Pacheco: Venezuela, oil and America’s imperial turn

Watching the news on Jan. 3 about the capture of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and his wife by U.S. forces brought back memories of my trip to that country in the 1990s. My former business partner and I were on a trip to South America to drum up business for a client. 

Landing at Simon Bolivar Airport on the Caribbean Sea, we were picked up by an old man in an early 1970s gas guzzler for a silent 30-minute trip to our lodging at the Hotel Tamanaco in Caracas. I was struck by the sheer poverty I witnessed on the route and the opulent site of the luxurious Tamanaco.

We promptly checked in with the commercial officer at the U.S. embassy, who asked us what we were doing in the country. When we explained, he asked how long we were planning on staying. When we answered, he strongly suggested that we do our business and leave as quickly as possible. I have never been told this at any other U.S. embassy I have visited. Political uncertainty was high, and Hugo Chávez would assume the presidency shortly after our departure.

At almost every place we went to in Caracas, we could feel the tension in the air. At first, we thought that most Venezuelans disliked Americans, but we noticed that there was a certain tension amongst the Venezuelans themselves. Perhaps this was a foreboding of hard times to come.

For the first couple of nights, we dined at our hotel. On the third night, we decided to take a taxi to an Italian restaurant whose favorable reviews we had read about. When we asked the bellman to call a taxi for us, he strongly suggested we not leave the hotel and dine inside again. We refused, and he reluctantly got us a taxi to the restaurant, which was about a mile and a half away.

We finished our meal, which was the best Italian food I have ever eaten, and asked the host if he would kindly call a taxi for us. Within minutes, a man who was a Benito Mussolini lookalike appeared in a banged-up, early 1970s Chevy Impala to take us to our hotel. As he drove, he kept taking his eyes off the road and looking back and talking to us, intrigued we were from the U.S. I was asking him to watch the road when our car slammed into the side of a commuter bus. 

Thankfully, we were not hurt, but after everybody recovered from the shock, an angry bus driver appeared with a tire iron at our taxi driver’s window. The taxi driver then started yelling at us to get out and run, which we did without hesitation.

Our panic button started to go off when we ran down the street and immediately noticed that we two Americans, dressed in suits and ties, were in a very poor, dark part of town, most likely a barrio. We could see the lights of the Tamanaco in the distance and resigned ourselves to carefully walking back to the hotel. 

On the way, we tried to stick to unlit streets, avoiding eye contact with anybody who saw us. It was probably the longest walk of my life, but we made it back safely to the Tamanaco.

During the rest of our stay in Venezuela, I kept thinking to myself, how could a country that has the most oil reserves in the world, with 1,700 miles of beach, islands on the Caribbean Sea, and ports be so poor? I contrasted Venezuela’s situation with the wealth in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, which also have oil, but not necessarily the other advantages that Venezuela has. 

On a one-on-one basis, most of the Venezuelans we interacted with were kind and inquisitive about the U.S. It saddened me that so many of their countrymen were suffering in poverty, while I stayed at a fancy resort surrounded by this poverty.

On one hand, I am glad that Maduro, whose ineptitude, corruption and brutal means have caused up to 25% of Venezuelans to flee their country, has been removed from office. On the other hand, his removal is far from noble on the part of the U.S. 

Originally, President Donald Trump accused Venezuela of supporting the flow of illegal drugs such as fentanyl into the U.S. However, after Maduro’s capture, Trump has focused on speaking about controlling Venezuela’s oil reserves to “make money.” This harkens back to the days when the imperial powers in Europe and the U.S. simply invaded weaker countries in which they coveted resources or strategic locations. Have we regressed to these imperial times?

The U.S. calls the Maduro raid a “police action,” even though ships and the elite Delta Force were deployed, which appears to be more of a military action. Does Vladimir Putin now have strong justification that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is a police action against Volodymyr Zelensky, whom he has previously called a Nazi? Can Xi Jinping now justify a future Chinese invasion of Taiwan because Chinese law says that Taiwan belongs to China? And on what moral ground would the U.S. stand if this happens?

If the U.S. is going to “run" Venezuela, as announced by Trump, is the nation necessarily going to be better off? Experts predict that it could take years to upgrade Venezuela’s aging oil sector. 

Does that mean that the U.S. will be occupying Venezuela for years to come? I remember the wise words of former U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell on the eve of the U.S.’s 2003 invasion of Iraq when he warned former President George W. Bush, “If you break it, you own it,” referring to the momentous task of governing the country after the invasion. Twenty-two years later, these words apply perfectly to the U.S. in Venezuela.

Jerry Pacheco is the executive director of the nonprofit International Business Accelerator. He can be reached at (575) 589-2200 or jerry@nmiba.com.