So the US just captured Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro.
Trump says the US will “run the country” temporarily to stabilize the region and secure oil assets.
Lake Maracaibo was the birthplace of the Venezuelan oil industry. The “Old Heart” fueled the 20th century, but today it’s a graveyard of rusting derricks and leaking pipes. The easy oil there is gone, tapped out by decades of extraction.
The lake is polluted from permanent black tide.
The Sludge Motherload in the east (running right toward the eastern border) lies the Orinoco Heavy Oil Belt. This is where Venezuela’s famous “300 billion barrels” of reserves are sitting.
The oil here is extra-heavy crude. It is essentially tar. To sell the sludge, you have to heat it, dilute it, and run it through massive, expensive “upgraders” to turn it into something usable. It is the most technically difficult and expensive oil on earth to produce.
This invasion is the climax of a conflict that has been simmering since 2015, when an ExxonMobil-led consortium discovered the massive Liza oilfield off the coast of Georgetown, Guyana, where I was born.
Guyanese Champagne
Just across the maritime border (in the waters Venezuela claims) lies the Stabroek Block. The oil here is totally different. It is Light Sweet Crude. “Light” means it flows like water, no heating required. “Sweet” means it has low sulfur, making it easy to refine into gasoline. In the industry, they call this “Champagne.”
But Guyana’s drilling occurs in ultra-deep waters (over 1,500 meters), where engineering is more complex and leaks are harder to contain. The primary fear is a “well blowout” similar to the 2010 Deepwater Horizon disaster.
Impact modeling shows a major spill could fuck up the Caribbean Sea all the way to Jamaica, affecting the economies of up to 14 different Caribbean islands and Venezuela.
Unlike the typical 10-year lead time for deep water projects, Guyana achieved “first oil” in December 2019, less than five years after discovery.
This was largely due to the first administration of President Trump who significantly supported (and still does!) the acceleration of Guyana’s oil sector through diplomatic, regulatory, and security measures.
The deal Guyana signed with Exxon is infamous: a meager 2% royalty and a 50/50 profit split only afterExxon deducts 75% of revenue for “costs.” Experts call it exploitative. But for Guyana, this is an insurance policy. Venezuela, crumbling under sanctions and claiming the territory as its own, was responding with gunboat diplomacy.
Venezuela views this as a second “theft” by Western powers; first by the British Empire for gold/land, and now by American corporations for oil. By giving away its black gold to an American giant, Guyana bought the protection of the U.S. Navy against Venezuelan aggression.
A Guyanese High Court judge ruled that ExxonMobil must provide an unlimited insurance guarantee to cover all costs of a potential spill, rather than a limited $2 billion sum, to ensure Guyana is not left to pay for a “calamitous disaster.”
Washington’s response makes one thing clear: The U.S. military is no longer just protecting democracy; it is the private security firm for the Stabroek Block.
Back Story: Turf War (1841-1966)
The border dispute between Guyana and Venezuela began when the British Empire acquired Guyana from the Netherlands. The western border was undefined, so in 1841, the British commissioned a German surveyor named Robert Schomburgk to draw a boundary.
He drew the famous Schomburgk Line, which claimed a massive chunk of territory (the Essequibo region) for Britain. Venezuela, a young nation that had just won independence from Spain, rejected this, claiming their border extended much further east to the Essequibo River.
By the late 19th century, the United States stepped in, invoking the Monroe Doctrine (which stated the U.S. would police the Americas). The U.S. forced Britain to accept international arbitration to avoid war.
In 1899, an arbitration tribunal met in Paris. It was composed of Americans, British, and Russians but no Venezuelans. The tribunal ruled in favor of Britain, awarding them the territory that is now modern Guyana.
In 1962, just as Guyana was nearing independence from Britain, Venezuela suddenly declared the 1899 award “null and void.” This led to the 1966 Geneva Agreement, a temporary treaty that acknowledged the dispute but kicked the can down the road.
The dispute remained a “cold conflict” until 2015, when the West re-entered the chat in the form of ExxonMobil.
The “Don-roe” Doctrine
Recent rhetoric from the 2025 administration suggests a new, aggressive corollary to this doctrine. The argument is no longer just “stay out”; it is that economic dependence on US rivals is a security threat.
Trump’s beef with Venezuela goes back to when Hugo Chávez nationalized the oil industry in 2007 and kicked out American giants like ExxonMobil and ConocoPhillips but kept their infrastructure. He then began building alliances with China, Russia and Iran and turned Venezuela from a U.S. partner into a Western Hemisphere foothold for America’s greatest rivals.
The U.S. logic for intervention (sanctions, blockades) is that they aren’t attacking Venezuela; they are evicting the tenants (Russia/China/Iran) who moved into the house next door.
Trump has floated the idea that we “keep the oil” as reparations for what he (and many other American businessmen) view as the theft of American property.
Financial disclosures from 2015 and 2016 showed that Donald Trump personally owned stock in ExxonMobil, ConocoPhillips, and Phillips 66 (the pipeline company).
