Trump ally defends Venezuela oil deal amid ‘gunpoint diplomacy’ criticism

Chris Wright arrives on a visit to Venezuela on Tuesday night. He hailed ‘President Trump’s grand plan to replace conflict with commerce’. Photograph: Timothy Gardner/ReutersView image in fullscreenChris Wright arrives on a visit to Venezuela on Tuesday night.

Prefer the Guardian on GoogleThe US energy secretary, Chris Wright, has denied Washington is seeking to commandeer huge quantities of Venezuelan oil, amid growing criticism of Donald Trump’s energy deal with the country’s interim leaders.

Wright landed in Venezuela’s capital, Caracas, on Tuesday night, four days after Trump announced what he called “the biggest oil deal in world history”.

The White House says the deal will help secure US “energy dominance for the next century” as well as “purging foreign malign influence from our back yard” by excluding China and Russia from oilfields in the country with the world’s largest proven oil reserves.

But there has been criticism from across the political spectrum.

The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board said Trump’s deal with Venezuela’s unelected interim president, Delcy Rodríguez, “looks less like a normal commercial transaction than it does the famous scene of US businessmen meeting with the Cuban strongman in The Godfather Part II”.

View image in fullscreenDelcy Rodríguez, Venezuela’s unelected interim president, has said the deal had ‘endless’ benefits. Photograph: Venezuelan Presidency/AFP/Getty ImagesThe economist Francisco Rodríguez told Democracy Now: “It’s clear that this is not a deal that any Venezuelan government would have entered into unless this country had been subject to an invasion, and unless its authorities had been held at gunpoint.

So I think we’ve replaced gunboat diplomacy now for gunpoint diplomacy.”.

Delcy Rodríguez was installed as interim president on 5 January, two days after the president, Nicolás Maduro, was abducted by US special forces during a predawn raid on Caracas.

Trump warned Rodríguez, who was Maduro’s vice-president, she would face an even worse fate if she did not toe the US line.

Since Maduro’s capture, Rodríguez has made a series of once unthinkable concessions to US officials who their nominally socialist political movement, Chavismo, had spent years denouncing as predatory imperialists bent on stealing Venezuela’s natural resources.

The deal has dealt a body blow to Venezuela’s political opposition who fear Trump is unlikely to push for a democratic transition or fresh presidential elections given his lucrative arrangement with Rodríguez.