Blood in the Crude: Oil, Power, and the Lawless State

Blood in the Crude: How Law, Oil, and Presidential Power Collided in Caracas

Oil is never the explanation.
Oil is the reason.

Every American intervention insists on a story, preferably one involving law, morality, and reluctant necessity. The paperwork comes thick and solemn: indictments unsealed, doctrines cited, memos stamped classified. What is never listed on the first page is the commodity underneath it all. Yet beneath the rhetoric, beneath the raid footage and courtroom schedules, the motive is almost always measurable in barrels.

Venezuela, inconveniently, has more of them than anyone.

With roughly **303 billion barrels of proven reserves, nearly one-fifth of the world’s total **Venezuela should be an energy superpower. Instead, it became an object lesson in suspended potential: the richest oil state on Earth reduced to a production cripple, pumping a fraction of what its geology allows. Wells intact, reserves untouched, output strangled, not by nature, but by politics.

By comparison, the United States, Saudi Arabia, and Russia each routinely produce between 9 and 13 million barrels per day. Venezuela, the Saudi Arabia of reserves became an energy beggar, its wells choked, its refineries cannibalized, its output dependent on narrow sanctions waivers granted to companies like Chevron or on opaque partnerships with Iran. The paradox was not geological. It was political.

And that is where Nicolás Maduro became inconvenient.

That contradiction, the oil that exists but cannot flow, set the stage for what followed in early January 2026. What was presented as a law-enforcement action was, in fact, something far older and far simpler: power clearing an obstacle.

The explanation for what followed would be far more elaborate; indictments, doctrines, memos stamped classified, a paper labyrinth designed to make brute interest look like moral inevitability. That distinction matters, because what unfolded in Venezuela was not merely a military operation, nor merely a law-enforcement action. It was the collision of energy hunger, executive power, and a five-year-old criminal case resurrected as a casus belli.

This is a familiar American rhythm. First comes the moral narrative, then the legal scaffolding, and finally the material reward, rarely announced outright, except when Donald Trump, characteristically, does exactly that.

The paper trail begins quietly enough. In March 2020, during Trump’s first term, the Department of Justice under Attorney General William Barr unsealed sweeping narco-terrorism indictments against Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and senior members of his inner circle. The charges were extraordinary in scope and ambition: that Maduro had, for more than two decades, presided over a criminal enterprise, the so-called Cartel of the Suns that fused the Venezuelan state with cocaine trafficking on an industrial scale.

The indictments alleged a “narco-terrorism partnership” with the Colombian FARC, the deliberate use of cocaine as a geopolitical weapon against the United States, the conversion of military airbases and ports into drug corridors, the issuance of diplomatic passports to traffickers, and the systematic hollowing-out of Venezuela’s judiciary and armed forces to ensure impunity. It was, in the DOJ’s telling, not corruption but governance, a state redesigned as a cartel.

It was also a prosecutorial theory that solved several political problems at once. It reframed a failed sanctions policy as a moral crusade. It converted regime change into criminal justice. And it allowed oil, the world’s most persistent motivator to remain safely unnamed.

The case went nowhere in 2020. Trump lost the election. Maduro stayed in Caracas. The indictments gathered dust, joining the long shelf of American grievances against inconvenient governments.

Until they didn’t.

On January 3, 2026, Attorney General Pam Bondi announced a new, expanded indictment, now including Maduro’s wife, Cilia Flores, just hours after U.S. forces conducted pre-dawn airstrikes across Caracas and seized the couple in what the administration described as a “precision operation.” By nightfall, the former Venezuelan president was en route to New York, bound for the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn. Arraignment was scheduled for Monday.

The choreography was unmistakable: military force followed by legal ceremony, Delta Force clearing the stage so the Southern District of New York could take a bow. The message was equally clear, law would follow power, not restrain it.

President Trump, never one for subtlety, dispensed with the euphemisms. Standing before cameras, he praised the operation as “brilliant,” lauded the troops as “great,” and then pivoted, without pause to Venezuela’s oil.

The United States, he said, would be “very strongly involved” in Venezuela’s petroleum industry going forward. American oil companies, he reminded reporters, were the “biggest and greatest” in the world.

It was the sentence that collapsed the entire edifice of justification into a single, clarifying moment. Everything else, the indictments, the doctrines, the talk of cartels and terror, suddenly read less like cause and more like cover.

Every American intervention requires a story, and this one was no exception. The administration framed the operation as a law-enforcement action occurring within an “armed conflict” against drug cartels newly designated as Foreign Terrorist Organizations. Under this theory, Maduro was not a sovereign head of state but the leader of a transnational criminal enemy, stripped of immunity by illegitimacy and indictment alike. Article II powers were invoked. Precedent was cited. Noriega was name-checked.

It is worth lingering on that comparison.