Trump reportedly sold all his stock before he became president to avoid a conflict of interest but he also appointed Rex Tillerson, the CEO of ExxonMobil (2006-2016) as his Secretary of State, although his tenure was short.
Trump views the last 20 years of U.S.-Venezuela relations as a “bad business deal.”
Between 2005 and 2014, the U.S. bill for Venezuelan oil typically ranged from $25 billion to $35 billion annually. The US is the largest consumer of oil in history, averaging about 20 million barrels per day. It was essentially a wealth transfer.
The amount of money the U.S. used to spend just buying oil from Venezuela in a single year is nearly double the size of Guyana’s current entire economy.
As an added sunken cost, the U.S. military spends roughly $81 billion annually protecting global oil supply lines (increasingly in the Caribbean/Guyana via SOUTHCOM).
The Trump Squeeze
In his first term, Trump laid down a campaign of pressure on Venezuela hoping to push them into renegotiating terms of the trade deal.
2017: Trump signed an executive order which prohibited Americans from buying new debt or equity from the Venezuelan state oil company, PDVSA, making it impossible for Venezuela to borrow money to fix their rotting equipment in Lake Maracaibo.
2018: Nicolás Maduro won re-election in a race that was widely boycotted and condemned as fraudulent by Trump and much of the West.
2019: Trump issued a total ban on Venezuelan oil to the US (it’s number one consumer) and also banned US exports of diluents (specifically heavy naphtha) which were essential for processing the Venezuelan sludge.
2020: Trump’s DOJ indicted Maduro for “narco-terrorism.” The argument is that Venezuela isn’t just a dictatorship; it’s a drug cartel disguised as a country.
While 2017 financial sanctions cut off the credit cards, the 2019 sanctions cut off the customers and the chemicals, leaving Venezuela with crude too thick to pump and nowhere to sell it.
Once producing 3 million bpd, Venezuela’s output crashed to ~740,000 bpd by 2023 (despite a temporary lift by Biden). As a result poverty rates in Venezuela hover near 82%, and over 7.7 million people have fled the country.
Back Story: El Dorado
While oil is the current headline, the history of Guyana and Venezuela is written in older, bloodier ledgers. Both nations have been hollowed out by the extraction of sugar and gold, but their paths diverged based on who was holding the shovel: the Corporation or the State.
In 1595, Sir Walter Raleigh sailed up the Orinoco chasing El Dorado and returned with a bestselling lie. The Discovery of the Large, Rich and Beautiful Empire of Guiana captivated Europe and kicked off centuries of extraction. El Dorado was a lie, but the hunger it stoked was real.
White Gold
In the 18th and 19th centuries, the Dutch and British turned the coast into a sugar empire that served the upper class in Europe. It was fueled first by the blood of enslaved Africans, culminating in the brutal 1823 Demerara Rebellion where 200 slaves were massacred. The rebellion was reported in graphic detail by abolitionists. A decade later, slavery was abolished across the British Empire.
The Demerara Uprising of 1823
After the abolition of slavery, plantation owners like John Gladstone (father of the future British prime minister) were desperate to keep the profits flowing. He was one of the first to import indentured laborers from India to British Guiana, replacing one caste of exploited bodies with another.
The engraving comes from a Dutch book. It shows a plantation owner with a group of slave women and children. The caption says, “An afternoon in the plantation life.” We can see that, as in other South American colonies and the Caribbean, the slave women go shirtless and the children unclothed. Some of the children are probably mulattoes and are so represented.
My own DNA is a receipt of this transaction: a mix of the African bodies brought to build the dikes and the Indian laborers brought to cut the cane.
My DNA snapshot
Red Gold
In the 20th century, the prize was bauxite, the ore needed for aluminum. Without this material, there would be no World War 2, no Cold War. Aluminum made the modern airplane possible. It built the wings of bombers, the skin of fighter jets, the frames of tanks, ships, even ration tins.
Guyana had some of the highest-grade bauxite deposits in the world.
First came the Canadians with ALCAN. Then the Americans with Reynolds. They laid down roads, built rail lines, carved out ports, not for the country, but for the ore. It was shipped out. The profits stayed abroad. Guyanese laborers did the digging, but never got a seat at the table.
Follow The Leader Leader
As of the end of 2025, Guyana’s daily oil production surpassed 900,000 barrels per day (bpd). The country is now the world’s fastest-growing economy and the third-largest oil producer per capita.
But walk the streets of Georgetown, and you won’t see Dubai. You see a population where nearly half (48%) still scrape by below the poverty line, while wealth pools in the hands of the elite.
Our family left Guyana in the early 80s due to what economic textbooks refer to as a “Great Economic Downswing.” Guyana nationalized their top exports in the 70s when prices were high. But when global prices fell in the 80s, the state-run industries collapsed due to poor management and rampant bribery.
For us citizens, it meant daily blackouts, milk and flour shortages, and a rapidly devaluing currency. My family was fairly well off in Guyana but it made sense to follow the money; to move higher up the food chain, to the country that was benefiting from our country’s cheap sugar and flour exports.
