The Invisible Nation: How 28 million people disappeared from their own oil deal “You’re not dealing with Venezuela at all. We don’t want you to deal with Venezuela.”
by Michael Lamonaca, 11 January 2025
That’s President Trump speaking to America’s biggest oil executives about a $100 billion investment plan. The paradox isn’t subtle—how do you invest in a country while being explicitly told not to interact with that country? But here’s the deeper question nobody in that room asked: how did we reach a point where erasing millions of people from their own future seemed like sound strategy rather than moral failure?
The architecture of this deal is built on separation, not partnership. Trump’s directive reveals a worldview where Venezuela exists as geography and resources, but not as people with legitimate claims to their own future. The US seized tankers, controls revenue accounts, and positions itself as sole authority. Venezuelans aren’t partners in this arrangement—they’re obstacles to navigate around. This separation isn’t accidental. It’s structural. When you design a system that requires people to not exist in order to function, you haven’t created an investment strategy—you’ve created a timer counting down to inevitable collapse. The entire framework operates from a scarcity mindset: grab it before someone else does, control it before you lose it, take now because trust is impossible. But scarcity thinking creates exactly what it fears. Every act of control deepens distrust. Every denial of agency strengthens resentment. The executives know this, even if they won’t say it—that’s why ExxonMobil’s CEO called Venezuela “uninvestable” despite sitting in a room where Trump just asked for $100 billion.
In Maracaibo, a former oil engineer named Carlos watches the news from a apartment where electricity comes three hours a day. He spent twenty years working Venezuela’s oil fields before the industry collapsed. Now he drives a taxi when he can afford fuel, which isn’t often. His daughter is a doctor who earns $30 a month—when the hospital has supplies, which it usually doesn’t. Carlos doesn’t care about geopolitical chess games or investor returns. He wants to know if his grandchildren will have a future in Venezuela or if they’ll join the seven million who’ve already left. Nobody asked him what $100 billion in foreign investment should look like. Nobody called to ask what Venezuelans actually need. The men in that White House room are deciding his country’s fate, and he doesn’t exist in their equations except as a risk factor to be managed.
The response from oil executives reveals what happens when practical caution replaces moral courage. They cited past asset seizures—twice burned, understandably careful. But notice what they didn’t do: question the fundamental premise that America should control another nation’s resources while excluding that nation from the conversation. That would require courage. Not the courage to risk money, but the courage to speak truth to power. To say: “This approach is unwise because it’s unjust, and injustice creates instability regardless of how much force backs it up.” Instead, they chose the safe path—business caution dressed as prudence. They protected their shareholders while staying silent on whether this entire arrangement violates basic principles of fairness and human dignity. Real wisdom would recognize that you can’t build sustainable prosperity on foundations that deny partnership. You can’t create stability by eliminating an entire population from decisions about their own land. Sound judgment means understanding that shortcuts built on coercion inevitably collapse, no matter how much short-term profit they generate.
The pattern repeating here is ancient: grievance breeding grievance, fear breeding fear. ExxonMobil remembers being burned twice. Venezuela remembers decades of foreign companies extracting wealth while leaving infrastructure to crumble. The US remembers sanctions and defiance. Everyone carries historical wounds into this room, and nobody’s talking about healing them—only about who controls what next. Forgiveness doesn’t mean forgetting or being naive about risk. It means asking: what would it take to genuinely start fresh? What would partnership actually look like if we weren’t operating from fear and resentment? What becomes possible when you release old grievances enough to imagine something new? Those questions never got asked. Instead, the past dictates the future—except now with different players holding the same extractive mindset.
Justice isn’t abstract philosophy—it’s the foundation of anything that lasts. When Trump says “you’re not dealing with Venezuela at all,” he’s describing an arrangement where millions of people have no say in what happens to their nation’s primary resource. That’s not a partnership. It’s not even honest occupation. It’s something more insidious—a system where Venezuelans exist but don’t matter. Here’s what nobody wants to admit: you can’t actually separate a people from their land and resources. You can pretend to. You can build legal frameworks that ignore them, financial systems that exclude them, military operations that bypass them. But the land remembers who lives on it. The resources belong to the ground they’re standing on. Eventually, reality reasserts itself, and every system built on denial collapses under the weight of what it refused to acknowledge. Fairness isn’t complicated here. It means Venezuelans get genuine agency in their own future. It means revenue from their oil serves their needs, not just foreign investors and American Treasury accounts. It means building infrastructure they own and control, not just pipelines flowing one direction. The executives talk about needing “legal certainty” and “competitive fiscal frameworks.” They’re right, but incomplete. Real certainty comes from legitimate governance that serves the population. Real competition comes from markets where people have actual choices. You can’t create either while explicitly excluding Venezuelans from their own story. Carlos in Maracaibo could tell them this, if anyone asked. So could the millions like him watching their country become an abstraction in someone else’s investment thesis.
