Venezuelans in no mood to dance despite Trump's oil bonanza

Nicolás Maduro has all but vanished from the walls of Caracas. Nine months after a US military operation removed him from power on January 3, the billboards, murals and government façades that once carried his face in profusion bear little trace of the unpopular, authoritarian leader who inherited Hugo Chávez's revolution.

For more than a decade Maduro's likeness was a fixture of the Venezuelan capital, part of a visual apparatus Chavismo used to project its permanence. Chávez's image served the same purpose. The stylised eyes first deployed in his 2012 re-election campaign were later reproduced across the country and became an emblem of the state. Much of that imagery is now peeling away, unmourned by most, and nothing of comparable weight has taken its place.

Delcy Rodríguez, Maduro's former vice-president and now the country's interim leader under US tutelage, has made little effort to fill the void. Her administration has few street-level markers and no signature public works to its name. The most conspicuous billboards in the capital honour the rescuers who responded to the twin devastating earthquakes of June 24, while newer campaigns promote “Venezuela Renace,” a programme to rebuild homes and infrastructure damaged in the disasters.

Yet the retreat of Chavista iconography has done little to persuade Venezuelans that their circumstances have changed. An economy hollowed out by more than two decades of mismanagement and corruption, and then by US sanctions, is showing signs of recovery on paper but not in people's lives. Those interviewed by IntelliNews in Caracas said economic hardship remained their overriding concern, as a sliding bolívar drove up prices and blunted any benefit from the foreign investment pledged for the oil and energy sectors.

"Economic deterioration remains one of the main problems for Venezuelans. Since Maduro was captured, there has been no economic recovery of the kind many expected. The official dollar exchange rate continues to rise almost every day and, with it, prices are also increasing," said Mariano, an investigative journalist who returned from exile this year. He and others quoted in this article asked that their real names be withheld for security reasons.

Some businesses, he said, have begun pricing goods against the euro as currency volatility intensifies. He also questioned whether the oil revenues touted by Donald Trump are reaching ordinary Venezuelans. "After nine months, there is also no sign of investments that have produced a significant improvement in quality of life. Power cuts have become worse and so has the water supply," he said.

That is a far cry from Trump's rosy account of Venezuelans "dancing in the streets because they have a lot of money coming in through the big oil companies that are all moving in".

The money is real, but its path to Venezuelan households is circuitous. Since January, Washington has in effect taken control of the country's crude sales. US Secretary of State Marco Rubio told the Senate foreign relations committee in January that proceeds would be held in a US-supervised account in Qatar, so that Caracas could pay police, sanitation workers and the day-to-day costs of government. Supervision was meant to guard against the graft that plagued PDVSA, the state oil company, under Chávez and Maduro. Energy secretary Chris Wright later said the revenue would no longer pass through Qatar, and Rubio told the US Congress that Venezuela had agreed to submit monthly budget requests to the State Department to receive its share of the proceeds.

But transparency remains thin. PDVSA has published no revenue figures since 2016, and the administration has not disclosed how much it controls.

The relationship deepened sharply in late August, when Trump announced what he called "the biggest oil deal in world history". The agreement covers 17 fields that Caracas says hold 65bn barrels of proven reserves, roughly a fifth of the national total, eight of them in the Maracaibo Basin and nine in the Orinoco belt. Rodríguez said the pact targets output of more than 1.5mn barrels a day over 25 years.

US officials said the arrangement would give Washington 55% of the effective output of a new private joint venture, split between equity in a holding company and oil bought at cost, with production earmarked for the US Strategic Petroleum Reserve and the military. The operator, North American Blue Energy Partners, will hold operating control, while the US government will hold a 35% stake, preferential access to 20% of production at cost and a veto over the board, a majority of whose members must be American. The company is headed by Alejandro Betancourt, a controversial businessman with ties to the Maduro government.

Rodríguez hailed the agreement as historic. Critics are less convinced. Opponents across Venezuela's political spectrum have questioned its legality and warned that it erodes national sovereignty, and analysts note that the constitution reserves ownership of petroleum to the state. Output is already recovering. Production rose to 1.2mn bpd in August, driven mainly by Chevron's joint ventures with PDVSA.

Commercial convenience, meanwhile, has turned old foes into partners. Washington has lifted sanctions on Rodríguez and recognised her as "sole Head of State" in federal court proceedings, while Trump has called her a “terrific person” who is "doing a fantastic job.” The pair met for the first time in New York last month to discuss Venezuela’s economic recovery and political transition, according to Rubio.

But for Mariale, a nurse at two public hospitals, that unlikely partnership has yet to show up in her paycheck. "In reality, I haven't seen any difference since Maduro left. I think the people benefiting are the politicians, as always, while ordinary people remain in the same situation. If there are no improvements in wages, we remain where we were," she said.

Carlos, a young chef juggling two jobs to get by, asked why the investment Washington trumpets has yet to show up in basic services. "Improvements should start to become visible when you are negotiating with a country that, according to what is being said, is investing millions of dollars in Venezuela," he said. For him, economic recovery is inseparable from political change. "For the situation to improve, the only option is to hold transparent elections and move towards a democratic and consensual transfer of power."

That transition looks increasingly distant. Hopes that a vote would be called within months of Maduro's ouster have given way to talk of elections in 2027 or even 2028. Addressing the UN General Assembly in New York last month, Rodríguez promised that free elections would be held and said her government had opened talks with opposition groups, but set no date. The White House has likewise shown little public urgency. Rubio told US senators in January that a rushed democratic transition was not the first priority, and Trump said in July that Venezuelans were "not ready yet for the elections".

"Many Venezuelans expected elections to be called during the first three months of the transition. Now, instead, people are talking about 2027 or even 2028. That fuels the perception that there has been no real political change," Mariano said. "Although repression has eased, those who carried out the previous system remain in power. For many Venezuelans, seeing Trump alongside Delcy creates the impression that there will be no meaningful political transformation and that he did not fulfil what he promised, that he betrayed them."

On one front, at least, Venezuelans describe real change. Maduro claimed victory in the July 28, 2024 election despite opposition tallies showing a clear win for its candidate, Edmundo González, and the brutal crackdown that followed led to more than 2,000 political arrests. This year, those interviewed said, persecution has eased markedly.

According to Foro Penal, a Venezuelan rights group, the authorities have freed most of those detainees this year, including every journalist still in custody, although a few civilian and military political prisoners remain behind bars. Some Venezuelans who fled earlier crises have begun to return, among them figures close to María Corina Machado, the opposition leader and 2025 Nobel Peace Prize laureate.

Machado herself, sidelined by the Trump administration in favour of Rodriguez, remains abroad. In recent weeks she has said she has been prevented from entering the country on seven occasions, without saying who blocked her or how.

"The return of opposition figures who left Venezuela after the political crises of 2014 and 2017 also suggests that arbitrary detentions at airports have become less common. It is a sign of some opening, although not necessarily of a break with the past," Mariano said.

Venezuelans have also regained some freedom to protest, reopening an outlet for discontent that the 2024 crackdown had largely closed. But the persistence of economic and political grievances shows how limited the transition has been so far.

Maduro may have disappeared from the walls of Caracas, and his successors now dance to Washington's tune. The structures and ills of his era, though, are proving far harder to erase.