Observations On Perception

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Venezuela is not undergoing the democratic transition proclaimed by the government of the United States.  Venezuela is being dispossessed.  The electoral mandate asserted against Nicolás Maduro has been denied operative authority; the succession to Maduro is being negotiated under foreign supervision; petroleum production and sale are being reorganized according to foreign requirements; national revenue is being held within a system controlled outside the Nation; and rights over Venezuela’s natural patrimony are being prepared for private beneficiaries whose claims may endure beyond the lives of everyone now arranging them.  Each measure is presented separately as stabilization, reconstruction, investment, or energy security.  Taken together, the measures describe the despojo of a nation.

The removal of Maduro did not restore the constitutional agency previously taken from Venezuelans.  It changed the custodian of that deprivation.  The Venezuelan electorate had already been invoked as the source of the authority claimed by Edmundo González Urrutia and defended by María Corina Machado.  Yet the United States has proceeded as though recognition of that electoral claim also conferred upon Washington the power to determine when the claim may become effective, which Venezuelans may act upon it, and what political accommodation must precede its exercise.  An electorate recognized when recognition served the removal of Maduro ceased to be decisive when the same electorate obstructed the administration preferred after his removal.

The contradiction is not resolved by describing the preferred arrangement as temporary.  A foreign power that selects the Venezuelan officials with whom political and economic terms will be negotiated does more than influence a transition.  The foreign power occupies the constitutional interval in which Venezuelans would otherwise determine the identity, authority, and limits of their government.  The occupation need not assume the visible form of annexation.  The operative fact is the displacement of national decision by an external decision whose consequences are imposed upon the national territory, treasury, and future.

This displacement explains why the political and economic arrangements cannot be examined as separate questions.  Control over the political succession conditions who may consent to the petroleum arrangement.  Control over petroleum revenue materially conditions which political authority can govern.  Control over the recognition of that authority shapes whether resistance to the arrangement will be treated as constitutional opposition or as obstruction of a transition already defined elsewhere.  The same power therefore participates in selecting the Venezuelan interlocutor, defining the permissible political process, administering the principal source of national revenue, and allocating access to the resource from which that revenue proceeds.

The structure is already visible.  The United States has asserted control over the channels through which Venezuelan petroleum is sold and over the accounts into which the proceeds are received.  Executive Order 14373 describes the protection of those funds as serving American and Venezuelan interests.  The description does not answer the antecedent question: by what authority does the executive of one nation become the custodian of another nation’s principal revenue?  Protection against attachment may explain a mechanism.  It does not confer constitutional title upon the protector, and it does not convert foreign custody into Venezuelan consent.

The petroleum agreement announced on August 28 makes the problem more exact.  The reported arrangement encompasses 65 billion barrels in seventeen fields, contemplates a controlling American interest, and may extend for a century.  The private operator has not been identified publicly, and the complete agreement has not been made available for public examination.  A transaction of such magnitude is therefore being presented as an accomplished national benefit before the identity of the beneficiary, the terms of control, the disposition of revenue, the allocation of risk, and the constitutional authority of the Venezuelan signatories can be tested.  Publicity has preceded disclosure because the political conclusion is being demanded before the juridical facts are supplied.

The Constitution of Venezuela does not treat hydrocarbons as an ordinary asset available to whichever government possesses temporary command.  Article 12 declares hydrocarbon deposits to be public property, inalienable and imprescriptible.  Article 302 reserves petroleum activity to the State for reasons of national interest.  Articles 150 and 187 require legislative participation in contracts of national public interest concluded with foreign states or entities.  Until the complete agreement, the identity and authority of its signatories, and the required approvals are disclosed, no final legal judgment about every provision can be made.  The contest over the acting president’s title does not place Venezuela outside its Constitution or enlarge the authority of a provisional officeholder.  The contest makes demonstrable compliance with the Constitution more, not less, necessary before national patrimony is encumbered beyond the tenure of the authority purporting to act for it.  The information already announced nevertheless presents a direct constitutional question: whether an authority formed under foreign supervision may burden inalienable national patrimony for generations without the demonstrable authorization of the Venezuelan constitutional order.

That question cannot be answered by the magnitude of the promised investment.  Capital does not cure a defect in public authority.  Nor can a later contract erase the coercive conditions that made the contracting arrangement possible.  If force removes a government, foreign supervision determines its successor, foreign custody controls the resulting revenue, and selected private parties then receive durable economic rights, the contract is not an event independent of the force.  The contract is the instrument through which the result of force is given a transferable legal form.

