The announcement of an oil agreement between the United States and Venezuela has sparked an intense debate about the new map of power in the Caribbean. The journalists from The World Order, Eduardo Saldaña and Fernando Arancón, have analyzed in JELO in the summer the geopolitical implications of this agreement and what could come next, with Cuba as a “great objective” of the Donald Trump Administration.
According to Eduardo Saldaña, this agreement is “a turning point”, as was the intervention in Venezuela at the time, only now it goes further: “The intervention was not about democracy.” According to the journalist, this agreement has been developed in phases: “The first thing is the zone of influence, the control of a space and all its resources, from Venezuelan oil.”
The agreement is the piece of a bigger puzzle
In this sense, the immediate consequence of this agreement is that there will not be a regime change in Venezuela “in the short term”, “because Trump’s United States does not care at all.” In fact, the current situation in Venezuela is a “new almost political protectorate system”, a kind of “return of the Monroe doctrine, but with Trump’s vision.”
Furthermore, he has warned that the shift is not “temporary”, because it will not change if a Democratic administration comes to power. Thus, for Saldaña, the oil agreement is only one more piece of a much larger puzzle: “If Venezuelan oil and also Venezuelan resources are going to begin to be extracted and an axis is being generated in that Caribbean basin that is very, very aligned with the interests of the United States, an axis that includes Colombia, Venezuela as a US protectorate, and a Central America prone to Trumpism…”.
Cuba, the great objective of the Trump Administration
That is why, in his opinion, the result is “a siege on Cuba, which is the great objective of the Trump Administration.” Fernando Arancón has expressed the same opinion, who has also used the word “protectorate” to refer to the current situation in Venezuela and maintains that oil is only the first step in a control strategy: “It is, on the one hand, the extraction of resources, but then also that American companies, beyond extractives, can do business widely in Venezuela.”
Arancón has also agreed with Saldaña that “the jackpot” is Cuba. Both place it as the medium-term strategic objective: an aligned Caribbean, with troops deployed in Colombia, a Venezuela converted into an extraction platform and a center of gravity shifted towards Washington.