By the time Desmond Hoyte took over in 1985 and began dismantling the socialist apparatus to satisfy the IMF, the damage was done. The “fight” between socialism and capitalism had a clear loser, and it was the Guyanese people.
Between 1980 and 1988, Guyana’s real GDP per capita plummeted by ~30%. We went from one of the more promising economies in the Caribbean to one of the poorest.
Back Story: Socialism In Guyana
In 1950, Cheddi Jagan, a U.S.-educated dentist of Indian descent, co-founded the People’s Progressive Party (PPP) with his wife Janet Jagan, a white, Jewish-American socialist, and Forbes Burnham, a charismatic Afro-Guyanese lawyer.
The British had used racial division to maintain control for over a century. By the 1950s, these divisions were deeply entrenched in neighborhoods, workplaces, unions, and party lines.The racial divide the British engineered (~40% Indo-Guyanese, ~30% Afro-Guyanese, ~20% Mixed, and ~10% Indigenous) is still the fault line along which Guyanese politics fracture. The PPP was a rare multi-ethnic, leftist coalition pushing for workers’ rights, land reform, and independence from Britain.
When military force failed to fully neutralize Jagan, economic tools took over. Loans were dangled, reforms demanded, and by the 1980s, Guyana was no longer a Cold War threat. It was a structurally dependent state, its sovereignty mortgaged in exchange for basic survival. The government controlled 80% of the recorded import/export trade, yet the shelves were empty.
This strategy (undermine, destabilize, then economically entangle) is precisely what John Perkins describes in Confessions of an Economic Hitman. In this light, British Guiana was a textbook case.
Human Shields of Jonestown
Most Americans know Guyana as host to the 1978 Jonestown massacre. Modern revisionists like Martyr Made try to frame Jim Jones as a tragic socialist revolutionary. This is nonsense. Jones was a classic tent huckster, a depraved con man who used socialist aesthetics to build a personal fiefdom.
In 1970, Forbes Burnham declared Guyana the world’s first “Cooperative Socialist Republic.” His vision was an economy run by small, worker-owned cooperatives rather than massive state bureaucracies or private corporations.
Jones pitched his settlement to the Guyanese government as a “deterrent.” He placed 900 Americans in the disputed Esequibo region, betting that Venezuela wouldn’t invade if it meant killing U.S. citizens. He used his followers as geopolitical sandbags. To Burnham, Jonestown was a showpiece proving his economic theory worked; to Jones, Burnham was a political patron.
While the official narrative frames Jonestown as a “revolutionary suicide,” forensic inconsistencies have fueled decades of skepticism. The initial body count reported by the Guyanese government was 408, a figure that inexplicably rose to 913 days later, with U.S. officials claiming bodies had been “stacked” in plain sight.
Furthermore, Dr. Leslie Mootoo, the first pathologist on the scene, reported that the majority of victims had fresh needle puncture marks on their shoulder blades (an impossible location for self-injection) and lacked the tell-tale facial contortions of voluntary cyanide ingestion, leading him to classify the deaths as mass murder by the state or cult leadership rather than suicide.
These anomalies, combined with the discovery of a massive cache of behavior-modifying drugs (Thorazine, sodium pentothal) sufficient to sedate a city of 200,000, have led researchers like John Judge to argue that the Peoples Temple may have been an extension of MK-ULTRA; a CIA mind-control program targeting “expendable” populations (poor Blacks and women).
Under this theory, Jim Jones was not just a cult leader but a U.S. intelligence asset whose connections to police and embassy officials (like the mysterious Richard Dwyer) protected an experiment that ultimately required a “cleanup” operation when Congressman Leo Ryan threatened to expose it.
Jonestown highlighted Guyana once more on the world stage but as a cautionary tale, one that could be used to prop up the argument against the efficacy of socialism.
The Final Bill
The contrast between Guyana and Venezuela exposes the brutal reality of the Western Hemisphere.
Under the “21st Century Socialism” of Hugo Chávez and later Nicolás Maduro, Venezuela nationalized its oil fields much like Guyana did its bauxite. When oil prices were high, poverty dropped, but when prices crashed in 2014 (and the U.S. tightened the screws with sanctions) the bottom fell out. Between 2013 and 2021, Venezuela’s economy shrank by a staggering 75%.
Just as my family fled Guyana in the 80s, over 7.7 million Venezuelans have fled their country since 2014. They are running from the same ghosts: hyperinflation, state failure, and an economic war waged by the West.
Guyana chose acquiescence: They signed the bad deal and let the Americans take the oil. The result is a booming GDP (on paper) and U.S. military protection.
Venezuela chose Socialist defiance. They reclaimed their resources and kicked out the American majors. The result? Total isolation, seized tankers, and an economy broken by the weight of sanctions and mismanagement.
In the end, the fight between socialism and capitalism in the West often feels less like a debate of ideologies and more like a choice of poison: Do you want to be starved by the empire, or eaten by it? Guyana has chosen to be eaten, but at least we finally get a seat at the table, right?
