A new cycle of greater hardships is avizo on the horizon of the Venezuelan on foot. Start feeling it in your pockets after Donald Trump He decided to redouble his sanctions against Caracas. Russian invasion to Ukraine and its impact on the international crude market allowed Venezuela recover its prominence despite political challenges. On January 20, with the arrival of the Republican tycoon, the era of pragmatism seemed to end. Trump paved two successive blows. First he decided not to renew permission to the multinational Chevron to continue its operations in Venezuela. Its departure is a loss of 3,000 million dollars this year. At the same time, the United States imposed 25% tariffs for those countries that buy Venezuelan oil. “Venezuela has been very hostile to the United States and the freedoms we defend,” he said. The company Reliance, of India, was the first to recognize that the situation had changed. He has just announced that he suspends his transactions with PDVSA, the state oil company.
Everything promises to get worse. The sending of 238 Venezuelans deported to a Salvadoran maximum security prison caused the anger of the government. The Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, threatened with a military response if Venezuela tries to advance in his claim from Guyana. “Imbécil,” he called it Nicolás Maduro. The Venezuelan economy takes note of this political escalation. It is de facto dollarized and the intuition or fear of companies and consumers who will soon lack the American bills immediately felt in the informal circuit. The dollar that circulates in the black market He exceeded 100 bolivars and considerably expanded the distance that separates him from the official price of the currency (68.91 bolivars). Maduro had celebrated the closure of 2024 with an inflation of 16%, an insignificance if compared to 2018, when the cost of life had an increase of 130,060%. Only that year, GDP contracted 47.6%. Last year, and largely due to Chevron’s impulse, the economy grew between 9% and 3.9%, according to official and opposition measurements.
The Miraflores Palace has given the first sign that stormy times are coming. Public administration will work only until noon During the next six weeks for the country to save energy. The decrease in electricity production as a result of droughts that impact the reservoirs, has forced the authorities to take this measure. The ghost of new cuts of light looms for these hours over the main cities. The promise to improve or renew the energy system has to be filed under the new circumstances.
Opponent Debate
The White House offensive not only impacts the Miraflores Palace. The opposition has been divided again, this time around Trump’s actions. The moderate movement by Venezuela (MPV) regretted that Washington appeals again to a pressure instrument that only causes “Hunger and suffering” in the population. Henrique Capriles He formulated the same reasoning. “Trump must remember that in his first presidency, They were going to make him lobby to ask him to squeeze thinking that he was going to get Maduro out of power And it turns out that it did not come out, but that it ended up weakening was the democratic opposition itself. “The allusion to María Corina Machado It did not go unnoticed and the leader of the hardest sector of the opposition replied. “They come to say that those who face Maduro are the culprits of his radicalization or his crime.” Machado directly responsible for the current president, whose authority does not recognize, and his “illegitimate consolidation”, for the measures adopted by the United States.
The analyst and consultant Luis Vicente León maintains that, beyond sympathy or extended rejection of Maduro, Leconomic sanctions, especially those that affect oil, “have been widely rejected“. Venezuelans have already experienced their effects:” Employment deterioration, revenue reduction, fuel supply crisis, collapse of public services and more recently, migratory restrictions. “León recalled, as Capriles, that it was Trump himself that in 2019 he launched a battery of measures to support the self -proclamation of the deputy of the deputy Juan Guaidó as “President in charge” And, in this way, force Maduro’s exit from the presidency. Those sanctions “Not only did they not fulfill their goal, but aggravated the crisis that the population already lived“. For the analyst” any study hypothesis that starts from an alleged majority acceptance “of these new sanctions” lacks livelihoods “and is a” disconnection with reality “. They are barely approved by 12.6% of the people surveyed. In clear allusion to the most radical sectors of antimedourism he added:” Sell a collective masochism thesis, to justify the unjustifiable, it is extremely unjustifiable Difficult and I would say that politically very dangerous for its exponents. “
China’s role
Weeks ago, when Richard Grenelll landed in Caracas as a special envoy from Trump, the government believed it was possible to leave behind historical disagreements and advance a series of bilateral agreements, including the repatriation of Venezuelan migrants. Deported turns began to arrive and the Miraflores Palace warned the hope of a new era understandings. Even ‘The Wall Street Journal’ conjectured that common sense would be imposed to ideological enmity and that Chevron would resume its activities. The events followed in the opposite direction so far and Venezuela is found again in a dead end in view.
Political allies, including Russia and China, have repudiated the sanctions of the White House. But one thing is rhetorical solidarity and a very different economic collaboration. The Chinese case is observed under that lens. Beijing allocated between 2020 and 2023 more than 48,000 million dollars in investments for Latin America. Venezuela was not a receptor of one of those dollars that had Peru, Panama, Brazil, Chile and even Argentina. A Transparency Report Venezuela realizes that between the start of the Bolivarian Revolution and 2018, that country received more than 62,631 million dollars in loans and 6,045 million in investments by the Asian giant. Venezuela had to pay with oil, but the supply was fulfilled halfway. There is a pending debt of 15,000 million dollars. In September 2023, a bilateral meeting at the highest level was held in the Chinese capital. On that occasion, 31 agreements were signed and the willingness to found a “strategic alliance” were expressed. Those words have not translated into facts.
