected more Chevron than Venezuela. Analysts were waiting for a six -month margin for the end of operations, in which a renegotiation of the measure was also possible. The period has been reduced to less than a month.
In a statement, the Venezuela government has pointed out to the opposition of making lobby with the administration of Donald Trump, with which Nicolás Maduro believed to be understood after receiving ay to have exchanged American prisoners for flights with deported Venezuelan. “The new US government has succumbed to the pressure of failed and defeated opposition sectors of Venezuela by definitely sanctioning the American company Chevron,” says the statement. “Today thanks to Venezuelan extremism, Chevron has been separated from its operations in the country.”
The direct signaling to the opposition, rather than the White House, has implications at the end of 2024, in which severe penalties imposes on those who, from the point of view of Chavismo, “promote, invoke, support or participate in the imposition of unilateral coercive measures and other restrictive or punitive measures, as well as actions against the security of the nation.” This law, have warned human rights defenders, could be a new repressive lever to use by the Chavista government. An opposition sector, in particular the one that orbits around Machado, have advocated for the application of this type of international pressure to Chavismo and when Trump announced it he said it was “a great step against Maduro.”
The licenses given during the administration of Biden to Chevron, in 2022, in a framework of negotiations with Chavismo, allowed Venezuela to get out of prostration. Chevron’s activity was authorized to pay PDVSA debts with the multinational, but in the long run it allowed the Venezuelan oil industry to reactivate, dismantled by years of bad management.
The output will surely imply an increase in inflation, because the government will have great difficulty containing the exchange rate. For now, Maduro has ordered the activation of the “Absolute productive independence”, like so many others with which he has tried to reactivate the economic apparatus and Chavismo has adopted a new motto: “Let’s not wait for anything but of ourselves”, which José Gervasio Artigas attributes to the hero. It remains to be seen what will happen to the letters of conformity that last year were granted to other companies such as Repsol and ENI in the framework of the readjustment of the sanctions made by Washington in response to the violations of the Barbados Agreement by the Government for the prohibition of the candidacy of Machado and other obstacles imposed on the electoral process of last July 28.
