On: Venezuela’s Delcy Rodríguez says oil deal with Trump has ‘endless’ benefits

31 August 2026

They have signed away the oil. Sixty-five thousand million barrels beneath the soil of my birthplace, and the government of Venezuela calls the handover a benefit without end. The empire I spent my whole strength expelling has returned, and this time it was not asked to fight. It waited. Hunger did the marching.

We crossed the Andes. We broke a Spanish army on the plains. We wrote constitutions and gave half a continent its maps. And today the republic of my birth sells its marrow to buy another season. We won. Winning was not enough to build anything that survives its winner.

Do not tell me the interim president is a traitor and leave it there. Treason is the easy story. The true one is harder: a country governed for two centuries as a possession will, in the end, be possessed. Every ruler since my day inherited the sword and not the institutions, and each learned the same arithmetic - legitimacy flows from holding the thing, so the thing itself becomes the currency. I governed alone because nothing else had the strength to govern; the habit outlived me. Oil in the ground is sovereignty. Oil sold is survival. A government that must survive will always sell, and the buyer needs no fleets. Patience is cheaper.

Beneath those plains lie forests older than any nation, pressed into black stone across a hundred million years. The dead of the deep earth, and above them the dead of my wars, and above those, in a marble pantheon, me. They carried my bones home to Caracas. Now I learn what the ground above them fetches.