President Trump and his top advisers could not be more blunt in their claims: The United States created Venezuela’s oil industry. Venezuela stole American oil fields through nationalizations. Now, the United States wants those assets back.
Those assertions have been used to justify the U.S. blockade on sanctioned tankers going to and from Venezuela. They have also pushed oil, alongside illicit drugs, to the center of the Trump administration’s pressure campaign against Venezuela’s leader, Nicolás Maduro.
But they also play into a core tenet of the Bolivarian revolutionary movement started in Venezuela by Hugo Chávez, Mr. Maduro’s predecessor and mentor, in the 1990s: that the United States is plotting to seize Venezuela’s oil.
“When they make the claim, ‘We’re going for land, for oil,’ it really discounts the depth to which Venezuelans understand oil as part of our birthright,” said Alejandro Velasco, a historian of modern Venezuela at New York University.
It is difficult to overstate the mythical importance oil holds in Venezuela. Like beauty pageant winners and baseball, oil is a source of national pride and a prism through which Venezuelans often compare their society to others.
Venezuela’s oil reserves rank among the world’s largest, even if production has declined as a result of mismanagement, corruption and U.S. sanctions. Multiple Venezuelan leaders have used oil revenues to project influence abroad, especially in Latin America.
Thanks largely to oil revenues, Venezuelans enjoyed some of the region’s highest living standards into the 1980s. It was a Venezuelan, the politician Juan Pablo Pérez Alfonzo, who was the driving force to create OPEC, the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries, in 1960 in Baghdad.
By openly declaring that his aim is to regain oil fields, Mr. Trump has touched a nerve involving sensitive issues of sovereignty and national identity, setting off a volatile new phase in the standoff between Caracas and Washington.
Some in the camp of María Corina Machado, an opposition leader and the Nobel Peace Prize winner, praised Mr. Trump’s blockade, underscoring her firm embrace of the U.S. military campaign in the Caribbean.
Others warn that Mr. Trump’s belligerence could backfire by provoking a nationalist response that breathes new life into Mr. Maduro’s efforts to maintain his grip on power.
“Venezuela belongs to the Venezuelans, period,” Luis Florido, an opposition figure, said on social media after Mr. Trump made his ambitions clear regarding Venezuela’s colossal oil reserves.
Mr. Florido added that the blockade would do little to hurt Mr. Maduro while potentially devastating the livelihoods of normal Venezuelans if oil exports, the economy’s lifeblood, go into free fall.
“To recover our sovereignty, we cannot destroy our own country,” Mr. Florido said.
Stephen Miller, a top adviser to Mr. Trump, seemed to express little regard on Wednesday for the oil nationalism that imbues Venezuelan politics, reflecting instead on an era when Americans wielded immense sway in the country.
“American sweat, ingenuity and toil created the oil industry in Venezuela,” Mr. Miller said. “Its tyrannical expropriation was the largest recorded theft of American wealth and property. These pillaged assets were then used to fund terrorism and flood our streets with killers, mercenaries and drugs.”
Mr. Miller did not specify which of Venezuela’s nationalizations informed his stance.
In 1976, Venezuela took control of the assets of ExxonMobil, Shell and Chevron, using them to create the state oil company Petróleos de Venezuela. Unlike sudden nationalizations elsewhere at the time, this process was a negotiated transition after decades of incremental policy shifts.
Mr. Chávez embarked on another nationalization phase in 2007, with the aim of dismantling the opening of the oil industry in the 1990s, which had allowed international oil companies to again put down stakes in Venezuela.
Even though Mr. Chávez allowed the foreign companies to remain in Venezuela on less favorable terms, this nationalization was more contentious, setting off protracted legal battles with U.S. oil giants like ExxonMobil and ConocoPhillips, which claimed they were owed billion of dollars in compensation.
Some of the ill will from this process involved Mr. Chávez’s push to situate oil at the heart of his revolution. He purged political opponents from Petróleos de Venezuela and transformed the company into a cash cow for antipoverty programs at home and political alliances with other countries, like Cuba, that chafed at the power of the United States.
These days, it’s hard to fathom the sway that American oil companies once had in Venezuela.
The foreign rush to exploit Venezuela’s oil began more than a century ago when the dictator Juan Vicente Gómez granted sweeping concessions to companies mainly from the United States and Britain.
The American companies didn’t just own the wells. They also built towns replete with hospitals, schools and baseball diamonds, creating “oil camps” that functioned as English-speaking enclaves for American workers and their families.
By the early 1960s, the number of Americans in Venezuela formed the largest postwar American expatriate community in the world, according to the historian Judith Ewell.
Even for some Venezuelans who loathe Mr. Maduro or the political movement forged by his predecessor, returning to such an era would be a deal breaker.
“You can detest Chavismo with every reason,” said Blanca Vera Azaf, an economic commentator. “But from there to turning into a traitorous hyena shows that you sold your soul to Hades.”
Simon Romero is a Times correspondent covering Mexico, Central America and the Caribbean. He is based in Mexico City.
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