Oakland (Special to ZennieReport.com) – Following an objective laid out in the Project 2025 document that provided the guide to action for the second Trump Administration, President Trump planned and carried out what is his most controversial and world-economic-control altering act to date: the takeover of the Country of Venezuela, and not really for the stated reason of its leader Nicolás Maduro being a narco-terrorist.
Nicolás Maduro made himself a target of America after becoming Venezuela’s President in 2013, and then taking a series of steps that slowed the flow of oil from its reservers and to the world at an era when cheap energy was is the objective. Moreover, the country was known for its human rights violations. In 2014, President Obama signed the Venezuela Defense of Human Rights and Civil Society Act of 2014, imposing sanctions on Venezuelan individuals held responsible by the U.S. for human rights violations during the 2014 Venezuelan protests.
But that was only a part of a large series of actions that stemmed from Venezuela gaining what was once American Oil Company control of the largest oil reserves in the World in 1999. But the real story that tracks to Trump’s actions goes back to 1936. On January 7, 1936, Standard Oil of New Jersey, with the drilling of the well “La Canoa-1” located near the community of La Canoa (state of Anzoategui), began the exploitation of the Orinoco Oil Belt (FPO). That well was active for 44 days, producing approximately one thousand net barrels of crude oil per day. But by then, the exploitation activities were abandoned due to the difficulty in extracting the extra-heavy hydrocarbons. In 1938, the first well discovering hydrocarbons was drilled with the name “Zuata 1”. That set in motion the development of several Venezuelan organizations that formed improved oil production over the years. But nationalization of the main field located in the Orinoco Belt did not start until the early 1970s, and was tied to the development of OPEC, the Organization Of Petroleum Exporting Countries. To get a better idea of the American Oil Company role in this, a look at Chevron’s version of the history is in order.
Chevron Touts 100 years Making History In Venezuela
Chevron has a website devoted to its ongoing work in Venezuela. Unlike Ecuador, where Chevron sold its fields in 1992, the American Oil Giant has never left Venezuela, and a substantial ownership interest in the oil fields, even with the political unrest over the years. Here is Chevron’s history in its own words:
Chevron is one of the leading private oil companies in Venezuela. Our presence in the country began with exploration activities in 1923, and the discovery of Boscan field in 1946.
Delivering energy requires working with trusted partners who succeed when we succeed. Chevron works in partnership with affiliates of Petróleos de Venezuela (PDVSA), Venezuela’s National Oil Company, in five onshore and offshore production projects in Western and Eastern Venezuela, in compliance with applicable laws and regulations.
Chevron and its partners have historically made significant capital investments in Venezuela, helped develop the national workforce and promoted the use of local resources.
Chevron made important contributions by bringing our most effective methods to the Venezuelan oil industry.
We participate in the following projects in Venezuela across 74,000 oil and gas acres.
petroboscán
- Operated by Petroboscán, S.A.
- 39.2% Chevron interest
- Boscan Field
- Zulia State, Western Venezuela
Chevron In The Venezuelan Community
Our social investment strategy aims to strengthen local communities with programs that deliver measurable and sustainable results. Our efforts are focused on three core areas: health, education, and economic development of our communities in Caracas, Anzoátegui, Delta Amacuro and Zulia state where our operational areas are located, as permitted by applicable law and regulations.
In the past 15 years, Chevron’s social investment contributions in Venezuela totaled more than $115 million, benefiting over 580,000 Venezuelans with health, education, and economic development programs. Chevron currently implements social investment projects in four states in Venezuela.
Since 2019, and in accordance with applicable laws, Chevron has invested $7 million in the Venezuela Relief Initiative, a cluster of programs selected in consultation with a variety of local and international organizations, in alignment with the United Nations Humanitarian Response Plan and complimentary to USAID programs. Programs are being executed in partnership with long-established and reliable implementing partners, such as the Red Cross International and the Pledge for Venezuela. The programs are aimed at providing vulnerable communities with access to potable Water, Sanitation and Hygiene (WASH program), medical support, and nutrition.
Chevron promotes health care programs in the communities where we operate.
- Chevron supports organizations to provide free cleft and lip palate surgeries. This has benefited more than 5,000 children and adults with cranial malformations often caused by malnutrition. Chevron volunteers have been key supporters, helping to provide a range of services to patients and their families throughout the treatment process. They have helped parents fill out medical forms, served as translators, taken children to recreational activities and donated toys and clothes.
