The Orinoco Rush and the Stabroek Warning

The Orinoco Rush and the Stabroek Warning

EDITORIAL BY: Editor— September 2026

How Venezuela’s unelected government is signing away a generation of oil before it has earned a mandate to sign anything — and why Georgetown should be watching its own contracts, not just Caracas’s

On September 2, 2026, U.S. Energy Secretary Chris Wright stood in Miraflores Palace beside Delcy Rodríguez — Venezuela’s acting president, installed after the U.S. military removed Nicolás Maduro in January and a woman her own government’s chief diplomat once refused to call legitimate and announced a new round of oil agreements with Chevron and Eni. The same week, on the other side of the ledger, Colombia’s Gilinski family finalized its move to take majority control of NYSE-listed GeoPark Ltd., a Bogotá-based operator, in exchange for handing GeoPark a twenty-five-year Production Participation Contract over the Bare Block in Venezuela’s Orinoco Heavy Oil Belt — a field holding an estimated 15.7 billion barrels. Grupo Gilinski becomes GeoPark’s controlling shareholder, financed entirely in stock, at a moment when the contract, the government, and the country’s political future are all, by design, still unsettled.

Asked, at that same press conference, when Venezuelans might actually vote, Rodríguez offered no date — only that elections would come once the country is “ready,” on terms she alone would judge. It is worth sitting with the arithmetic. The oil contracts now being signed run for a quarter of a century.

The elections attached to them have no year, let alone a month. Sovereignty, on this timeline, is the thing to be arranged later. The wells are being arranged now.

A GOVERNMENT THAT CANNOT BIND THE FUTURE IT DOESN’T REPRESENT

The legitimacy problem here is not our editorial invention; it is the stated position of the same administration cutting the deals. Secretary of State Marco Rubio said at the time of Rodríguez’s swearing-in that he did not consider her government legitimate, because Venezuela has never held a free and fair election under it. Eight months on, his own Energy Secretary is signing that government’s name to contracts that will outlast most of the people negotiating them. Harvard economist Ricardo Hausmann, reviewing the same deal, was blunter still, calling it an asset grab struck with a government that lacks the constitutional standing to make a commitment of that length — predicting, in his words, that “this announced deal will not stand.”

María Corina Machado; the exiled opposition leader whose candidate is widely understood to have won the stolen 2024 election — has made the same point from the other direction: the transition to democracy, she says, has not yet happened. Senator Ted Cruz, no critic of the deal’s economics, still calls Maduro’s successor government illegitimate and wants elections to move “rapidly.” Nobody serious is disputing that Rodríguez’s mandate is borrowed, not earned. The dispute is only over whether that should have stopped the drilling.

The order of operations is the argument. Stabilization, then resource contracts, then — eventually, undated — a vote. Everywhere that sequence appears, the contract is the part that actually happens on schedule.

A PATTERN THIS NEWSROOM HAS SEEN BEFORE

Readers of this newsroom’s Stabroek Surrender series will recognize the shape of this immediately, because we have spent four parts and a fifth in progress documenting its Guyanese cousin. In 2016, a government with a fraction of Rodríguez’s legitimacy problem — but facing its own institutional immaturity, an untested regulatory apparatus, and an electorate that had no meaningful opportunity to weigh in on fiscal terms before signature — locked Guyana into a Production Sharing Agreement whose stability clauses, cost-recovery ceiling, and absence of ring-fencing are still, a decade later, being defended by the current government as “sanctity of contract” — even as that same government freely concedes it did not fully enforce the audit and gas-utilization obligations inside that same contract. Sanctity, in Georgetown as in Caracas, has always been selective: binding when it protects the operator, negotiable when it inconveniences the state.

The Orinoco rush is that same mechanism running at higher speed and lower cover. Venezuela’s contracts are being signed under an outright unelected government, in full public view of officials who call that government illegitimate while signing its paperwork. Guyana’s was signed by an elected government under undisclosed terms that took years of freedom-of-information fights and independent legal analysis to surface. The end state — a resource base committed for a generation before the public that owns it had a genuine chance to negotiate the split — is the same end state. Only the packaging differs.

WHY THIS SHOULD WORRY GEORGETOWN, NOT JUST CARACAS

There are three concrete reasons this newsroom is treating the Orinoco pattern as a warning for Guyana rather than a foreign curiosity.

First, capital displaced from Venezuela’s newly reopened but still politically unstable fields does not evaporate — it reallocates regionally, and Guyana’s offshore basin, now producing under a fiscal regime already criticised as too generous, is the most obvious secondary destination for operators and financiers hedging against a Venezuelan deal that Hausmann and others expect could be renegotiated or voided by a future, legitimately elected Venezuelan government. A rush of new entrants chasing that hedge is a rush our own regulators, courts, and Parliament — sitting four to five times in 299 days, per this newsroom’s own reporting — are no better prepared to referee than they were in 2016.

Second, the Bare Block deal is a live demonstration of how quickly “transitional” arrangements calcify into permanent facts. No one signing the GeoPark-PDVSA contract expects Venezuela’s next elected government to have real leverage to unwind a twenty-five-year commitment already booked, financed, and trading on the NYSE. The same dynamic already applies to Guyana’s Stabroek Block: every cost-recovery dollar Uaru, Whiptail, and Hammerhead now draw from the same undivided pool that just finished repaying Exxon’s original $55 billion pushes the date of any real renegotiation further away, contract clause by contract clause, exactly as Christopher Ram has argued.

Third, and most directly: the rhetorical cover being used in Caracas — that the country needs foreign capital and technical capacity now, and that popular sovereignty can be reconciled with the contract later; is structurally identical to the cover President Ali has used to defend Guyana’s own refusal to reopen Stabroek’s terms. “We cannot scare off investment” and “elections will come when we are ready” are the same sentence wearing different clothes. Guyana does not need Venezuela’s coup and interim government to have Guyana’s legitimacy problem; it only needs to keep signing contracts on the logic that the public’s genuine, informed consent is a formality to be arranged once the ink is already dry.

THE STANDARD WE ARE APPLYING

This newsroom takes no position on whether removing Maduro was justified, nor on the broader geopolitics of the U.S. re-entry into Venezuelan oil. Our objection is narrower and, we think, harder to dispute: a government without a mandate to govern past the transition it was installed to manage has no mandate to sign contracts that outlive that transition by a quarter-century. The same standard applies whether the signature belongs to an acting president installed by foreign troops or an elected one who has simply declined, for years , to let the public see or revisit the terms it is bound by.

Contracts made in the dark — whether the darkness is a lack of votes or a lack of disclosure — carry the same defect. Guyana has one already. It does not need a second, and it should not need Caracas’s example to notice the pattern in its own harbor.

— The Board