By Spy Uganda
There is an old saying that perfectly captures the current outrage over Venezuela: the thief is accusing the robbed of robbery.
Venezuela’s subsoil resources have belonged to the Venezuelan people since Simón Bolívar decreed it in 1829. Foreign companies were never owners of Venezuelan oil; they were licensees, granted permission to extract under conditions set—at least on paper—by the Venezuelan state.
What followed was not partnership. It was plunder dressed up as legality.
Between 1917 and 1936, American and British corporations extracted an estimated $1.2 billion worth of oil from Venezuelan soil. Venezuela received about $90 million in return. For every 100 barrels pulled from the ground, the country was paid for roughly one. If this is called “lawful commerce,” it is only because the laws were written by those doing the taking.
That was not metaphorical. After seizing power in a 1908 coup backed by Washington, dictator Juan Vicente Gómez reportedly told American oil executives, “You know about oil. You write the laws.” And they did. Foreign corporations drafted Venezuela’s petroleum legislation, tailored to protect their own interests.
When a Venezuelan minister attempted to renegotiate better terms for his country, the companies bypassed him and appealed directly to Gómez. Within a year, the minister was gone. The tax exemptions granted to oil firms exceeded what they paid in extraction taxes. Venezuela was not merely being robbed; it was subsidising the robbery.
The unforgivable sin came when Venezuela asked for a fairer share.
In 1948, a democratic government introduced the 50–50 principle, asserting that Venezuela should finally receive half the value of its own oil. Within months, it was overthrown in a military coup. Washington promptly recognised the new junta.
The ensuing dictator, Marcos Pérez Jiménez, was rewarded handsomely. In 1954, US President Dwight Eisenhower awarded him the Legion of Merit for his “anti-communist attitudes.” His feared security chief met with the Dulles brothers and FBI director J. Edgar Hoover. Soon after, new oil concessions flowed.
The lesson was unmistakable: sovereignty is punished; compliance is rewarded.
It was not until 1976 that Venezuela fully nationalised its oil industry. Here is the detail often omitted by cable-news commentators: Venezuela paid for it. Every last cent—$5.6 billion in compensation. Every major American company accepted. Their concessions were due to expire in 1983 anyway, at which point Venezuelan law entitled them to nothing. They took billions early and walked away.
But empires have long memories.
Under IMF pressure in the late 1980s and 1990s, Venezuela’s political elite reopened the doors. Royalties were slashed from 16 percent to an astonishing one percent—worse terms than under Gómez. The state’s share of oil revenues fell from 71 percent to 36 percent. That was the neoliberal bargain in plain language: one-percent royalties for corporations, repression for the people.
When Hugo Chávez was elected, he reversed course. Royalties were raised to 30 percent. Majority state ownership was restored. Five days before the 2002 coup attempt against him, a CIA memo chillingly observed: “Venezuela: Conditions for a Coup Are Ripening.” The National Endowment for Democracy had already channelled millions of dollars to coup-linked actors. Hours after Chávez was briefly removed, the White House endorsed the new regime.
The coup failed. Chávez returned. Most oil companies accepted the new terms. Chevron remains in Venezuela to this day.
ExxonMobil and ConocoPhillips refused. They pursued arbitration and won multi-billion-dollar awards. These rulings are often cited as proof of “theft.” But arbitration exists for contract disputes, not robbery. The very fact of arbitration demolishes the theft narrative.
What those awards really represent is the legal architecture of extraction asserting itself. International arbitration tribunals are designed to enforce the rights of global capital against sovereign states. They are the judicial descendants of the system that allowed oil companies to write Venezuela’s laws in the 1920s. The referee, as ever, works for the other team.
Even if Venezuela wished to pay, it cannot. The United States ensured that outcome. Washington sanctioned Venezuela’s oil industry—the country’s primary source of revenue. It froze assets, seized CITGO, blocked access to international banking, threatened secondary sanctions against third parties, and made it effectively illegal to transport Venezuelan crude.
You cannot exclude a country from the global financial system and then demand it wire you billions of dollars. That contradiction is not accidental; it is the strategy.
Sanction a country into collapse. Point to unpaid awards. Brand it a thief. Seize what remains.
The awards are not meant to be paid. They are meant to justify the next phase of appropriation, beginning with CITGO, Venezuela’s US-based refinery network, now being auctioned off to satisfy creditors.
Cut a man’s legs off, then mock the way he walks.
Today, Donald Trump demands that Venezuela “return” oil fields that were never American property to begin with. This demand comes from a country whose corporations extracted hundreds of billions over a century, bribed dictators, drafted laws to suit themselves, backed coups, armed torturers, and imposed sanctions that devastated an entire population.
And now it claims to be the victim.
This is not confusion. It is projection—at a civilisational scale.
