Luis Britto García, September 2nd 2026
https://luisbrittogarcia.blogspot.com/2026/09/el-peor-acuerdo-petrolero-del-mundo.html
Opacity of opacities, and everything is opacity. We resort again to the expression of the Liberator in a letter to José Antonio Páez dated in Chorus on December 23, 1826: “In the shadow of máster only crime is at work.” About what is really happening in Venezuela we must resort to indications from foreign sources that arouse more doubts than certainties.
Thus, in the Daily Journal it is announced as “The Best Oil Agreement” an alleged agreement that commits to the United States 65,000 million barrels of Venezuelan oil during the modest span of one hundred years. To this day, their terms are secret. It seems that it was discussed for four months, without the least news transcending for the Venezuelan people about the decisions on the resources that inalienably and non-transferably belong to them.
Only on August 31, 2026, not the text of such an agreement is published, but a White House version of it. We use this version for our analysis.
Before commenting on the news, it is good to lay down some premises.
Current legal situation
First of all, the situation between the United States and our country since the bombing and kidnapping on January 3rf 2026 is one of armed hostility. Since then we have been living through a war without prior declaration, described as such by your President, against Article 2 of the Charter of the United Nations, and without the indispensable authorization of your country's Congress.
This war, contrary to International Law and the Internal Law of both countries, has not ended. No Peace Treaty validly and legally delimits or limits the relations between the two.
What we are experiencing is a de facto situation of continuous and unlimited pillage and violation of our territory and regulations, in which the invader intends to assume in a dictatorial and illegitimate way all the powers and deny the aggrieved any of its rights.
This state of looting is maintained by the continued unilateral threat of the President of the United States to repeat and intensify his illegitimate warlike aggression in the event that his orders are not obeyed.
Such orders and claims violate both the Charter of the United Nations and the Constitutions and Laws of the United States and those of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela.
Unconstitutional and illegal acts only produce null effects of all nullity.
In the light of these principles, we examine the preliminary and fundamental question of the status that the United States government recognizes or does not recognize that of Venezuela.
The United States does not recognize our government as legitimate
Obviously, a country that blocks another, uses its army to assassinate its citizens, makes war on it, invades, bombs, ignores elections, kidnaps and tries to prosecute the elected President and steal the national patrimony, recognizes as legitimate neither the victim's government nor the acts that it executes.
Anyone who does not recognize the legitimacy of the President cannot accept the legitimacy of the Vice President appointed by him. Well, the government of the Vice President, today the President in Charge who provisionally replaces the kidnapped President-elect, has as its source the same elections that elected the President and his legislators, judges and other elected officials. An illegitimate official cannot legitimately confer powers on a subordinate. Therefore, all the acts of the "illegitimately" invested person would have no effect on the invader.
On the other hand, by recognizing the legitimacy of the appointed Vice President, the invader automatically recognizes that of the President who appointed her. Therefore, the brutal de facto actions against the Venezuelan people and their elected President have no grounds and no legal effects, he must be reinstated in office, revoke all actions contrary to the sovereignty and legitimacy imposed by the invader, and claim compensation for the damages caused by them.
These irrefutable principles must be taken into account to explain the situation we are living in.
Participants in the Convention
According to the cited "Government Fact Sheet” of August 31, "President Donald J. Trump has secured U.S. majority control of more than 65 billion barrels of proven oil reserves in Venezuela.” It would seem that the President of the United States, acting on behalf of his country, has signed an agreement with Venezuela.
This is not the case. In his web portal of the same date, Official Pahlo Padula incorporates a recording of Secretary of State Marco Rubio in which he states verbatim that “it is not really an agreement with the interim government, it is an agreement with a private company which is participating together with the United States.”
And indeed, according to the cited Government Fact Sheet, “Venezuelan interim authorities have granted North American Blue Energy Partners (NABEP), a privately held oil company that is the second-largest private Venezuelan oil producer and a proven operator, 100-year concessions for 17 oil fields with proven reserves of approximately 65 billion barrels.”
If you believe the Fact Sheet, then there is no US Agreement with Venezuela, but with NABEP, which in turn would contract with our country. This company was not among the 14 large oil firms summoned to the January 9 meeting at the White House, in which none offered to invest a single dollar in Venezuela due to “lack of legal certainty.” Nor would the new entrant seem to bring it. NABEP is owned by Alejandro Betancourt, who has an arrest warrant in Switzerland, and is the subject of various judicial investigations in several countries. “This is a disaster. It smells bad, tastes bad and will definitely be a failure” sums up Padula.
