Caracas
Marco Rubio, Trump’s ‘viceroy’ In Venezuela
In the photographs released by the White House documenting the monitoring of the U.S. operation against Nicolás Maduro, President Donald Trump is constantly accompanied by a very serious Marco Rubio, his eyes fixed on what appears to be a screen. The secretary of state is Trump’s key figure in foreign policy, already holding the three top diplomatic posts in Washington (he is also national security advisor and administrator of what remains of USAID, the federal development agency). Now he assumes a fourth, and perhaps the riskiest: coordinating the U.S. response in Venezuela.
Rubio was the main architect of the increasingly tight encirclement of the Chavista leader over the past six months. He also closely followed the development of the military operation in and around Caracas.
The 54-year-old former senator, the son of Cuban exiles, is one of the key figures in the process. On Saturday, at a press conference at his Mar-a-Lago residence in Florida to announce the capture of the Venezuelan president, Trump revealed that Rubio had already been in contact with the new leader of the South American country, Delcy Rodríguez, holding a “very long” conversation, and that he had just conveyed to the Chavista vice president Washington’s demands — access to oil, the arrest of criminal gangs, an end to drug trafficking, and an end to collaboration with regimes hostile to the United States — in order to allow her to remain in office.
Rubio will maintain that prominent role. He will be part of the president’s four trusted advisors tasked with remotely overseeing the Venezuelan government’s actions. This quartet is completed by Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, Vice President J.D. Vance, and the White House Deputy Chief of Staff and advisor for domestic policy, Stephen Miller, the author of the administration’s anti-immigrant strategy. “They have all expertise, different expertise,” Trump noted in an interview broadcast Monday on NBC.
But Miller confirmed to reporters covering the White House on Monday that Rubio will be in charge of the group; Trump “has asked him to lead the efforts to enforce the directives issued by the president.”
In this role, Rubio will have to decide how to restructure Venezuela’s energy sector, the country’s greatest asset, control of which is the target of U.S. intervention. His fluency in Spanish, decades of experience in Latin America, and contacts with the Venezuelan opposition make him the key liaison for dealing with the new-old authorities in the South American country during the path to the “safe, proper and judicious transition” that Trump promised.
It’s a monumental task. The president has spoken of 18 months to rebuild an oil sector reconstructed by U.S. companies. A new economic and financial strategy, a new security and military strategy, and a new government strategy must be implemented. And it’s unclear how the process will unfold in a country with numerous paramilitary groups, where cartels are present, and where even within Rodríguez’s government, different factions are aligned.
“It’s unclear how stable this government will be in Maduro’s absence. To a certain extent, Maduro was the consensus builder, the one who brought the different factions together, and without him, they may split,” says Phil Gunson, an analyst for the Andean region at Crisis Group, an organization specializing in conflict prevention, speaking from Caracas.
One of Rubio’s main missions will be to ensure that Rodríguez strictly adheres to the directives coming from Washington. The threat is a second round of U.S. attacks and a future “worse than Maduro’s,” according to Trump. Rubio clarifies that, before reaching that point, the United States has a whole range of persuasive tools at its disposal, starting with the “quarantine” — the blockade — against ships exporting Venezuelan crude, which it has been implementing since last month, and the massive military deployment it maintains in the Caribbean, which it has no intention of withdrawing at the moment.
“It’s a tremendous amount of leverage that will continue to be in place until we see changes that not just further the national interest of the United States, which is number one, but also that lead to a better future for the people of Venezuela,” Rubio said in an interview Sunday on CBS’s Face the Nation.
For Rubio, reaching this point represents a tremendous victory, the fulfillment of his goal of ending leftist dictatorships in Latin America and the vindication of the hardline positions he defended during his time as a senator, when he lashed out at Maduro, calling him a “narco-terrorist.” There, Trump’s former rival in the 2016 primaries became the president’s go-to person for matters related to the region; the then-legislator tried to pressure the Republican to force the removal of the Chavista leader.
It was a stance he continued to hold after becoming secretary of state, though with little success at first. His arguments in favor of democracy and human rights found little receptiveness with the U.S. president, who initially favored a strategy of negotiation with the regime. This was the approach advocated by his original envoy to Venezuela, Richard Grenell, who, during his visit to Caracas just under a year ago, secured the release of Americans from Venezuelan prisons.
Rubio managed to capture Trump’s attention when, instead of emphasizing democracy, he pointed out to the president that Maduro had been indicted in New York on drug trafficking charges. This narrative was more to the president’s liking, a teetotaler who despises drugs after the death of his brother from alcoholism. In July, the State Department added the Cartel of the Suns, the alleged drug trafficking group that it accuses the Venezuelan leader of heading, to its list of foreign terrorist organizations. In August, it doubled the reward for his capture to $50 million. That same month, the United States began its naval deployment in the Caribbean.
Since then, Rubio has been a constant presence in the White House, meeting with Miller to devise the strategy for ousting Maduro and for post-Chavismo Venezuela, only visiting the State Department for bilateral meetings with other foreign ministers in Washington. The travel that characterized his first stint as head of U.S. diplomacy has taken a backseat. With a few notable exceptions — such as rescuing the negotiations on the war in Ukraine in Geneva in November — his trips have consisted primarily of accompanying Trump to Florida and continuing to plan the intervention there.
Rubio, whose dream is to see his parents’ homeland, Cuba, free from the Castroist regime, has framed the intervention in Venezuela as a warning to Havana and the “incompetent and senile men” running the island. “If I lived in Havana and I was in the government, I would be concerned, at least a little bit,” he declared Saturday at Trump’s press conference.
