CARACAS, Venezuela — At 84 years old, José Toro Hardy remembers when Venezuela allowed private and foreign investment in the oil sector. He also remembers when Hugo Chávez forced them out.
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Toro Hardy, an economist, served as a member of the board of directors of Petróleos de Venezuela, or PDVSA, from 1996 to 1999, when Chávez assumed the presidency.
“It might be a good deal for Venezuela if the investments actually come,” Toro Hardy said about what President Donald Trump described on Friday as the “biggest oil deal in world history.”
Delcy Rodríguez, who stepped up as Venezuela’s interim president after Nicolas Maduro’s capture, announced on Saturday night that she was granting a “historic” 25-year deal and said it would increase output to 1.5 million barrels per day at 17 oilfields.
“Our oil production should be more than 6 million barrels per day,” Toro Hardy said.
The Wall Street Journal reported on Saturday that the parties involved were the Pentagon’s Office of Strategic Capital and billionaire Alejandro Betancourt, of North American Blue Energy Partners, or NABEP, a production company.
“The U.S. is going to take a 35% passive stake in a private company that is run by a Venezuelan who has done some deals for oil in Venezuela before, and ultimately that would give them preferential rights to buy about 20% of the production that comes from these investments at cost,” Ellen Wald, the president and founder of Transversal Consulting and a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council Global Energy Center, told Bloomberg on Monday.
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Betancourt, 46, also known as Leopoldo Alejandro Betancourt López, was the subject of investigations on money laundering in the U.S., Switzerland, and Spain, The Washington Post reported last week. U.S. federal prosecutors dropped a case against him in 2020. He has previously denied wrongdoing.
In Caracas, Jesus Yansen was among the Venezuelans who accused Venezuela’s interim president of doing everything she could to distract the public from the failures of her party.
“We need investment, technology, infrastructure,” Rodríguez told Venezuelans about the benefits of a deal that she said will allow the U.S. to contribute capital and technology.
Some of the Venezuelans who lived through Chávez’s seizures of private property and Maduro’s chronic underinvestment mistrust Rodríguez and her administration.
“What should have been done, was to try to arrange things in Venezuela to have elections, to have a legally elected president, and then to sign a new contract with this government,” Toro Hardy said.
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Torres contributed to this report from Miami.
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