- The alliance between Hogar Clínica San Rafael and Chevron has lasted for over a decade. It includes the sponsorship of the children’s surgical program and financial support to execute significant improvements within its facilities. In 2022, two of the Hogar Clínica San Rafael’s operating rooms were refurbished and equipped thanks to Chevron’s support to benefit over 8,000 patients seeking medical attention at this healthcare center in Maracaibo annually.
- Chevron completed the rehabilitation of water wells systems in three communities in Anzoategui State, including one of the most important hospitals in the area to improve access to potable water and benefit to more than fifteen thousand inhabitants. Chevron aims to continue to add water wells in subsequent years.
- As part of the healthy communities’ projects executed in eastern Venezuela, since 2004 Chevron has annually supported kids with cancer. In 2018, Chevron initiated new efforts to be positioned as a major contributor on fighting cancer in the east region through the donation of the headquarter for Oncoaliado that aims to offer medical and oncological attention and telemedicine service available for all over the country with high-level specialists, among others. Additionally, Chevron donated a van to facilitate transportation for cancer patients, families, and medical staff.
Education is the foundation for sustainable development. Since 2005, Chevron has worked with Venezuela’s Ministry of Education as permitted by applicable law and regulations to expand resources and opportunities for educators and students ranging from elementary to post graduate studies.
- Chevron supports the “Aula 20” teacher training program, a nationwide project which combines best practices in reading, writing, mathematics, and teaching techniques. It has been deployed at schools in Anzoátegui, Miranda, Monagas, Sucre and Zulia states benefitting about 9,000 students yearly.
- Chevron’s partnership with the Venezuelan American Friendship Association began 15 years ago, as permitted by appliable law and regulations. This program provides university scholarships nationwide to socio-economically disadvantaged students through the Pro Excellence Program, which includes mentoring, specialized training based on the United Nations skills and competencies, and English language skills.
- Since 2018, Chevron has supported the Fe y Alegría Educational Complex that offers oil and non-oil trades and technical trainings for entrepreneurs. This year, Chevron is working on the second phase to expand the infrastructure of the educational complex located in El Tigre, eastern Venezuela.
Chevron partners with local nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), as permitted by applicable law, to build capacity and self-sufficiency while promoting economic development in the communities where we have operations.
- Chevron has been supporting the Emprered and Empremujer entrepreneurship programs since 2004. Between 2009 and 2022, the programs provided training on how to start and run small businesses to more than 24,000 entrepreneurs in five states. In addition, the Dressed for Dreams program offers training in the craft of sewing to low-income women and victims of violence.
- The Maraisa project strengthens the earning power of indigenous Warao artisans in the Delta Amacuro state, who create fair trade export quality baskets, hammocks, and jewelry. Since 2009, more than 3,300 people have benefited from training in craft techniques and marketing.
Chevron’s Recent Time In Venezuela History From A Perspective Of VenezuelaAnalysis
First, what is Venezuelanalysis .com? Well, I located this from the “about” page:
Venezuelanalysis is an independent website produced by journalists and researchers who are dedicated to producing news and analysis about the current political situation in Venezuela.
Our main objective is to counter the corporate media propaganda against the Bolivarian Revolution by giving a voice to leftist and grassroots movements in Venezuela. We aim to cover daily news about the Caribbean nation, as well as to contextualize these developments with in-depth analysis and background information. The site is targeted towards activists, academics, journalists, intellectuals, policymakers, and the general public.
While the site publishes opinion articles, we likewise aim to produce the most accurate and fact-based news available on Venezuela. Our goal is to be the primary resource for information and analysis on the country in English. Over the years we have also developed collaborations with a number of Venezuelan collectives.
The VenezuelanAnalysis Team Gives Must Read View Of President Trump’s Expected Coup
The VenezuelanAnalysis wrote the following:
Washington’s unprovoked aggression against Venezuela, and the likely coming ground attack, are an attempt at reimposing “proud, stable democracy” in the country, in the words of the US front surrogate, Maria Corina Machado.
When you decode the meaning of those words and the pretexts put forth for US aggression, you will find a remarkable culture of terrorism and gangsterism on display. Let us take a look.