In fact, by evading direct agreement with Venezuela, the United States evades any responsibility towards our country through an intermediary person who could defraud us, transfer the assets object of the agreement to a third party, declare bankruptcy or disappear leaving us only debts.
On the other hand, yahoo finance announces that “The Pentagon plans to acquire a passive 35% stake in a private company that owns oil rights in Venezuela, which marks an unusual expansion of the role of the US government, which would go from facilitating investments in Energy to being a direct owner of a stake in an oil project, as exclusively reported by the Wall Street Journal.”
Thus, the complexity of the supposed Best Oil Agreement reaches its maximum: in a project in which the United States government refrains from participating directly, however, 35% would correspond to the Department of Defense, a curious mixture of politics, armament and economic speculation in a country which during 2025 on more than one occasion was unable to pay the officers of its army.
Claim of monopoly over the exploitation of hydrocarbons in Venezuela
In the aforementioned Fact Sheet, statements appear that intend to reserve the operation in Venezuela solely and exclusively for US companies, which we transcribe below:
“REAFFIRMING THE MONROE DOCTRINE AND EXPELLING FOREIGN ADVERSARIES FROM OUR HEMISPHERE:
Most of the new oil fields that NABEP will operate were previously controlled or operated by Russian and Chinese companies, or by corrupt cronies of Maduro and Chavez. These malicious foreign actors plundered Venezuela's resources for the benefit of American adversaries such as Cuba, Russia and China, and did not invest in Venezuela's infrastructure or development. President Trump has reinstated the Monroe Doctrine, purging malign foreign influence from our environment and ensuring that American dominance in our hemisphere will never be questioned again.”
Indeed, in I published on January 24, 2026 the article “Venezuela is being auctioned off at the White House” in which I pointed out that a large part of the country's production fields were operated by Russian and Chinese companies, and that the President of the United States himself had confessed that such concessions were legal and would be respected. By stating that the fields to be granted “were previously controlled or operated by Russian and Chinese companies,” the Fact Sheet seems to confirm that this operation has continued to the present. But it cleverly leaves Venezuela the easy task of stripping China and Russia of their legitimate concessions, “purging malign foreign influence from our environment and ensuring that American dominance in our hemisphere is never again questioned.”
In this regard, it should be noted that on September 1, the Xinhua Agency disseminated statements by the spokesperson of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of that country, who declared that "China has always maintained that relations between countries should be handled in accordance with the purposes and principles of the UN, economic and trade cooperation between countries should follow the principles of equality, mutual benefit and shared gain, the cooperation between China and Venezuela is protected by International law and the laws of both countries and that China's legal rights and interests must be protected.” A similar statement from the Russian Federation is to be expected. No wonder the United States cunningly evaded direct participation in the Agreement that would supposedly be “purging malignant foreign influence from our environment.” In that environment, in fact, they themselves are the foreigners.
Proportionality between the objects of the Convention
There is no proportionality between the objects of the aforementioned convention. On the one hand, it refers to 65,000 million barrels of oil, tangible portions of a non-renewable resource, equivalent to one third of Venezuela's reserves, with an upward trend and that will inevitably increase in price as the inevitable and irreversible depletion of its availability takes place.
On the other hand, the aforementioned Agreement provides for a possible investment of US$100 billion dollars by US companies in Venezuelan oil fields. It is not a price for the concessions, nor a delivery to the National Treasury for the hydrocarbons to be extracted. It is an amount owned by these US companies, which they will invest according to their free discretion for their own exclusive benefit to obtain profits on which they are supposed to finally cancel to Venezuela the reduced taxes and royalties provided for in the recently reformed Organic Hydrocarbons Law.
The investment will apparently be made in dollars, a monetary sign in permanent devaluation, of which in a few years there will probably be nothing left but the historical memory; it is not specified in which currency the amount of taxes and royalties will be contributed to the Venezuelan Treasury.