For now, the task before him in Venezuela is immense. The success, or failure, of the U.S. administration of the country will rest on Trump and him as the ones ultimately responsible. As one of his Republican predecessors at the head of the State Department, Colin Powell, liked to remind us when speaking about the last major American attempt to restructure a country — the Iraq War — “if you break it, you pay for it.”
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The largest oil reserves in the world in 1980 were concentrated in the Middle East, principally in Saudi Arabia. Venezuela had been found to have considerable deposits — which were essential to the country’s economy in previous decades — but they represented only 3% of the world total.
Thirty years later, between 2008 and 2010, Venezuela became the first country to surpass Saudi Arabia in known oil reserves. As announced by the local government and certified by the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), beneath the country’s soil lay one of the largest deposits of technically recoverable crude oil in the world.
According to the latest available data from 2020, Venezuela accounts for 17% of all the world’s crude oil.
The sudden growth of Venezuela’s reserves — which quadrupled in just five years, reaching 40 billion tons — is a unique case. The explanation lies in the Orinoco Belt, a vast area located in the north of the country.
Just 20 years ago, when Venezuela was one of the world’s leading oil exporters, not a single barrel came from the Orinoco. Today, 80% of its 300 million barrels of production come from that region.
But Orinoco crude is unusual: it is heavy and extra-heavy oil. As highlighted by the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA), it is complex and costly to process and, due to its composition, is not directly suitable for fuel production. It requires a high level of technical expertise, investment, and technology — resources that many international companies possess. The United States even built refineries in the Gulf of Mexico specifically adapted to this type of oil when Venezuela was one of its main sources of imports. Canada and Mexico also have large reserves of heavy crude, which the United States continues to import today.
In Venezuela, the oil company PDVSA — which has been owned by the state since 1976 — has seen its resources dwindle and investment and maintenance falter, especially after Hugo Chávez came to power in 1999. The participation of foreign capital and technology was further restricted by international sanctions against the country’s oil sector in 2019. Added to this have been repeated cases of corruption over the past decade in nationalized companies and the emigration of skilled personnel — a combination of factors that has ultimately brought the country’s oil production to its knees.
Venezuela currently extracts about 1% of global oil, less than half of its contribution in the mid-1990s (2.5%), despite now having reserves four times larger.
The following chart shows how Venezuela’s reserves and production have gradually decoupled, in contrast to what has occurred in three of the world’s largest producers.
The most up-to-date picture of this trend is reflected by comparing the 2020 reserve data and the 2024 production (expressed here in barrels per day).
Venezuela’s oil infrastructure — now obsolete — is one of the country’s great unknowns. U.S. President Donald Trump referred to this issue just hours after the capture of Nicolás Maduro and his wife on January 3: “We’re going to have our very large United States oil companies — the biggest anywhere in the world — go in, spend billions of dollars, fix the badly broken infrastructure, the oil infrastructure, and start making money for the country.”
From major exporter to relying on ghost ships
For decades, Venezuela was a major exporter of crude oil, primarily to the United States, until relations between the two countries deteriorated with Hugo Chávez’s rise to power. Today, it exports approximately half of what it did 10 years ago.
Meanwhile, the United States has become the world’s third-largest oil exporter, behind Saudi Arabia and Russia. Fueled by fracking (with its environmental drawbacks) and a legislative change that opened up exports of light crude, the United States has increased its foreign sales thirtyfold in just a decade. Only 10 years ago, it exported 10 times less oil than Venezuela.
The main recipients of the Latin American country’s crude oil have also changed. Following the trade embargo imposed on Venezuelan oil in 2019, China has become Venezuela’s primary trading partner, with Venezuela resorting to so-called ghost ships to circumvent the blockade. By 2025, 36% of exports were destined for the Asian country, more than double the amount going to the United States, according to data from Kpler, a global provider of real-time analytics and tracking.
Exports rebounded in 2023, when the embargo was eased. However, Trump revoked all licenses to operate in Venezuela in the first half of 2025, before granting an exception to Chevron. The company directly produces and exports between 150,000 and 200,000 barrels per day, a figure that represents less than 3% of the oil imported by the United States.
Given this scenario, ghost ships have become increasingly common. This term refers to oil tankers that turn off their Automatic Identification System (AIS) — which transmits data about the route, position, and identity of each vessel — when they want to avoid detection. This is a common practice for, for example, smuggling oil out of sanctioned countries like Venezuela. While the signal is off, the ships change course and load or unload crude oil, either in port or by transferring it to other vessels. According to the maritime trade publication Lloyd’s List, last December alone, 17 tankers sanctioned by the United States and hidden from radar later reappeared flying the Russian flag.
The United States recently boarded at least two of these ships, the Bella I (or Marinera) and the M Sophia. Both had departed from Venezuela and, during the voyage, had changed their course, name, and flag.
The oil that moves the world
Despite the rise of renewables in the last decade, oil remains the most consumed primary energy source in the world, ahead of coal and gas, and continues to rise.
Crude oil remains the primary energy source for the United States, followed by natural gas. In China, although coal accounts for more than a third of the country’s primary energy consumption, oil ranks second. It is a similar situation in India, another major importer of Venezuelan crude.
In Venezuela, despite having the world’s largest oil reserves, production is very low; as a result, oil now accounts for a smaller share of the country’s total energy consumption than natural gas, and only slightly more than hydroelectric power.
The oil industry also has a significant presence in the United States. Refineries directly employ approximately 80,000 people and support around three million indirect jobs. According to a study by Oxford Economics, this sector has the greatest multiplier effect (creating more indirect jobs) on employment in the country, with a particularly significant economic impact in states historically linked to oil.
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