The initial pretext was that Venezuela was an exporting “narco-terrorist” state. The knowingly fraudulent story did not merit even laughter by US intelligence agencies and the DEA. In the DEA’s most recent report, Venezuela is mentioned in only a single paragraph. In fact, Venezuela did not merit even a single mention in the one-hundred pages long 2025 UN World Drug Report, just like the EU’s own annual drug assessment report.
Nevertheless, Western media still incessantly report the fabricated charges without comment, while omitting the conclusions from Western intelligence, since it reached the wrong conclusion. The servility could not be more startling.
US propaganda then had to shift its main focus back to its staple: Maduro the dictator must be removed. “Maduro ramps up repression in Venezuela,” noted CNN, which failed to mention that the country is, after all, under a multi-pronged attack by a superpower.
CNN did not mention, either, that no opposition funded and directed by a hostile superpower would ever be tolerated in the West’s best friends, like Egypt, Israel, the Philippines and so on. Countries that routinely murder – not just imprison – their opposition under far less onerous circumstances.
The thought that such “opposition” would parade the capital calling for the overthrow of the government in any of these states is plainly absurd. However, that is exactly what happened in Venezuela, with CIA-sponsored figurehead Juan Guaido in 2019. It is Venezuela alone that must live up to such standards.
The idea that democracy promotion could be the real motivation behind the hostility is too ridiculous to merit even a comment. After all, the West lends its full support and sends hundreds of billions in arms to ICJ- and ICC-indicted Israel, Saudi Arabia (which doesn’t even pretend to have elections), Egypt and so on.
Incidentally, for those interested in actual election fraud in Latin America, there is certainly no shortage of issues to be concerned about. Namely, the election manipulations that are run out of Washington, which is by far the league leader.
Just to pick some examples known to all media offices – though few, if any, care: Trump was effectively “bribing Honduran voters” to “restore [the] narcotrafficking government to power”. Trump demanded that they vote for Tito Asfura, the colleague of the indicted narco-trafficker he just pardoned, Juan Orlando Hernández. Or else the US would withhold aid to the country, effectively “threatening to destroy the Honduran economy unless the country elects the oligarch-run National Party”. “Trump deployed the same strategy in Argentina’s October 2025 midterm elections,” in which he threatened to withhold a $20 billion bailout, “successfully strong-arming voters there into backing the party of the country’s mentally unstable president, Javier Milei.”
With a naval armada outside their shores to display what will happen if countries disobey, Washington thus sends the appropriate message: “you are free to choose as long as it is the right guys; otherwise you will starve.”
Thus, no reason for going to war with Venezuela worthy even of consideration from anyone with two functioning brain cells has been put forth.
The actual reason is explained openly by the aggressors themselves. In Trump’s own words: “When I left, Venezuela was ready to collapse. We would have taken it over. We would have gotten all that oil. It would have been right next door.” More recently, perhaps tired of the “narco-terrorism” script, Trump conceded that he wants “the oil and land rights.”
Congresswoman Maria Elvira Salazar boasted that “Venezuela, for the American oil companies, will be a field day, because it will be more than a trillion dollars in economic activity.”
This pitch was further explained by Washington’s minion Machado in a speech to the America Business Forum. As soon as she leads a “proud, stable democracy” there will be a “massive privatization program,” offering “a $1.7 trillion opportunity.” “We will open markets … And American companies are in, you know, a super strategic position to invest. … This country, Venezuela, is going to be the brightest opportunity for investment of American companies,” which “are going to make a lot of money.”
The only criticism found in the political and media establishment against an attack, then, is tactical concerns. Will it work? Will Trump get away with aggression?
Thus, coup plotter Elliott Abrams explained that Venezuela “previously was” a democracy, and “has a long democratic history,” with which he must mean as a US-run junta and staged colony, if words have any meaning whatsoever. If aggression is successful, “oil production can start rising again … As it was before the Chávez-Maduro years, Venezuela can be a major supplier of oil to the United States and a partner in Latin America.” Hopefully “Cuba, and Nicaragua” will fall too, but aggression could hurt American “clout on the international stage.” Abrams concludes by complaining that the “economic and diplomatic pressure we put on Maduro in the first term was simply not enough.”