This establishes an unequal relationship between the legal delivery of a solid and tangible natural resource, increasingly scarce and valuable, and a discretionary investment and possible payment of taxes in a paper currency lacking support whose value is progressively decreasing. Venezuela gives up a substantial part of its hydrocarbon reserves in exchange for nothing.
To this observation it should be added that Venezuelan regulations such as the Treaties against Double Taxation, the Law on the Promotion and Protection of Foreign Investment, and the Law on Special Economic Zones, provide for such an accumulation of exceptions, exemptions, reliefs and advantages in favor of foreign capital, that it is to be feared that thanks to the complacent granting of such advantages the tax contributions of oil companies will be insignificant or null, with which we would be ceding the most precious wealth of the planet in exchange for insignificant amounts of “you're welcome”.
Temporary validity for a century
One of the points that has transcended the aforementioned Agreement tries to extend its validity for 100 years. This implies that it would subject, not only the current generation, but at least four generations to come, until the remote 2126 of the equally remote XXII century.
It is not sensible, nationalistic, rational or humane to chain so many future generations to a pact resulting from an invasion triggering a massive pillage.
The Constitution of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela establishes in article 156, paragraph 16, that “The National Executive may not grant mining concessions indefinitely." In terms of non-renewable resources, a century is equivalent in its practical effects to an indefinite time. Aware of this, President Isaías Medina Angarita issued concessions in 1943 only for forty years, a period that the historical evolution made irrelevant when Carlos Andrés Pérez nationalized the industry in 1974. It is not logical, sensible or patriotic for us to deprive generations of the public patrimony of the coming century, while earning their disapproval and undying contempt.
On the other hand, as I have repeatedly pointed out, at the global level we have passed or are passing the so-called “peak of hydrocarbons”, an optimal exploitation point from which they will become progressively scarce, until in four or five decades their extraction requires more energy than they will produce. It is grotesque and disproportionate to want to implement a monopoly of double duration than that provided for the availability of the transferred natural resource. Such conditions betray the spirit of rapine and greed with which the invader tries to push his profit limits even beyond those set by nature.
After an adverse reaction in the media about the duration of the agreement, according to a last-minute statement by the Vice President, now temporary President-in-Charge, the Agreement would only last for a quarter of a century. But US sources confirm the duration by one hundred years. The aforementioned White House Fact Sheet insists that the Agreement “have granted North American Blue Energy Partners (NABEP), a privately held oil company that is the second-largest private Venezuelan oil producer and a proven operator, 100-year concessions for 17 oil fields with proven reserves of approximately 65 billion barrels.”
It would be, thus, “100-year concessions”, concessions for 100 years. In case of difference of opinions about the terrible lapse, it is known with what arguments the invader would impose his own.
Massive theft of Venezuela's income
In short, Venezuela should expect nothing from this or any other agreement or mandate of the invader. Let us remember that, according to Executive Order 12.373, all income from Venezuela must be deposited, not in the Treasury or in the Budget of our country, but in an Item from the Treasure of the United States, to be managed at the discretion of the President and the Secretary of State of that country. The Executive Order recognizes that such assets belong to Venezuela, but the right to use, enjoy and dispose of them – constituent elements of the right of ownership - belong to the President of the invading country.
After the invasion of Iraq, it was forced to deposit his mineral exploitation income in a Federal Reserve fund. 23 years have passed, and the theft continues exactly the same. According to the World Food Program, poverty in that country by 2020 was 31.7%,
It is appropriate to point out that, according to the reasoned estimate of the Financial Times, during the first half of 2026, the United States would have sold Venezuelan oil worth 13,000 million dollars. Well, neither the US Executive, nor its Secretary of State, have been accountable to the Congress of that country or that of Venezuela for the destination of such funds, which, by the way, have not entered the item of the Treasury either.
Thus, the funds looted from our country are in a black hole from which no information is made avialable. It is probable that any other income from Venezuela for its mineral wealth will disappear in the same way, without even reports of its use or destination being submitted to the Congresses and peoples of the invaded country and of the invader. Nothing prevents the announced revenues for the extraction of the 65,000 million barrels of the “World's Largest Oil Deal” from also disappearing into such a bottomless pit. Venezuela would give everything to receive nothing in return. This would be the biggest act of corruption in the world, to the detriment of the people and future generations of Venezuela.