The sequence is therefore more consequential than an unlawful intervention considered in isolation.  Military and executive power produce political submission.  Political submission produces contractual access.  Contractual access produces private entitlements.  Those entitlements may then be defended in courts, arbitration proceedings, financial markets, and diplomatic negotiations as acquired rights.  Coercion disappears from the final vocabulary.  Property, reliance, investment, and commercial stability take its place.  Force manufactures the entitlement, and law is subsequently invoked to protect the entitlement from the nation upon which the force was exercised.

The duration of the proposed arrangement makes this a temporal dispossession as well as a material one.  A century-long concession does not merely govern the extraction of petroleum today.  It removes choices from Venezuelans not yet born, binds governments not yet elected, and assigns the economic consequences of the present intervention to generations that could not have consented to it.  The mortality of Donald Trump is therefore beside the essential point.  The legal interests established during his administration can survive his influence because corporate rights, financial obligations, and institutional habits are designed to survive the officials who create them.

Trump is neither the sole author nor a sufficient explanation of the order now being constructed.  The President is an unusually explicit agent of a governing culture that equates financial capacity with public authority while detaching both from civic responsibility proportionate to their reach.  The relevant accusation is not directed indiscriminately at every American.  It concerns the narrow economic and political stratum capable of converting access to the executive into access to the assets of another nation.  That stratum claims the private liberty of an owner when profit is examined, the public prerogative of a ruler when markets and governments are rearranged, and the innocence of neither office when responsibility is assigned.

The distinction matters because oligarchy does not operate only through the possession of wealth.  Oligarchy operates through the capacity to translate wealth into governmental selection, governmental selection into exceptional access, and exceptional access into additional wealth.  The resulting circuit is internal to the United States, but its object in this instance is Venezuelan.  Venezuelan petroleum becomes the material through which American political patronage may be rewarded, concentrated, and made durable.

The first Venezuelan oil sale after the intervention supplied a concrete reason for scrutiny.  A congressional inquiry reported that Vitol and Trafigura stood to profit from an initial sale valued at approximately $500 million, and that Vitol senior trader John Addison had previously donated $6 million toward Trump’s campaign.  The inquiry does not by itself establish that the still-unidentified operator of the seventeen-field agreement is a political crony, and the absence of disclosure prohibits such a conclusion.  The combination of prior patronage, present secrecy, extraordinary executive discretion, and the scale of the proposed transfer does establish the necessity of the question.  Secrecy is not neutral when public coercion creates private opportunity.

The announced promise of lower oil and gasoline prices performs a different function within the same arrangement.  It supplies the American public with an anticipated personal benefit through which the foreign taking may be experienced as domestic policy.  The citizen is invited to evaluate the control of Venezuelan petroleum not by the authority under which the control was obtained, but by the possible price displayed at an American fuel pump.  The proposed benefit becomes retrospective justification: if the consumer eventually pays less, the means by which the advantage was produced are expected to recede from judgment.

The economic promise is itself uncertain.  Petroleum reserves beneath Venezuelan soil are not equivalent to immediately marketable supply.  Much of Venezuela’s crude is heavy, its production infrastructure requires extensive rehabilitation, substantial investment must precede sustained increases in output, and specialized refining capacity affects where and how the crude can be processed.  A vast statement of underground reserves can create an impression of immediate abundance while omitting the time, expense, and market constraints between geological possession and retail price.

Even an eventual increase in Venezuelan production would not establish that the benefit must reach American consumers.  The price of petroleum is formed within a global market, while the distribution of any lower acquisition cost depends upon refining, transport, contracts, competition, taxation, and the decisions of private intermediaries.  The corporations receiving privileged access may retain the margin as profit.  A possible reduction in price is thus presented as though it were a guaranteed transfer to the public, while the enforceable rights are transferred first to firms whose obligations run to owners and investors.

The propaganda does not fail only if the promised reduction fails to occur.  The premise would remain defective even if prices declined.  An economic advantage accruing to one population cannot supply title to the resources of another.  A benefit may explain why an act obtains political tolerance; the benefit cannot determine whether the act was constitutionally or internationally authorized.  The proposed price reduction is therefore not merely a questionable forecast.  It is a category error through which prospective utility is substituted for lawful authority.