“For 26 years, the U.S. has tried to restore democracy in Venezuela through negotiations, concessions, sanctions and a combination of carrots and sticks. Nothing has worked,” noted former OAS ambassador and Harvard lecturer Arturo McGields.
An illegal economic siege, eradicating perhaps 75% of the country’s GDP, and which has killed tens or hundreds of thousands of civilians, a failed mercenary invasion, and numerous coup attempts are not wrong in principle, only tactically unfortunate, since none of it “has worked.”
The euphoria liberals display at this show of sadism is quite revealing. For example, Rebecca Heinrichs pointed out that Cuba could fall if Venezuela is sufficiently squeezed. ”If you pressure” Venezuela “so much” and eliminate “80 to 85% of the revenue” through the illegal naval blockade imposed on them, then ”you are immediately going to have further crises” for the civilian population, and ”they are going to feel that pressure even more, and they will blame Maduro” – Cuba-style, in other words.
James Story, one of the key architects of the illegal regime change operations against Venezuela in recent years, wrote an op-ed repeating all the standard propaganda charges. Story gloated that the recent oil blockade on Venezuelan exports “is a more effective and acceptable way” of overthrowing the government, since “squeezing this revenue stream would” starve the population sufficiently so as to “recognize that life without him [Maduro] in power is preferable to him remaining”.
You will notice the transparent hypocrisy, since the US a month prior to its “total and complete blockade” on Venezuela denounced “Iran’s use of military forces to conduct an armed boarding and seizure of a commercial vessel in international waters [which] constitutes a blatant violation of international law, undermining freedom of navigation and the free flow of commerce”.
It is not that Western journalists do not know about Washington’s propaganda plot when it condemned Iran only to then conduct global piracy itself, since it was publicly reported. Rather, connecting the dots would expose the media as totally servile to state propaganda, and give the game away.
To be sure, there is nothing that causes more outrage than Venezuela supposedly collaborating with the “enemy states.” Even if the charges are true, this illustrates the leading principle that must be accepted if you wish to be part of the debate: no country, however weak, has the right to defend itself against unprovoked Western aggression.
Thus, Elliot Abrams demanded the US attack Venezuela due to its supposed “cooperation with China, Cuba, Iran, and Russia, which gives countries hostile to U.S. interests a base of operations on the South American mainland,” with weapons that can “reach U.S. territory from Venezuela”. Abrams has no issues with the “legality” of such strikes, only “doubts about the chances of success.” “Merely starving” the country “will not be enough: it must be forced out of power with military strikes, which will throw the regime’s support structures, including in the military, into disarray and make them fear for their own futures.”
No doubt the Nazi press “criticized” Operation Barbarossa on the same grounds before invading the Soviet Union. Their ideological heirs have learned that “starving” the population is not enough to win; they must smash their opponents “and make them fear for their own futures.”
In fact, without a hint of irony, we read that it is Venezuela with “Castro’s Cuba” who are “attacking” the US “asymmetrically” in Machado’s words – not the other way around, of course. The goal of US aggression is to open “an extraordinary frontier for US investment in energy, infrastructure, technology and agriculture.”
In short, Washington and its allies cannot tolerate that Venezuela is “associated with” those that the Mafia Don has prohibited, as liberal media darling David Frum put it. So the “goal is to restore the Venezuelan democracy that existed before [Hugo] Chávez and Maduro” – which, again, must refer to the US-directed junta and staged oligarchy.
Trump’s Cold Use Of Military Power That Has Stunned The World And Has Stunning Implications
The world does see through President Trump’s actions as a move to help American Oil Companies, and does not buy the arrest of Maduro. There’s a clear case to be made for the captured leader’s release once the full set of stories is released to the public. Here’s Senator Sanders on Twitter:
Once MAGA zealot Candace Owens wrote this:
Statement By The UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer
Starmer: “The UK has long supported a transition of power in Venezuela. We regarded Maduro as an illegitimate President and we shed no tears about the end of his regime.
I reiterated my support for international law this morning. The UK government will discuss the evolving situation with US counterparts in the days ahead as we seek a safe and peaceful transition to a legitimate government that reflects the will of the Venezuelan people.
Meanwhile, Chevron stock has taken off as of this writing, though the price increase is just over two percent so far. And of course, there’s the unfolding question of just how the Trump Companies will benefit.
Stay tuned.