Manuel Noriega was indicted before the invasion of Panama, but the invasion itself rested on broader claims: treaty obligations, protection of U.S. citizens, and the security of the Panama Canal. The indictments mattered, but they were not the whole story. They supplemented power; they did not substitute for it.

Here, the indictment is the story. It is the authorization, the rationale, and if the administration has its way, the historical alibi.

Trump’s justification is cruder and more revealing. This is not containment or democracy promotion or canal security. It is prosecution fused with extraction, a criminal case repurposed as regime change, with oil waiting patiently at the end of the runway.

Venezuela, after all, sits atop the largest proven oil reserves on Earth, reserves long rendered inaccessible by sanctions, decay, and political hostility. For decades, American oil companies have circled those fields like creditors waiting out a bankruptcy. What sanctions could not unlock, shock and awe just might.

International law has not been persuaded. The UN Charter’s prohibition on the use of force remains stubbornly intact. The OAS has again deplored intervention. Regional powers have condemned the strikes. Members of Congress have questioned the bypassing of the War Powers Resolution. Even the evidence underpinning recent maritime attacks, Operation Southern Spear has been challenged, with no public lab confirmations released and allegations that civilian vessels may have been struck.

But legality, like oil, has a way of becoming flexible under pressure.

Now the drama shifts from airspace to courtroom.

Maduro’s defense team is expected to attack the case on three fronts: the illegality of the capture, head-of-state immunity, and the credibility of the evidence itself. They will call the operation an extrajudicial abduction. They will note the reliance on defectors and cooperating witnesses. They will ask, pointedly, where the cocaine is.

The government will reply with Alvarez-Machain, the Ker–Frisbie doctrine, and the assertion that courts do not inquire into the manner of capture. Jurisdiction, they will say, is not morality.

That argument has always been less a legal principle than a confession of power.

And if the United States is now the law-enforcement agency of the world, the selectivity becomes impossible to ignore.

Vladimir Putin is subject to an active ICC arrest warrant for the unlawful deportation of Ukrainian children. Benjamin Netanyahu faces ICC warrants alleging war crimes and crimes against humanity. These are not activist petitions; they are formal actions by the world’s primary tribunal for atrocity crimes.

And yet there are no pre-dawn airstrikes in Moscow. No commandos landing outside Tel Aviv. No declarations that sovereignty has been nullified by indictment. Instead, there are sanctions against the court itself, executive orders, denunciations, and speeches about politicized justice.

The principle is suddenly rediscovered: that borders matter, that sovereignty survives accusation, that legality without consent is aggression.

But imagine the reversal.

Imagine a foreign power issuing a criminal indictment against Donald Trump and dispatching commandos to seize him in a “precision operation.” Imagine the memos. The doctrines. The claims of necessity.

The American response would not be procedural. It would be incandescent.

That is the mirror this moment refuses to look into.

What happens next is uncertain. Convictions in cases this political rarely decide history. Circumstances do; detention, diplomacy, exhaustion, bargains struck far from cameras.

What is clear is this: Venezuela’s sovereignty has been shattered, its president sits in a Brooklyn cell, and its oil fields are suddenly the subject of intense American enthusiasm. History suggests that when law and power merge this seamlessly, the former rarely survives intact.

In time, the language will soften. The raid will become an operation. The seizure will become a transfer. The oil fields will become “partnership opportunities.” Contracts will be signed, production will rise, markets will applaud stability restored. And somewhere between the first tanker leaving port and the first quarterly earnings call, the original justification will fade into background noise, indictments yellowing in court files, sovereignty reduced to a footnote.

That is how these stories always end: not with a verdict, but with a flow rate. When law is used as a weapon and oil as the prize, justice is never the point, it is the packaging. And once the crude begins to move, the blood that cleared its path is quietly written out of the story.

Why It Matters

This piece exposes how legal language is weaponized to sanitize raw power. When indictments replace diplomacy and military force precedes courtroom theater, the rule of law becomes branding, not restraint. Venezuela is not an anomaly; it is a warning. If sovereignty can be erased by paperwork and oil interests, no nation is truly protected from “lawful” conquest.

Key Takeaways

• U.S. indictments against foreign leaders can function as retroactive justification for regime change
• Venezuela’s vast oil reserves, not law enforcement are the true motivator behind intervention
• Legal process increasingly follows military power instead of constraining it
• Selective enforcement reveals that “justice” applies only to unfriendly regimes
• When oil is the prize, law becomes packaging, not principle

Further Reading – Bookshop.org

1. The Open Veins of Latin America – Eduardo Galeano. A foundational account of how foreign extraction hollowed out Latin America’s sovereignty. https://civilheresy.com/open veins of latin america
2. The New Confessions of an Economic Hit Man – John Perkins. A firsthand look at how economic pressure and regime change serve corporate power. https://civilheresy.com/new confessions of an economic hit man
3. Empire’s Workshop – Greg Grandin. Explores how Latin America became the testing ground for modern U.S. imperial strategy. https://civilheresy.com/empire workshop