Alienation of Venezuelan natural resources
Our mining and hydrocarbon deposits are imprescriptible and inalienable in accordance with the Constitution of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela. Inalienable, it means that they cannot be delivered, sold or transferred because they belong to the Republic and therefore to all Venezuelans:
Article 12. “The mining and hydrocarbon deposits, whatever their nature, existing in the national territory, under the territorial seabed, in the exclusive economic zone and on the continental shelf, belong to the Republic, are goods of the public domain and, therefore, inalienable and imprescriptible. The sea coasts are goods of the public domain.”
A massive transfer of rights over the product of deposits that comprise a third of our hydrocarbon reserves, and for the span of a century, is in fact equivalent to their alienation. Most of the mineral or fossil energy deposits are exhausted before the expiration of this period. Not to mention the patience of the dispossessed peoples.
Violation of the State Reserve on oil activity and other industries of public interest and strategic nature.
When considering an Agreement that attempts to confer the decision on a fundamental part of our oil activity to a foreign company, it is worth recalling the validity of articles 156, 302 and 303 of the Constitution of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela, which provide:
Article 151. “In contracts of public interest, if it is not inappropriate according to the nature of the same, a clause will be considered incorporated, even if it is not expressly stated, according to which the doubts and controversies that may arise about said contracts and that do not come to be amicably resolved by the contracting parties, will be decided by the competent courts of the Republic, in accordance with their laws, without for any reason or cause being able to give rise to foreign claims.”
Article 156. “Of the competence of the National Power. 16. The regime and administration of the mines and hydrocarbons; the regime of the vacant lands; and the conservation, promotion and use of the forests, soils, waters and other natural riches of the country.
The National Executive will not be able to grant mining concessions indefinitely.”
(…)
Article 302. “The State reserves, by means of the respective organic law, and for reasons of national convenience, the oil activity and other industries, exploitations, services and goods of public interest and of a strategic nature. The State shall promote the national manufacture of raw materials from the exploitation of non-renewable natural resources, in order to assimilate, create and innovate technologies, generate employment and economic growth, and create wealth and well-being for the people.”
Article 303 “For reasons of economic, political sovereignty and national strategy, the State shall retain all the shares of Petróleos de Venezuela, S.A., or of the entity created for the management of the oil industry, with the exception of those of subsidiaries, strategic associations, companies and any other that has been constituted or is constituted as a result of the business development of Petróleos de Venezuela, S.A.”
Article 151 of our Basic Law deals with one of the attributes of sovereignty, immunity, or the power not to submit your acts of public interest to the decision of foreign courts or arbitrators. It is one of the articles maintained almost unchanged in our constitutional texts since a foreign arbitral award tried to deprive us of the Essential Guyana at the end of the nineteenth century.
The unanimous claim of empires is to deprive us of sovereignty by submitting disputes on matters of public interest to their courts and their laws, or to jurisdictional organs under their decisive influence. This is what is involved in the attempt to prosecute the legitimate President Nicolás Maduro Moros in U.S. courts and under the laws of the United States. Any clause of the Agreement that intends to submit the decision of disagreements on the same to courts and laws other than the Venezuelan ones, is null of any nullity and has absolutely no effects.
Likewise, any clause of the aforementioned Agreement that seeks to deprive the Venezuelan State of the power to decide on our oil activity and other industries, farms, services and goods of public interest and of a strategic nature in the terms of Article 302 of the Constitution is null and void and has no effect.
In the same sense, any clause which in any way seeks to annul, undermine or ignore the exclusive competences of Petróleos de Venezuela S.A. for the management of our oil industry is also null and void and has no effect.
Cancellation of the Agreement by the Vienna Convention
In the present case, we are faced with an Agreement that in principle was going to be signed by the Presidents of two countries, on matters of public interest for both, involving matters related to sovereignty. An evasive maneuver pretends that the Agreement is concluded only between Venezuela and a businessman; the decisive participation of the US government in the negotiations and that of the Pentagon in the investment belies such an insinuation.
Regardless of whether private companies and individuals also participate in it or not, the claim that this Agreement binds the signatory countries places it in the category of a Treaty, and obviously makes the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties, in force since January 27, 1969, applicable. Among its many articles on the nullity of the Treaties, Articles 52 and 53 are particularly applicable, which provide for;
52. Coercion of a state by the threat or use of force. Any treaty the conclusion of which has been obtained by the threat or use of force in violation of the principles of international law embodied in the Charter of the United Nations is null and void.
