Venezuela and the United States: Have relations improved?

By Sergio Rodríguez Gelfenstein

The Venezuelan and United States governments have managed to establish a permanent line of communication. This is due more to internal policy decisions in the United States than to a real improvement in ties between the two countries. Finally, in the United States, the pragmatic MAGA (Make American Great Again) proposal is prevailing over the ideological one of the neoconservatives led by Marco Rubio.

The international situation and the acceptance that China is Washington’s main enemy has been gaining ground at the top of the US power structure, leading a good portion of the administration’s leadership to understand this situation, forcing the neoconservatives and Marco Rubio to give in.

Their policy of maximum pressure (which in Venezuela is currently only supported by María Corina Machado’s group) has failed. Oil production and exports have stabilized and even grown slightly above one million barrels per day. This has been possible largely thanks to the support of China, which appears to be taking a more active stance regarding its economic and commercial ties with Venezuela, increasing its oil purchases and filling the void left by the suspension of special licenses granted to Chevron to operate in Venezuela despite sanctions. While the US policy aimed at overthrowing President Nicolás Maduro continues to founder in Venezuela, President Xi Jinping’s strategic vision has ultimately prevailed over the short-termism and mere profit motives of Chinese businessmen.

In this context, the release of 252 Venezuelan migrants who were detained in the United States and sent to a prison in El Salvador has been a public expression of an apparent improvement in relations. In reality, what has occurred is an improvement in communication. If this were not the case, there would be no reason to continue linking the Venezuelan government to organized crime and drug trafficking, which continues to be present in the State Department’s political outlook and rhetoric.

In addition to the above, children who had been kidnapped in the United States and separated from their parents have also returned, although 33 of them are still being illegally held by Washington. It is not ruled out that Marco Rubio, in his aberrant obsession with overthrowing the Venezuelan government, may want to use them as bargaining chips for one of his usual misdeeds. In this context, Chevron’s special licenses have been reinstated, and the company will operate again in Venezuela, although it is not authorized to pay the country in cash.

In return, Venezuela had to pay a high price: it had to release 10 American terrorists imprisoned in the country and a significant number of Venezuelan terrorists from radical opposition parties who had committed crimes punishable by the Constitution and the law. Marco Rubio himself acknowledged that there was no reason to keep the Venezuelan migrants imprisoned in the United States and that they were merely being held hostage in an attempt to exchange them for their compatriots. It has even been revealed that one of them is a confessed murderer who has already been tried in Spain.

Ultimately, the policy pursued by Special Envoy Richard Grenell has prevailed over Marco Rubio’s extremist stance. The Venezuelan government’s interlocutor has been in constant communication with him. Grenell’s position is that Venezuela has not taken an aggressive stance toward the United States and, finally—within a framework of absolute pragmatism—he has asserted that Venezuela has never refused to sell oil to the United States, which is entirely true.

Nor has it refused to repatriate migrants, even using Venezuelan planes to pick them up, freeing Washington from paying for these operations, which by now are almost daily and have brought a quantitatively small number of migrants back to the country but have had an enormous media, emotional, and symbolic impact as an expression of the government’s willingness to address this situation, which originated in Washington’s designation of Venezuela as a threat to the national security of the United States, with the resulting repercussions that this has had for more than ten years.

On the other hand, Rubio’s lies have been exposed. He claimed that the “release” of terrorist leaders sheltered in the Argentine embassy in Caracas was a U.S. special forces operation, when in reality it was the result of a negotiation with Grenell. Now, he has said that he pressured Maduro to release the imprisoned Americans, when in reality it was also the result of another agreement with Trump’s special envoy. This has also further weakened and discredited the position of María Corina Machado, Rubio’s main ally in Venezuela.

At this point, in Trump’s logic, Venezuela has ceased to be a problem and is focusing on those that are (according to his logic) and for different reasons: Mexico and Colombia because of drug trafficking and the shipment of drugs to the United States, and Brazil because, as an industrial power, it competes with American companies.

When circumstances forced Trump to hand over the State Department to the neoconservatives, and he had to appoint Rubio against his will to that post, he countered this by appointing 24 special envoys who report not to Rubio but to him. With these envoys, who handle the most important and strategic aspects, Trump manages the substance of US foreign policy. In fact, faced with the loss of prominence of the State Department, Rubio was forced to reduce his staff, dismissing hundreds of career diplomats and other officials.

In return, Trump handed Rubio control of Latin America and the Caribbean policy, which Trump doesn’t particularly care about and is actually being handled by the Pentagon through the Armed Forces Southern Command. To that extent, the region is bearing the brunt of the hatred of the man Trump called “Little Marco.” In the case of Venezuela, as an oil-producing country, the bilateral agenda exceeds its capabilities, so decision-making power is increasingly being transferred to Trump, through Grenell.

In response to the progress in communication between Venezuela and the United States, and in the face of Rubio’s despair and loss of prominence, the State Department, through its Bureau of Western Hemisphere Affairs, declared the “Cartel of the Suns,” an artificial creation of the United States, supposedly comprised of high-ranking Venezuelan officials, a terrorist organization. It then named President Maduro as the leader of this organization, baselessly accusing him of having ties to the Tren de Aragua (Aragua Train) – another criminal organization destroyed in Venezuela by the government’s decisive action but which Washington keeps alive with its rhetoric to argue in favor of its policy toward Venezuela.

Likewise, and to give international scope to the idea, the State Department has added a faction of the Sinaloa Cartel, accused of being one of the main organizations that introduces drugs into the United States, as part of the imagined triumvirate of mafia power that only exists in the fevered and perverse mind of the terrorist extreme right of the United States.

Accepting this aberration only responds to Trump’s need to maintain balance and keep together the contradictory groups that have gathered, glued together, in his administration.