The language used reveals everything about excess versus balance. Trump’s “$100 billion” demand. The military seizure of leadership. The aggressive control of revenue flows. Executives calling Venezuela “prime real estate”—as if it’s empty land rather than home to millions navigating crisis. This is dominance, not measured action. It’s the opposite of restraint. Power exercised without limits, control pursued without consideration for proportion or consequence. Balance would mean matching investment scale to Venezuelan capacity to absorb it. Restraint would mean sharing authority rather than monopolizing it. Moderation would recognize that slower, collaborative development creates more stability than rapid extraction under foreign control. But moderation doesn’t generate headlines or serve quarterly earnings reports or satisfy imperial ambitions.
What’s missing from this entire framework is the recognition of fundamental connection. When you genuinely see others as connected to yourself, their wellbeing becomes inseparable from your own. You can’t prosper long-term by impoverishing them. You can’t create stability by denying their dignity. Your fates are intertwined whether you acknowledge it or not. The oil executives see Venezuelans as risk factors to manage. Trump sees them as irrelevant to the transaction. Even well-meaning analysts discuss “conditions on the ground” as if describing weather patterns rather than human lives. This disconnection—this inability to recognize shared humanity—is the core failure. Everything else flows from it: the lack of wisdom in the approach, the absence of moral courage in the room, the violation of basic fairness, the exercise of power without restraint.
The consequences are predictable because the pattern is old. Short-term, this might work. Oil flows, some money moves, energy prices potentially drop. Medium-term, Venezuela becomes a laboratory for resource control without representation—governance as remote management, extraction without partnership. Long-term? History is clear. Every system built on denying human agency eventually fractures. The suppressed dignity doesn’t disappear—it transforms into resistance. The ignored population doesn’t vanish—it reasserts itself, often violently, always eventually. The Roman Empire learned this. Colonial powers learned this. Every attempt to treat humans as resources rather than partners learned this. We’re about to learn it again, apparently, because the alternative—genuine partnership based on mutual respect—requires virtues currently absent from that White House room.
The gap between what we claim to value and how we actually behave is the entire story. We say we believe in human dignity, then design systems that erase populations. We claim to support self-determination, then seize control of other nations’ futures. We talk about free markets while manipulating them through force. Every choice reveals what we truly believe when tested. This situation reveals a belief that power justifies control, that fear is wiser than trust, that separation serves better than connection, that short-term gain matters more than long-term relationship. Those beliefs are wrong. Not morally wrong in some abstract sense, but functionally wrong—they create instability, resentment, and eventual collapse of whatever system they build.
Carlos will probably still be driving his taxi when this arrangement fractures. He’ll watch another cycle of foreign promises turn to dust, another generation of leaders claim they’re saving Venezuela while serving themselves, another round of his country’s wealth flowing elsewhere while hospitals lack medicine. He’s seen it before. He’ll see it again. What he won’t see is anyone in power asking him what he needs, what his community needs, what genuine partnership might look like. The powerful make plans. The powerless make do. And somewhere in the gap between those two realities lies every failed empire, every collapsed extraction scheme, every “uninvestable” country that was never actually the problem—the system that tried to pretend people don’t exist was always the problem. Because systems built on separation don’t suddenly discover connection. Arrangements that begin by excluding people don’t evolve into inclusive partnerships. The seeds you plant determine the harvest you reap.
The lesson isn’t new. The opportunity to learn it apparently is. Somewhere in Washington, plans are being made. Somewhere in Houston, spreadsheets are being updated. Somewhere in Maracaibo, Carlos is hoping for electricity tonight so his grandchildren can do homework. Only one of these realities will ultimately matter. History suggests it won’t be the spreadsheets.
Tags: Venezuela, Geopolitics, Resource Control, US Foreign Policy, Oil Investment, Justice, Human Dignity