From Stabroek to the Orinoco: Two Petrostates, One Uncomfortable Question

OPINION BY: Hem Kumar–August 2026

Washington is negotiating direct access to Venezuela’s oil fields through a government it installed. Guyana should be watching the legal architecture, not just the geopolitics.

Reuters and Al Jazeera reported this week that the Trump administration is negotiating long-term access to a group of Venezuelan oilfields, structured as leases with an auction or tender to allocate blocks among American producers. Axios and the Wall Street Journal have since reported a more direct version: the United States government itself taking an equity stake in more than a dozen fields holding roughly 90 billion barrels — nearly a third of Venezuela’s proven reserves — with the deal spearheaded personally by Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Venezuela’s interim president, Delcy Rodríguez.

Whichever legal form it eventually takes, the direction is unambiguous. Seven months after the United States removed Nicolás Maduro from power, Washington is moving to convert its military and political leverage in Venezuela into a durable claim on the largest proven oil reserves on Earth. For a publication that has spent this year dissecting the legal architecture of Guyana’s own oil relationship with a foreign power, the Venezuelan deal is not a curiosity next door. It is a second data point in the same experiment — and one being conducted with far less legal cover than the first.

A Different Species of Arrangement

It is worth being precise about what distinguishes this deal from Guyana’s, because the comparison is instructive only if it is accurate. Guyana’s Stabroek Block operates under a 2016 Production Sharing Agreement — a private commercial contract between the state and a consortium of international companies (ExxonMobil, Hess, CNOOC), negotiated and signed by an elected government, however lopsided its terms. Whatever this newsroom has argued about the PSA’s fiscal structure, its absence of ring-fencing, or its selectively invoked “sanctity of contract,” the underlying instrument is a corporate agreement between a sovereign state and private firms.

What is being negotiated in Venezuela is a different species of arrangement entirely. Axios and the Wall Street Journal both describe active discussion of the US government itself holding direct equity in Venezuelan oilfields — not American companies operating under a state contract, but Washington as a working-interest holder in a foreign country’s national patrimony.

The Wall Street Journal notes this is historically almost unheard of: the only comparable precedent it could locate was Franklin Roosevelt’s wartime effort to create a US state oil company and buy into Saudi concessions in the 1940s — an effort that ultimately failed.                 Direct sovereign-to-sovereign resource capture of this kind has essentially no functioning modern precedent.

Layered onto that novelty is a legal problem Reuters flagged and that Venezuelan legal critics have seized on: Venezuela’s constitution reserves the hydrocarbon sector’s core activities to the state, and current law does not provide for the kind of acreage leases under discussion. Ricardo Hausmann — a Harvard economist and former Venezuelan government minister, not a fringe commentator — has already called both the interim government and the underlying hydrocarbons law illegitimate, writing that “an illegitimate interim government with an illegitimate hydrocarbons law has no legitimacy to strike this unconstitutional deal,” and predicting it “will be a fiasco for all involved, starting with Secretary of State Rubio.”

“They are treated as expropriated peoples in Guyana. Now examine what may happen next door — where the negotiating government was appointed, not elected.”

Who Is Actually Signing

The single fact that should concern Guyanese observers most is not the oil at all. It is the identity of the Venezuelan signatory. Delcy Rodríguez, the interim president now negotiating away nearly a third of Venezuela’s proven reserves, is Maduro’s own former vice president — installed by Washington after Maduro’s capture, not elected by Venezuelans. María Corina Machado, the opposition leader who actually won the 2024 election by a documented landslide and who was awarded the 2025 Nobel Peace Prize for her fight for that democratic transition, has been publicly sidelined from the process.

The Center for American Progress has characterized the arrangement bluntly: Washington “traded a democratic transition for oil access,” swapping “one indicted autocrat for another — this time, one acceptable to U.S. business interests.”

Machado herself has called for a fundamentally different model — full privatization of PDVSA, a new oil law, and Washington’s continued oversight of oil revenue only until a genuinely elected government can take over — explicitly conditioning long-term investment security on the rule of law and independent institutions that a durable, elected government would provide, not an interim one appointed by a foreign power.

That the deal now moving toward signature bypasses her entirely, in favor of the very apparatus she spent over a decade opposing, is the clearest evidence yet that this is a resource-access project first and a democratic transition project a distant second, if at all.

Two Petrostates, Side by Side

Questions Without Plausible Answers Yet

Several structural questions remain genuinely open, and any responsible analysis has to sit with that rather than resolve it prematurely:

• Legitimacy and durability. If an unelected interim government signs 20-to-30-year commitments over a constitutionally reserved sector, does that bind a future elected Venezuelan government at all — or does it simply guarantee another cycle of contract disputes once Machado, or any elected successor, takes office? Guyana’s own PSA fight over “sanctity of contract” suggests durability questions do not resolve themselves even when the signing government was legitimately elected.
• What happens to Essequibo. Rubio has already answered part of this one directly. Standing beside President Ali in Georgetown, he warned that any Venezuelan “adventurism” against Guyana or ExxonMobil’s operations would carry serious consequences — explicitly linking Washington’s Venezuela policy to Guyana’s territorial security. That commitment reads differently now that Washington has direct commercial exposure inside Venezuela’s own oil sector: the US has as much interest in a quiet, unresolved border dispute that keeps both governments dependent on American goodwill as it does in an active one favoring either side.
• The Chinese displacement question. Some of the 17 fields under negotiation, in Lake Maracaibo, are currently operated under contracts signed with a Chinese firm during the Maduro era. Whether this deal formally displaces those contracts — and whether that becomes a template Washington applies to Chinese-linked interests elsewhere in the region, including the Berbice port financing this newsroom  has tracked shifting from Chinese pre-feasibility interest toward Bechtel and Hess — is not yet answered.
• Field allocation transparency. Axios has separately reported friction inside the US government over the “pace” of Venezuelan oil deals, with industry figures pressing Washington to “pick winners and losers” among competing American firms. An opaque field-allocation process of this kind, run by a foreign government inside another country’s oil patrimony, is precisely the kind of arrangement that would draw sustained scrutiny from transparency advocates if it happened in Guyana.

Why This Matters in Georgetown

It would be a mistake to read the Venezuelan deal as simply “worse than Guyana’s” and leave it there. The more useful reading is structural: both cases show a resource-rich, institutionally strained state entering long-term hydrocarbon commitments with a dominant external power, under conditions where the domestic legal and democratic architecture is contested rather than settled. Guyana’s version of that story ran through a corporate PSA and an elected government whose 2020 about-face on renegotiation this publication has already documented in detail. Venezuela’s version is running through direct state-to-state resource capture, negotiated by a government that never faced Venezuelan voters, over the explicit objection of the woman who did — and won.

If the deal is signed in anything like its current reported form, it will hand Washington its clearest opportunity yet to demonstrate whether “energy security in the Western Hemisphere” means genuine partnership with resource-rich states, or simply a more efficient method of extraction dressed in newer legal clothing.

Guyana, sitting on the other side of a still-unresolved and now newly consequential border dispute, has every reason to watch closely.

— The Board

Sources: Al Jazeera, Reuters (via Al Jazeera), Axios, Wall Street Journal (via Fortune/Axios reporting), Fortune, Center for American Progress, ABC News, CNBC/KHOU (Machado, CERAWeek), Associated Press (Rubio–Guyana remarks). This piece will be updated as terms of the deal, if signed, become public.