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Venezuela is under United States occupation, albeit without the physical presence of U.S. troops on the ground. Since January 3 — when the Trump administration attacked the country and kidnapped President Nicolás Maduro and First Lady Cilia Flores on highly questionable drug and weapons charges — Venezuela has lost control of its oil, minerals, and foreign policy.

In Maduro’s absence Delcy Rodríguez, previously the country’s vice president, took office as interim president. Together with her brother Jorge Rodríguez — head of Venezuela’s National Assembly — they have been speaking to U.S. and Spanish media outlets about moving Venezuela towards a market-friendly economy while welcoming U.S. diplomats and delegations into the country.

Reporting on Rodríguez’s interim presidency, an article in The Washington Post recently noted that “the country has largely avoided revolutionary convulsions while a Wild West marketplace swarms with U.S. companies and investors.” Focusing on the Cuban American lawyer Mauricio Claver-Carone, the Post notes that since the military operation that deposed Maduro, Claver-Carone has become the “unofficial U.S. viceroy of Venezuela, helping to implement the administration’s plan to work with Delcy Rodríguez and exploit the South American country’s vast oil wealth.”

A Government of Occupation

Tony Boza, an economist and former National Assembly legislator for the ruling United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV), told Truthout that the Rodríguez administration should be viewed as “a government of occupation.” Its job, in his view, is to “rapidly and hastily transform a series of laws, practically without consultation, while fulfilling all of the requirements being imposed upon it.” In this process, Boza says Venezuela’s financial independence has been decimated.

“The resources that are being sold — in the case of oil and gold — are being handled with complete opacity, and nobody knows under what exact conditions they are being sold,” Boza said, “because all of that passed under the direct control of the group surrounding Donald Trump, even in violation of U.S. law itself, because there was never any declaration of war.”

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On January 29, 2026, the National Assembly passed the Organic Hydrocarbons Law, which has been seen as the most important change to Venezuela’s oil-sector framework since changes made in 2006 and 2007, when the government of Hugo Chávez forced foreign oil companies operating in the Orinoco Belt to convert their projects into mixed enterprises (empresas mixtas) in which Venezuela’s state oil company would hold at least 60 percent ownership.

According to Boza, the central issue is that the royalties that the state receives from the energy sector for granting it the right to extract and sell oil are now contingent on a company’s profitability. That means if a business does not generate profits on paper, royalty payments could fall to as little as 1 percent or even zero, since there is no guaranteed minimum threshold. In the future, he says, “disputes arising from the management of the oil business” will be “transferred abroad” because of the constitutional changes made under Rodríguez. This will mean that energy disputes will most likely end up in U.S. courts — the same judiciary that a few years ago seized Venezuela’s state-owned Citgo company under the umbrella of U.S. sanctions.

Venezuelan trade union activist Adelmo Becerra, from the National Institute for Training and Socialist Education (INCES), has a similar opinion. Speaking to Truthout, Becerra said the changes to........

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