Ricardo F. Morín
The Art of Concealment
Computer-generated imagery (CGI)
2026
Ricardo F. Morín
October 25, 2026
Okland Park, Florida
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An agreement of eighteen pages now governs a share of the oil beneath Venezuelan soil. It was signed for the United States by its secretaries of State and Defense; the other signatory is a private enterprise organized to develop the fields. Its own terms forbid disclosure of its existence. What is known of it was learned because reporters obtained a copy, not because any authority presented it, and the text itself has not been made public. The signatures the copy shows are American. The nation whose subsoil the instrument disposes of does not appear among them.
The instrument is not silent about what it provides. Disputes under it are to be heard by a federal court in Texas. Its partners may remain unnamed behind a parent company registered in Barbados. The United States may purchase a fifth of the output at thirty dollars a barrel. It supplies a forum, a price, and a shelter for anonymity. It does not supply a signatory with title to what is being disposed of.
Under the Venezuelan charter of 1999, still the text in force, the deposits of hydrocarbons belong to the Republic, are of the public domain, and are inalienable. Contracts of national public interest concluded with foreign states or entities require the approval of the National Assembly. The acting government in Caracas has announced a package of sixty-one accords, seventeen of them covering oil fields. Venezuela’s absence from the eighteen pages does not show that no Venezuelan authority underlies the enterprise; it shows that the instrument cannot supply that authority itself. Whatever title exists must exist under the charter, and be demonstrated there.
Venezuela has no date for its next election; on 22 October citizens marched to ask for one. The following day an acting president inspected a field in Zulia producing, she said, 115,000 barrels a day, accompanied by the chargé d’affaires of the United States and the head of the enterprise. The diplomat called the country a great partner. The visit established who was present. It could not establish whether the approval the charter requires had ever been given, and none of those present could give it.
The two governments do not describe the arrangement in the same terms. On 31 August the White House stated in writing that Venezuelan interim authorities had granted the enterprise concessions of a hundred years; Caracas speaks of a bilateral project of twenty-five. The concessions are a Venezuelan grant, separate from the eighteen pages, and the figure of a hundred appears nowhere in those pages. The duration of a nation’s patrimony is stated as rhetoric on one side and reassurance on the other, and between the two figures stands an agreement that neither public was meant to read.
Among its provisions is one designed to keep future leaders of Venezuela, and future presidents of the United States, from changing or dismantling the enterprise. Investors exposed to the turns of politics ask for such protection as a matter of course: whoever commits capital over decades wants assurance that the next government will not undo the commitment. The rationale can be granted in full. What the clause does remains what it does. Governments enter agreements that outlive the officials who negotiate them as a matter of routine, and duration alone is no defect. A mandate is a delegation for a term. The office outlasts it, and with the office the powers the law vests in it, among them the power to revise what an earlier term did. The clause is written to withhold that power. It seeks to bind successors not merely in the performance of obligations but in the exercise of authority the law leaves to them, in both countries, including governments the voters of both countries have not yet chosen.
At home, the instrument rests on a further act. The Pentagon office charged with strategic capital took an equity stake, an authority Congress had been asked to grant and had declined. The administration maintains that existing law already permits it. When the question first arose, the department’s spokesman said the office did not take equity stakes in private companies. A provision now before the Senate, in the annual defense authorization, would confer that authority explicitly and require the office to disclose the terms of the stakes it has already taken. Should it pass, the legislature will have conferred for the future a power it refused before, and nothing in the provision as reported says whether the stakes already taken were lawful when taken. The sequence is ordinary in appearance: an act, then a law. What it records is that the question of authority, open when the act was done, has given way to the question of whether to permit such acts hereafter.
Senators wrote to the cabinet at the end of September and asked to be briefed. A briefing was arranged and then, on the first of October, moved to November at the request of majority staff, on the grounds that the Senate had left town. The briefing now falls after the vote. A briefing postponed is not oversight abandoned; it is oversight placed after the judgment it might have informed. The reporting that brought the terms to light did work no institution had done, and it concentrated on their secrecy and on whom they favored, proposing disclosure as the remedy, as though the question of who had standing to sign had been settled by the signing. Each of these responses is reasonable on its own terms. None is complicity. Together they are the whole of the institutional answer: a letter, a postponement, an account of terms. The responsibility to object was refused by no one. It was set aside by everyone, each for a sound reason, and the omissions add up to a reply.
On 3 November Americans will elect the legislature that never authorized the arrangement. In two years they will elect a president, and the arrangement was written to outlast that president as well. The electorate is asked to judge; the instrument was drafted so that its judgment would not reach it. Neither fact depends on motive. Whatever its authors intended, the instrument may be enforceable in some of its parts and still exceed, in others, what any of its signatories had authority to give. Where it disposes of a nation’s patrimony without the participation of that nation, and where it seeks to bind future governments against their own electorates, it claims more than law, as an order, allows any contract to claim. A contract presupposes that those who enter it hold title to what they exchange, and a law above them to which all answer. In those provisions title is asserted where none has been shown, and its signatories have sought to place a clause of their own writing beyond the reach of every law that might later revise it. What the clause seeks to make durable is not an exchange. It is the exclusion of everyone entitled to object.
Venezuela has written twenty-five constitutions. Each was an attempt to establish the authority by which a nation disposes of what is its own, and each, sooner or later, was rewritten, suspended, or left unobserved. The record of those charters is the record of a nation unable to keep its foundational law in force. The instrument signed this year shows another habit, in another nation, and the two meet over the same ground. One country repeatedly replaced its charter. The other has drafted a document meant to stand beyond the reach of either nation’s charter, and of the votes that would ordinarily answer for it. What the two habits share is an absence: of the constitutional authority that alone could make such a disposition binding. The oil is the occasion. What remains is a mandate its authors sought to place beyond the voters who are about to exercise theirs, and the institutions meant to answer it, waiting until they have.
Tags: congressional oversight, Constitutional Absence, constitutional authority, executive power, National Sovereignty, Petroleum Concessions, ProPublica, public accountability, Secrecy
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