cross-posted from: https://news.abolish.capital/post/24135
Caracas, January 30, 2026 (venezuelanalysis.com) – The Venezuelan National Assembly has approved a sweeping reform of the country’s 2001 Hydrocarbon Law that rolls back the state’s role in the energy sector in favor of private capital.
Legislators unanimously endorsed the bill at its second discussion on Thursday, with only opposition deputy Henrique Capriles abstaining. The legislative overhaul follows years of US sanctions against the Venezuelan oil industry and a naval blockade imposed in December.
National Assembly President Jorge Rodríguez hailed the vote a “historic day” and claimed the new bill will lead oil production to “skyrocket.”
“The reform will make the oil sector much more competitive for national and foreign corporations to extract crude,” he told reporters. “We are implementing mechanisms that have proven very successful.”
Venezuelan Acting President Delcy Rodríguez signed and enacted the law after the parliamentary session, claiming that the industry will be guided by “the best international practices” and undertake a “historic leap forward.”
Former President Hugo Chávez revamped the country’s oil legislation in 2001 and introduced further reforms in 2006 and 2007 to assert the Venezuelan state’s primacy over the industry. Policies included a mandatory stakeholding majority for state oil company PDVSA in joint ventures, PDVSA control over operations and sales, and increased royalties and income tax to 30 and 50 percent, respectively. Increased oil revenues bankrolled the Venezuelan government’s expanded social programs in the 2000s.
The text approved during Thursday’s legislative session, following meetings between Venezuelan authorities and oil executives, went further than the draft preliminarily endorsed one week earlier.
The final version of the legislation establishes 30 percent as an upper bound for royalties, with the Venezuelan government given the discretionary power to determine the rate for each project. A 33 percent extraction tax in the present law was scrapped in favor of an “integrated hydrocarbon tax” to be set by the executive with a 15 percent limit.
Similarly, the Venezuelan government can reduce income taxes for companies involved in oil activities while also granting several other fiscal exemptions. The bill cites the “need to ensure international competitiveness” as a factor to be considered when decreasing royalty and tax demands for private corporations.
The reform additionally grants operational and sales control to minority partners and private contractors. PDVSA can furthermore lease out oilfields and projects in exchange for a fixed portion of extracted crude. The new legislation likewise allows disputes to be settled by outside arbitration instances.
Thursday’s legislative reform was immediately followed by a US Treasury general license allowing US corporations to re-engage with the Venezuelan oil sector.
General License 46 (GL46) authorizes US firms to purchase and market Venezuelan crude while demanding that contracts be subjected to US jurisdiction so potential disputes are referred to US courts. The license bars transactions with companies from Russia, Iran, North Korea, or Cuba. Concerning China, it only blocks dealings with Venezuelan joint ventures with Chinese involvement.
Economist Francisco Rodríguez pointed out that the sanctions waiver does not explicitly allow for production or investment and that companies would require an additional license before signing contracts with Venezuelan authorities.
GL46 also mandates that payments to blocked agents, including PDVSA, be made to the US Foreign Government Deposit Funds or another account defined by the US Treasury Department.
Following the January 3 military strikes and kidnapping of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, the Trump administration has vowed to take control of the Venezuelan oil industry by administering crude transactions. Proceeds from initial sales have been deposited in US-run bank accounts in Qatar, with a portion rerouted to Caracas for forex injections run by private banks. US Secretary of State Marco Rubio vowed that the resources will begin to be channeled to US Treasury accounts in the near future.
In a press conference on Friday, Trump said his administration is “very happy” with the actions of Venezuelan authorities and would soon invite other countries to get involved in the Caribbean nation’s oil industry. Rubio had previously argued that Caracas “deserved credit” for the oil reform that “eradicates Chávez-era restrictions on private investments.”
Despite the White House’s calls for substantial investment, Western oil corporations have expressed reservations over major projects in the Venezuelan energy sector. Chevron, the largest US company operating in the country, stated that it is looking to fund increased production with revenues from oil sales as opposed to new capital commitments.
Since 2017, Venezuela’s oil industry has been under wide-reaching US unilateral coercive measures, including financial sanctions and an export embargo, in an effort to strangle the country’s most important revenue source. The US Treasury Department has also levied and threatened secondary sanctions against third-country companies to deter involvement in the Venezuelan petroleum sector.
The post Venezuela Approves Pro-Business Oil Reform as Trump Issues New Sanctions Waiver appeared first on Venezuelanalysis.
From Venezuelanalysis via This RSS Feed.
this is not good
So Maduro basically was singlehandedly maintaining Venezuelan socialism, huh
Maduro kept promising to do exactly this kins of thing and the US wouldn’t make the deal. This kind of selling out has been brewing for some time.
It’s not just that he was removed, but that his removal constituted a very effective demonstration to those in charge that the US could do what it wanted militarily, or at the very least that the next Maduro could receive the same treatment or worse.
Gotta love endless streams of socialist movements subscribing to great man theory
It’s hard not to interpret this outcome as having been caused specifically by Maduro being removed. Nothing else has happened.
I can see how this was misinterpreted. I meant that the electoralist movement behind the PSUV and other left-electoralist parties have generally stuffed their energy into individual “great men” only making it easy for the bourgeois forces to defeat them, or threaten to do so with relative ease.
Perhaps I’m unknowingly subscribing to that theory too, because perhaps it isn’t that Lula, Evo, Sheinbaum, Maduro et al are the ultimate deciders.
