Caracas Chronicles

“…the order that we need doesn’t exist” —Benjamin Bratton

On March 15, Trump invoked a murky 1798 law to deport any Venezuelan suspected of being a member of Tren de Aragua without trial. A first transfer of Venezuelans to El Salvador was quickly carried out, despite a court order forbidding it. Nayib Bukele’s post on X, celebrating the arrival of more than 200 Venezuelans, was not just bluster and a promotional stunt for CECOT—his prison-industrial complex—but a real sign of the times.

In response, a statement signed by president-elect Edmundo González and María Corina Machado was posted on X on Monday. For the first time, they attempted to balance their unconditional support for Trump with a call to protect Venezuelan migrants. However, they avoided directly addressing the fact that these deportations were carried out in clear violation of the law, due process, and court rulings.

They are forced into these rhetorical acrobatics because they currently believe they have a chance to integrate themselves—like Bukele—into the geo-business network of the “MAGAcracy,” trying to turn Venezuela’s political transition into a kind of commercial transaction where Trump stands to gain something: a trade of wealth for freedom.

The politics of melancholy

With the apparent failure of the “hemispheric security” narrative, Machado is now trying to offer something in exchange for the destruction of the dictatorship. And what she is offering is Venezuela’s underground wealth—resources that, after the hypothetical fall of the regime, would be available in an “energy hub” of the Americas, open to investors from around the world. A business so attractive, the idea goes, that it would motivate those investors to convince, pressure, or incentivize Trump to overthrow Maduro.

This “realist” shift in Machado’s usually idealistic rhetoric takes place in the context of the ongoing struggle between the government and the opposition to win Trump’s favor—a confusing chess game between lobbying groups, each trying to exclude the other from deals and arrangements with the United States.

In an era where geopolitics is increasingly shaped by business interests—where Gaza is reduced to a real estate issue and Ukraine to rare earth minerals—Bukele has CECOT, and María Corina has her energy hub. But her proposal is built on both the perennial illusions of Venezuelan politics (the notion that Venezuela has more oil than Saudi Arabia, when in reality it mostly has extra-heavy crude, much of which, as a former PDVSA director put it, is not even recoverable) and the equally persistent denial of an inconvenient truth: Venezuelan oil is not indispensable to anyone. Trump, a staunch supporter of fracking, continues to insist that the U.S. does not need foreign oil.

Machado believes she can insert her melancholic Thatcherism into Trump’s geopolitical framework.

But this proposal perfectly encapsulates a political class that looks to the future through the lens of the past. If Chávez’s “Magna Reserve” was a distorted echo of Carlos Andrés Pérez’s oil nationalization, the energy hub is an imitation of the Luis Giusti-era oil opening policy of the 1990s—another example of how deeply our political nostalgia runs.

Much like in William Gibson’s The Gernsback Continuum, where the protagonist is haunted by visions of futures that never came to be, Chávez only saw the mirages of 19th-century Gran Colombia and 20th-century Gran Venezuela. And Machado, in nights haunted by the ghosts of Reagan and Thatcher, sees nothing beyond the oil opening.

Neither can look past the illusion of a magical, underground treasure chest—straight out of One Thousand and One Nights—filled with infinite riches, capable of generating instant miracles.

The trustees

Machado believes she can insert her melancholic Thatcherism into Trump’s geopolitical framework. However, there is more than one difference between the old privatization projects of Britain’s Iron Lady—which were still part of a public policy—and Trumpian corporate governance. There is also more than one similarity between the privatization of the Venezuelan state by its civic-military cartel and the capture of the U.S. government by DOGE and the emerging Billionaire Cartel.

In fact, given that the Venezuelan state was privatized through nationalization, the old debate reducing governance to a matter of public versus private ownership now feels as dated as Guillermo Dávila’s songs and Radio Rochela sketches. While our 20th-century mindset clings to the fetishism of PDVSA ownership and the myth of infinite wealth that supposedly makes us the most important country in the world, the real problem of the 21st century is resource scarcity, the environmental impact of burning hydrocarbons, and ensuring effective control of mining and energy activities by countries and local populations.

In other words, if Venezuelans truly controlled their underground resources through a public authority capable of taxing and regulating the industry, the question of who extracts the oil would be a secondary matter. The sector would naturally evolve into a mix of public and private operators—where “public” could include municipal or regional enterprises, and “private” could mean local or community-led companies.

What remains unclear in these privatization fantasies is whether they stem from the old dream of selling PDVSA shares or from a Texas-style model of private subsurface ownership. The civic-military cartel has already pushed Venezuela far along the latter path, as evidenced by the depredations of Tareck El Aissami and the rampant plundering in Bolívar’s mining zones.

And if Trump, in one of his fantasies, wanted to annex this “hub” like the Panama Canal or Greenland, why would he need Machado or González Urrutia, who are offering what they don’t even possess?

Given the state’s patrimonial and centralized nature, even after nationalization, Venezuelans have always had very little power over their underground treasure. Like a Caribbean Britney Spears—brunette, vast in number, and perpetually swindled—Venezuelans have been trapped under the guardianship of trustees who never took them seriously. The poverty of the oil-rich regions of Anzoátegui and Zulia, as well as decades of environmental destruction, are proof of this.

Beyond the ideological dogma of removing the state from extraction—and thereby shrinking fiscal revenue—a more meaningful discussion would be on whether Venezuelans can gain real control over mining and energy activities. But that debate cannot be confined to political parties, technocrats and expert groups whose proposals usually reflect the demands and fantasies of specific political groups.

One could engage in speculative reasoning and imagine a regulatory body—perhaps even a platform—that is genuinely democratic and includes municipalities, regional governments, and communities, not just the sitting government and ruling parties in Caracas. But in that case, the debate would not be reduced, as Machado wants, to legal security and guarantees for foreign investors. It would also have to include guarantees for Venezuelan citizens and communities, addressing potential conflicts with both the state and foreign partners.

Ultimately, Machado’s proposal does not solve her fundamental problem: Venezuela does not need to democratize to become an energy hub—oil is extracted even from war zones, and the world’s top producers are autocracies. Moreover, the ones who can actually make that offer are the regime’s lobbyists: Chevron, Sergeant, and others. And if Trump, in one of his fantasies, wanted to annex this “hub” like the Panama Canal or Greenland, why would he need Machado or González Urrutia, who are offering what they don’t even possess?In the end, this illusory barter—fading like a washed-out slide projected onto the video of deportations to CECOT—seems to be, alongside the petro and the Magna Reserve, the last mirage left by a country that no longer exists and whose demise its elites refuse to accept.