US Energy Secretary Wright denies US seeks to seize Venezuelan oil amid Trump deal controversy

The US energy secretary, Chris Wright, has denied Washington is seeking to commandeer huge quantities of Venezuelan oil, amid growing criticism of Donald Trump’s energy deal with the country’s interim leaders.

“Absolutely not,” Wright replied when asked by a CNBC journalist if the US was engaged in a “heavy-handed” attempt to “take” Venezuelan oil in violation of the South American country’s constitution.

Wright landed in Venezuela’s capital, Caracas, on Tuesday night, four days after Trump announced what he called “the biggest oil deal in world history”.

“I think we are seeing an absolutely historic transformation of both Venezuela and the relations between Venezuela and the US,” Wright said of the deal, which Trump has claimed will give the US control of 65bn barrels of Venezuelan oil. “This is President Trump’s grand plan to replace conflict with commerce,” Wright said.

The White House says the deal will help secure US “energy dominance for the next century” as well as “purging foreign malign influence from our back yard” by excluding China and Russia from oilfields in the country with the world’s largest proven oil reserves. But there has been criticism from across the political spectrum.

The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board said Trump’s deal with Venezuela’s unelected interim president, Delcy Rodríguez, “looks less like a normal commercial transaction than it does the famous scene of US businessmen meeting with the Cuban strongman in The Godfather Part II”.

“The US government is essentially getting in bed with a foreign dictator and her favored capitalist,” the newspaper complained, in reference to Alejandro Betancourt, the Venezuelan tycoon at the centre of the deal.

The economist Francisco Rodríguez told Democracy Now: “It’s clear that this is not a deal that any Venezuelan government would have entered into unless this country had been subject to an invasion, and unless its authorities had been held at gunpoint. So I think we’ve replaced gunboat diplomacy now for gunpoint diplomacy.”

Delcy Rodríguez was installed as interim president on 5 January, two days after the president, Nicolás Maduro, was abducted by US special forces during a predawn raid on Caracas. Trump warned Rodríguez, who was Maduro’s vice-president, she would face an even worse fate if she did not toe the US line.

Since Maduro’s capture, Rodríguez has made a series of once unthinkable concessions to US officials who their nominally socialist political movement, Chavismo, had spent years denouncing as predatory imperialists bent on stealing Venezuela’s natural resources.

On Saturday, Rodríguez claimed the oil deal had “endless” benefits and would help produce more than $209bn in revenues that could be used to improve healthcare and education. “We are thinking of Venezuela’s future,” she said during a televised broadcast to the nation.

The deal has dealt a body blow to Venezuela’s political opposition, who fear Trump is unlikely to push for a democratic transition or fresh presidential elections given his lucrative arrangement with Rodríguez.

“This is a game between the Trump administration and Delcy and her people,” one opposition figure lamented after the deal was unveiled.

Speaking at a signing ceremony in the Miraflores presidential palace in Caracas on Wednesday, Rodríguez thanked the Trump administration for its part in what she called a “win-win deal”. She said: “I have faith in the future of Venezuela. What we are doing today represents the future and the hope of the people of Venezuela.”