Our Man in Caracas

 The Wall Street Journal has a story out this morning that reads like a chapter from a Graham Greene novel. One of Trump's personal cronies and golfing buddies has reportedly been lobbying from behind the scenes for years to try to "pry open" the Venezuelan oil market for U.S. business interests. If this meant working with Maduro, that was fine with him. And so, for a while, he concentrated his efforts on trying to persuade Rick Grenell and the rest of the Trump administration to make nice with the ruling regime. Cut a deal with Maduro to accept deportations and get the oil flowing, he told them. 

Let us keep in mind, here, that "accepting deportations" means cajoling Maduro into being willing to collaborate with the U.S. government in its effort to forcibly expel asylum seekers—many of them pro-democracy Venezuelan opposition activists who, in a sane world, would be natural allies for the United States—back to the hands of the regime they fled. And intermittently, of course—though not always—Maduro was willing to do precisely that. And the U.S. government was more than happy to send innocent people into his clutches. 

When the option of becoming friends with Maduro long-term, though, eventually appeared to be taken off the table (due in part, perhaps, to the involvement of Marco Rubio), Trump's golfing buddy shifted to suggesting it was fine to kidnap Venezuela's president; he just then urged the U.S. government to work with whoever was left behind. Oil profits, he has made clear, should be a much higher priority than any effort to persuade Venezuela's leadership to undertake a democratic transition or hold free elections. For this reason, the Venezuelan opposition rightly despises him. 

And all of this appears to be exactly the policy course our government has chosen to adopt. We illegally invaded and abducted the Venezuelan head of state. But then we said: all the rest of his authoritarian apparatus is just fine with us. We can do business with these people. We can "play ball" with them—as Joan Didion points out was the primary test U.S. policymakers seemed to apply in determining which Salvadoran death squads and right-wing thugs they were willing to work with in the 1980s. 

Graham Greene, in Our Man in Havana, depicts a scene set from Batista's Cuba in which "The American Consul-General [...] spoke of the spiritual links between the democracies -- he seemed to number Cuba among the democracies. Trade was important because without trade there would be no spiritual links, or was it perhaps the other way round[...]" So too here, with our woman in Caracas. Delcy Rodriguez now gets to be numbered as a representative of the "free world," even as she locks up the same political prisoners that Maduro did. Why? Because she's willing to turn on the oil tap. 

It could not be clearer from this account—published in the mainstream right-leaning business press—that the U.S. government under Trump has reverted to the world described in books like Gore Vidal's Dark Green, Bright Red—a Latin America where "the company"—i.e., whatever reigning U.S. business interest is foremost in a given country at the time, whether banana plantations or oil extraction—in the end always calls the shots. Ministers and presidents come and go—some of them forcibly expelled from office by U.S.-backed coups if they get too restive, but in the end, "El Pulpo" always wins. 

As Pablo Neruda put it in his poem on the "Standard Oil Co." (Schmitt trans.): They buy countries, people, seas, police, county councils, [...] A President assassinated for a drop of petroleum, [...] a subtle change of ministers in the capital [...] and zap, you’ll see / how Standard Oil’s letters shine above the clouds, [...] illuminating their dominions.