The same substitution governs the invocation of regional security and the Monroe Doctrine.  A unilateral doctrine of American policy is treated as though the doctrine were a source of jurisdiction over the political and material disposition of the hemisphere.  No doctrine announced by one state can amend the Charter of the United Nations, displace the prohibition against intervention in the Charter of the Organization of American States, or extinguish the permanent sovereignty of a people over its natural resources.  The Monroe formula supplies a historical vocabulary for power.  The formula supplies no international title to Venezuelan petroleum and no constitutional capacity to act for Venezuelans.

The constitutional distortion within the United States is equally precise.  The executive has moved from coercive measures preceding Maduro’s removal to military action, control of foreign revenue, supervision of political succession, and the organization of a long-term petroleum regime without a comparably explicit act of Congress authorizing the whole structure.  Authorities granted for emergencies, sanctions, and the protection of assets have been assembled into something greater than their stated parts: an executive capacity to administer the political economy of another nation.  The absence of a formal annexation does not reduce the constitutional significance of that capacity.  It makes the capacity less visible while leaving its effects intact.

Congress possesses powers over war, appropriations, foreign commerce, and the legal commitments of the United States.  The Congressional Research Service has identified questions concerning the authority, reporting, auditing, and agreements involved in the post-Maduro arrangement.  Yet congressional silence, delay, or fragmented objection can allow executive facts to harden into commercial expectations.  Once capital has been committed and contracts have been performed, reversal will be described as instability, confiscation, or injury to investors.  The constitutional omission of the present becomes the asserted economic necessity of the future.

The arrangement consequently resembles concessionary imperialism more closely than democratic reconstruction.  Its object is not simply obedience from a foreign government.  Its object is the reconstitution of the foreign nation’s authority so that control of strategic resources can be exercised through local signatures, private instruments, and externally supervised revenue.  The flag need not change.  The legal personality of Venezuela may remain formally intact while the decisions that give that personality substance are made elsewhere.

This is why the language of transition is inadequate.  A transition identifies a movement from one Venezuelan constitutional condition to another.  The present process transfers the power to determine that movement away from the Venezuelan constitutional subject.  Political figures may change, elections may eventually be held, and Venezuelan officials may execute the documents.  None of those facts independently establishes that the Nation recovered the capacity to decide.  Procedure performed after agency has been displaced can ratify the displacement while supplying its democratic appearance.

The injury is correspondingly larger than the extraction of petroleum.  Venezuela is being deprived of political authority, constitutional agency, revenue, natural patrimony, and time.  The Nation is also being deprived of the language required to identify the unity of those losses.  Political control is called transition.  Custody of revenue is called protection.  Preferential allocation is called investment.  Long-term encumbrance is called reconstruction.  Expected consumer advantage is called the national interest of the United States.  When each part receives a separate administrative name, the total condition disappears from official description.

The total condition is dispossession.  The term does not depend upon nostalgia for Maduro, hostility to commerce, or a denial that Venezuela requires investment and institutional reconstruction.  Maduro’s removal does not authorize the removal of Venezuela’s agency.  The need for capital does not authorize a foreign executive to determine who may commit the resource, on what terms, and for whose durable advantage.  The existence of national weakness does not transform external capacity into national consent.

No institution presently directing the arrangement appears capable of resolving the central contradiction because each has incorporated the disputed premise into its conduct.  The American executive treats power as authority.  The selected Venezuelan administration treats external recognition as operative capacity.  Private beneficiaries may treat the resulting contracts as title.  Congress may treat facts already established as limits upon what can still be contested.  Markets may assign value to the arrangement before either nation has determined its legitimacy.

The material arrangements may determine the movement of petroleum, the custody of revenue, and the allocation of corporate rights.  The arrangements cannot determine the judgment by which those facts are recognized as authority or as dispossession.  That unresolved jurisdiction remains in the mind of every American asked to mistake prospective advantage for lawful title, and in the mind of every Venezuelan asked to mistake imposed administration for national consent.  The responsibility is not identical, because the power and the injuries are not identical.  The question confronting both populations is nevertheless the same: whether an accomplished fact becomes legitimate merely because institutions with the capacity to impose it have also acquired the capacity to name it.

A nation is not restored when its ruler is removed but its authority is transferred elsewhere.  A nation is not assisted when its resources are placed under arrangements the nation did not freely determine.  A nation is not enriched when private corporations receive durable rights over its patrimony in exchange for promises made on its behalf.  A nation is not made democratic when the power to decide its future is exercised by those who possess the force to impose it.  Venezuela is being stripped of authority, resources, revenue, and time.  To describe that condition as transition does not alter the condition.  The description completes the despojo by taking from Venezuela even the recognized fact of what is being done to it.

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