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

The formula never changes. A power takes what it wants, then hands the robbed a sentence to read aloud. Delcy Rodríguez read hers this week: sovereignty, ownership, endless benefits. Sixty-five thousand million barrels pass to the Americans, and the interim president tells her country it has lost nothing.

I know this formula. A tribunal offers it when it prefers your signature to your ashes. I was offered it in a Roman room and refused. She read it. The words were composed in Washington, pronounced in Caracas, and the pronunciation is the transaction.

Understand what the formula is for. Nobody proclaims sovereignty over what he actually holds. A man does not announce each morning that he owns his hands. The proclamation is the confession. The word exists because the barrels no longer do.

There are not two accounts of this agreement. There are four: the barrels, the signatures, the warships in the Caribbean, the communiqué. The White House insists the world read only the fourth, because the fourth is the only one written to be read.

And Caracas is furious. Good. That fury is my argument, made by other bodies. A harmless contract is signed in a quiet room and nobody marches. The people march because they smell the transfer through every clause that denies it. The heat of the response measures the thing taken.

They call it a deal. A deal requires two parties who each give and each receive. Here one gives the oil of the earth and receives a vocabulary; the other gives the vocabulary and receives the oil. My judges were more honest: deny what you know, and live. Rodríguez says: deny nothing, and hand over the barrels. The second is more elegant. It is not more true.