00:00John D. Feely has a great insight into the region, having served in a number of diplomatic post-ins
00:05across Latin America, ending as a U.S. ambassador to Panama. He's now executive director for the
00:11Center for Media Integrity of the Americas. Welcome to DW. As ever with this administration,
00:17there's a lot of detail missing, not least the identity of the U.S. company that will be given
00:22control of these vast amounts of Venezuela's untapped oil reserves. Why do you think that
00:28might be kept a secret? Well, I think, Phil, because this latest announcement last Friday by the
00:36president just reaffirms a penchant that we've seen since the beginning of the second administration
00:43for a big, beautiful announcement in search of a substantive deal underneath. I think if you,
00:50you know, I'm thinking of the Gaza peace plan. I'm thinking of the Iran MOU back in June.
00:56Big announcements, a lot of, you know, sort of gaudy, you know, Versailles kind of trappings. But
01:03once you get a couple of days, weeks, months out, there really isn't a lot of there there. And the
01:10second thing, I think, the reason that you haven't seen a lot of that detail is because this particular
01:15announcement smacks of desperation to me. I think they're coming up on November. Oil prices and
01:25gasoline prices here in the United States remain above $4 a gallon. And I think this was very much
01:33intended to have a political effect. But quite frankly, according to most experts I've read,
01:38not much of a practical effect. Really? So you think that there is nothing to this deal? That's
01:45interesting, because one of the names that has come up with regard to this deal is the man behind
01:52Venezuela's second largest private oil producer, Alejandro Betancourt-Lopez, whose family controls
01:58North American Blue Energy Partners. What can you tell us about him and how this private company
02:05might fit into any deal concerning Venezuelan state oil interests?
02:11Yeah, he's a Venezuelan oil speculator. He's somebody who made a significant amount of money,
02:17if you're looking at the press only, by basically upcharging the Chavez government to bring in
02:25a significant amount of energy producing hardware, oil turbines, things like that,
02:33to over 15 years ago or so. Since then, he's taken a lot of those windfall profits, and he's
02:40mostly been on the run from tax authorities and financial investigators in Spain and Great
02:47Britain. If you follow some of the press that's been written about him recently, the American
02:54administration even had to go to Swiss prosecutors to ask them to drop a case they had looking into his
03:01financial impropriety. And I have no, obviously, I have no knowledge of any of that, but the reporting
03:07on him and on North American Blue Energy partners is that they simply can't raise this kind of money.
03:15I mean, let's just do some basic arithmetic here for a second, Phil. And math in public is always a
03:21little dangerous. 65 billion barrels of oil, going to cost $100 billion of investment. Donald Trump says
03:30not a dime of that is going to come from taxpayers. So you got to ask the question,
03:34is this Alejandro Betancourt going to raise that on his own? I think most investors, most investment
03:41committees and hedge funds or in sovereign wealth funds, kinds of places that normally put money into
03:46these ventures, if they've got a serious board of directors, they're going to need a lot more
03:51information before they even think about putting money into it. Okay. So setting aside your scepticism,
03:59your deep scepticism about whether or not this deal will actually happen, if it happened,
04:05who do you think would be likely to benefit and who might lose from a deal like this?
04:12Well, let's start with the second. Who might lose from this? And this is, I think,
04:16a very important point that's obscured in a lot of the announcement and the mathematics and the
04:22numbers floating around. The people who lose are the people of Venezuela. According to the
04:28Venezuelan constitution in at least two articles, the petroleum reserves of the Venezuelan, Venezuela,
04:35the physical territory of the sovereign state of Venezuela, belong to the Venezuelan people.
04:41Well, if this deal goes through, if there is some kind of a magic wand that produces maybe not a
04:50hundred
04:51billion, but even let's say 50 or $25 billion worth of investment, according to what's been announced,
04:59that belongs, that oil belongs now to the American people. And that's a serious problem.
05:06Since January 3rd, the president of the United States, when he ordered the takedown of Nicolas Maduro,
05:13you've heard his secretary of state, Marco Rubio, talk about a three-phase plan. The three-phase plan
05:21was they were going to do stabilization, recovery, and transition, transition to a democratic system
05:28of government in Venezuela, which is exactly what Exxon and ConocoPhillips and all the major
05:35oil companies want, because it gives you a better business climate, it gives you stability,
05:41etc. Well, you know who has never, Phil, in all this time, mentioned those three words?
05:49President Trump. So there's a real concern about the democratic future of the Venezuelan people
05:57as a result of last Friday's announcement. Announcement last Friday, you think that there's
06:03nothing to it. People who might agree with you seem to be other governments in the region. The
06:09reaction to this news has been really, really muted. Nothing from Brazil, nothing from Colombia,
06:13nothing from Mexico. And do you think that's because they think like you that this nothing's
06:18going to happen? Or are they scared of pushback from the US? I think both of those are probably
06:25legitimate speculations as to why other major oil producers in the region haven't said anything.
06:32You know, again, let's go back to the Gaza peace plan. Let's go back to the Iran-MOU signed at
06:40Versailles
06:40Palace just in June. I think international observers have begun to recognize that perhaps as we head here
06:50domestically in the United States into November, the best tack they can take is just to stay quiet.
06:56Sort of whether you're a friend, an enemy, or a frenemy of Donald Trump, when you see someone in freefall
07:03mode, there's really not much incentive to go after and try to prop him up or help him or align
07:10yourself
07:10with him. And I think that's what you're seeing the Latin American oil producers doing right now,
07:15just standing back and watching the show.
07:18Meanwhile, Delcy Rodriguez is only Venezuela's interim president. When the country's situation
07:25finally normalizes, could a future government challenge this deal or even reverse it?
07:32You know, it's funny that you mentioned that, Phil, because we had this announcement on Friday,
07:37and I think it was either Friday night or Saturday. One of the president's very strong Cuban-American
07:42congressional supporters, a woman by the name of Maria Elvira Salazar, came out with a tweet that was
07:50on X, now we call it. Sorry, I dated myself there, but came out with a post that said,
07:56this was a terrible deal. She'd been a very strong defender of Maria Corina Machado and the Democratic
08:01opposition in Venezuela. And she basically said, this deal doesn't survive 2028 when Donald Trump leaves
08:09office. Well, within about two hours, she took it down and replaced it with a very rah-rah cheerleading
08:16post, which very clearly means that somebody from the White House reached out to her and gave her a
08:23swift rap across the knuckles and said, hey, that's not the line. But the original post is exactly what I
08:31think a lot of people both in Venezuela and in the United States are thinking, is that when President
08:36Trump leaves office, this deal will be as dead as anything else that he's proclaimed,
08:43such as a Gaza peace plan and resorts in Gaza. Thanks for talking us through that so graphically,
08:51John. John D. Feely from the Center for Media Integrity of the Americas.
08:55John D. Feely from China
08:55is
Comments