53. Treaties that are in conflict with a peremptory norm of general international law ("jus cogens"). Any treaty which, at the time of its conclusion, is null and void. is in conflict with a peremptory norm of general international law. For the purposes of the present Convention, a peremptory norm of general international law is a norm accepted and recognized by the international community of States as a whole as a norm which admits of no contrary agreement and which can be modified only by a subsequent norm of general international law having the same character.
In this regard, it is absolutely obvious that it exerts coercion on one State by the threat of the use of force under the terms of the aforementioned article 52, another State that maintains for a long time more than a thousand Unilateral Coercive Measures on the former; confiscates its assets abroad, destroys its nationals' boats and murders its crew members, violates its airspace, maritime and territorial; it bombs its cities and facilities with a heavy toll of victims, kidnaps the legitimate President and his spouse, installs its political police, carries out deportations and extrajudicial executions in the attacked country, seizes all the income of the victim country from mineral exports and threatens to repeat these behaviors on a larger scale in the face of any disobedience.
As for the application of the aforementioned article 53 of the Vienna Convention on International Treaties, concerning treaties that are in conflict with a norm of General International Law, it is enough to contrast the aforementioned convention with Articles 1 and 2 of the Charter of the United Nations:
Article 1. “The purposes of the United Nations are: 1. To maintain international peace and security, and to that end: to take effective collective measures to prevent and eliminate threats to the peace, and to suppress acts of aggression or other breaches of the peace; and to achieve by peaceful means, and in accordance with the principles of justice and international law, the adjustment or settlement of international disputes or situations likely to lead to breaches of the peace.”
Article 2: "4. The Members of the Organization, in their international relations, shall refrain from resorting to the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any State, or in any other manner incompatible with the Purposes of the United Nations.”
The behavior of the United States towards Venezuela during the present century has been characterized by systematically “resorting to the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence” of our country. The aforementioned articles of the Charter of the United Nations may therefore be invoked for the purposes of the application of the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties.
Absence of democratic consultation on the Agreement
The Constitution of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela includes numerous forms of consultation to know and comply with the popular will on issues that affect it. None has been applied in relation to the Oil Agreement we are studying, imposed by the threat and use of force by an invading power after an illegitimate warlike aggression.
In any case, our Constitution contemplates the possibility of submitting to referendum bills of law or treaties that could compromise sovereignty or transfer competences to supranational bodies, in the following terms:
Article 73. Those bills under discussion by the National Assembly will be submitted to a referendum, when at least two-thirds of the members of the Assembly so decide. If the referendum concludes in an approving yes, provided that twenty-five percent of the voters registered in the Civil and Electoral Registry have attended, the corresponding project will be sanctioned as a law.
International treaties, agreements or agreements that may compromise national sovereignty or transfer powers to supranational bodies may be submitted to a referendum on the initiative of the President of the Republic in the Council of Ministers; by the vote of two thirds of the members of the Assembly; or by fifteen percent of the voters registered in the Civil and Electoral Registry.
In conclusion, the project we analyzed could well be considered the Worst Oil Deal in the World.
• It would commit decisive non-renewable resources for the period of a century in exchange for a promise of discretionary investment;
• it intends to monopolize investment in hydrocarbons in the country;
• it does not result from a legal or transparent process;
• the credentials of the private counterpart are terrible;
• it undermines constitutional regulations on the reservation of the state management of natural resources;
• it does not reserve the solution of possible disagreements to the Venezuelan courts and according to the laws of the Republic;
• it has not been the subject of any kind of democratic consultation;
• it incorporates funds from the Army of the aggressor country;
• it promotes a private monopoly on energy resources;
• it seeks to ignore previous legitimately agreed concessions on the exploitation of them;
• the eventual revenues that he would produce would go to an item of the United States Treasury managed freely by the invading President without any type of control.
In this regard, it is incumbent on us to reiterate once again that, according to article 333 of our Basic Law:
Article 333. “This Constitution shall not lose its validity if it ceases to be observed by an act of force or because it is repealed by any other means other than that provided for in it.
In such an eventuality, every citizen invested or citizen invested or not with authority, will have the duty to collaborate in the restoration of its effective validity.”