I just fear there’s an inherent contradiction within socialist-electoralism between needing a popular figure to win elections, and the party that nominally reproduced the ideological doctrine necessary to survive leadership changes.
I think the contradiction is that electoralism requires a party that allows everyone in, but a strong vanguard that is not vulnerable to leadership decapitation due to skills and knowledge being high among ALL members requires being exclusive about party membership.
It’s gonna get extremely bleak here in the Americas for a while. The US is resorting to overt military force to maintain its hegemony. In the long term, this is bad for the US (and good for those of us wishing the end of empire). But in the time span of human life, especially of the next couple of decades - things are not good. Latin American countries need to realize what this danger is and act right now, in unison with other powers of the world to safeguard their interest to ensure what happens to Venezuela (and potentially Iran and Cuba which are the next likely targets) does not happen to others. There is no USSR - Russia is bogged down, far too bogged down than I think anyone expected. And China has focused far too much on defence and long-term economic planning to be able to change (not even sure if it would want to). The only option is for countries that do seek an alternate, independent path free from US influence, to help each other - and for those of us in countries currently ruled by regimes where that is NOT happening, to push for that to be the case. For those of us in the US? Protect your communities - things are going to get worse.
and what is that alternative? how do you compete against the most powerful empire of all time. it’s easy to want these poor countries to do more but that is the context within which they find themselves
we learn from history, how else? amerika isn’t the first empire, god willing it will be the last. all empires have been defeated, the british, the french, the spanish, to name but a few of the previous heirs to the throne of the most powerful empire of all time. they were not any less brutal or fascist or dominant compared to the tools of resistance the people had at their disposal back then. but people resisted nonetheless and the people won. it wasn’t easy then and it won’t be easy now. but it can be done. i’ll ask you, what else is there to be done? for each nation to just…lie down and accept colonialism? once again? is that why the tricontinent suffered and fought and resisted for centuries? to return to being oppressed?
I don’t comment on things like this often because I don’t even know how to reply to comments like this. like I understand you are frustrated, we are all frustrated, but
we learn from history, how else? amerika isn’t the first empire, god willing it will be the last. all empires have been defeated
this has nothing to do with what I said. all empires fall eventually but that doesn’t happen when a nation the size of cuba or venezeula decides to be like really anti-colonialist
but people resisted nonetheless and the people won
lots of people also died doing that, until one day the empires had collapsed and they had won. amerika may be an empire in decline but it remains very firmly in control of the world
it wasn’t easy then and it won’t be easy now. but it can be done.
how??? like seriously how? we’ve just seen the resistance in west asia basically abaonded by the rest of the world. china did not veto the “ceasefire”, neither did russia, russia couldn’t stop the collapse of syria, nasrallah is dead, amerika is about to bomb iran again, the zionists bomb lebanon regularly. and the genocide in gaza is ongoing, because empire has its friends in the gulf, egypt, turkey etc who all made sure its interests were enacted. these relatively powerless countries in syria and even like non-state actors like hezbollah did what I guess they should do according to you and look what happened
i’ll ask you, what else is there to be done? for each nation to just…lie down and accept colonialism? once again? is that why the tricontinent suffered and fought and resisted for centuries? to return to being oppressed?
you are not speaking to somebody who celebrates this new phase of empire reasserting itself. it goes without saying that what we are seeing is horrifying. I am being geniune when I ask you or others what you actually expect these relatively powerless nations to do when they’re acting mostly alone.
I think honestly the somewhat brutal truth is that life still works relatively well for eg the settlers of amerika, and so nothing is going to happen anytime soon. until we get a real left movement helping to disrupt empire from within I don’t expect much to change. also despite internationalism being completely dead and China not giving a fuck about anyone who isn’t themselves, maybe China’s rise could give some breathing space to some nations in the periphery who wise up and realise they have an option to not tie their economy as deeply to the dollar. but what do I know
Was trying to have this convo in the news mega. Seems most here are taking the defeatist position on what South America countries can do
it’s really easy to comment on niche communist internet forum on your phone that south american countries go down in a gloriuous bloody and ultimately doomed fight against empire, but i imagine it is harder for the leaders of said counties to make such a decisionFor sure , and I just see some options forming (not yet concrete, also I’ll not be the one to figure it out from the other side of the world lol). I think south America could do some radical move to actually separate more from China in exports (keep importing Chinese non-strategic stuff) and convince the USA to invest in them heavily, but doing this while maintaining some sovereignty. Deng was able to do this by using the USSR as the counter weight. I think China will survive such a thing easily (unlike the USSR which was materially weak relatively), and then Brazil, Venezuela, Mexico will be able to build up some needed production means without the US bombing them. Right now, I think we are underestimating how major the lacking production means is playing a role in subservience to the US.
There are tons of problems with this Idea, but I would like to work through more of the contradictions and see what’s possible.
Venezualan project has been doomed since they hit Chavez with the cancer gun tbh
Fucking cowards
so, did venezuela lose?
theyre about to, cause apparently other countries don’t have history books or the internet to figure out how ratfucked theyre gonna get. ukraine fucked themselves and venezuela will too. Used and abused with promises dangled like a carrot, but theyll never eat the carrot.
Despite the White House’s calls for substantial investment, Western oil corporations have expressed reservations over major projects in the Venezuelan energy sector. Chevron, the largest US company operating in the country, stated that it is looking to fund increased production with revenues from oil sales as opposed to new capital commitments.
So… Venezuela might get some sanctions reduced and all the outside oil companies are pretty much going to keep their production levels/infrastructure investments the same instead of turning the country into a forest of oil pumps… right?
