Venezuela War Would Be Over Oil, Agrees Pentagon, US Congress, Maduro, and Colombian President – Antiwar.com

Having amassed an enormous combined arms force off the coast, placed the Venezuelan President on the US list of known terrorists, and closed the airspace to commercial flights above Venezuela, all signs point to the White House’s intention of attacking the Venezuelan regime. The war would be fought to steal oil.

On November 26th in an interview with Fox Business, Florida Congresswoman Maria Salazar was asked why Americans should support an aggressive war in Venezuela that could leave American soldiers and sailors dead, and she responded “for the American oil companies, [it] will be a field day”.

“Venezuela, for those Americans who do not understand why we need to go in… Venezuela, for the American oil companies, will be a field day, because it will be more than a trillion dollars in economic activity,” said the daughter of Cuban exiles.

Salazar made more absurd claims – that Maduro is transferring uranium to Iran and Hezbollah, without citing any evidence, but she was only taking the line that former Commander of US Southern Command said at the Aspen Security Forum in 2022 – that South America is rich in resources and “adversaries” take advantage of that “every single day”.

“[O]ur competitors and adversaries also know how rich in the resources that this region is. 60% of the world’s lithium is in the region, you have heavy crude, you have light sweet crude, you have rare earth elements… and there are adversaries that are taking advantage of this region every single day right in our neighborhood,” said General Laura Richardson in her opening remarks of a QA in which she was asked how she viewed the SOUTHCOM Area of Responsibility in terms of national security. The terms are of resources, and of adversaries having them.

Others who see that oil is the reason behind the uptick in threats and violence against the South American country include the Gustavo Petro, the President of Colombia, a major non-NATO ally nation.

“(Oil) is at the heart of the matter,” he told CNN in an interview, adding that US President Donald Trump is “not thinking about the democratization of Venezuela, let alone the narco-trafficking”.

He said that Colombian investigations have not found any major link between narco-trafficking and Venezuela. The problem with his eastern neighbor, he said, was a “lack of democracy,” not narcotics.

Oil has consistently featured in Washington’s narrative around its problems with Venezuela. During the Trump Administration, when the 2018 Venezuelan presidential elections saw Maduro receive a second term, Washington backed a political nobody with a penchant for street fights named Juan Guaido, whom 81% of Venezuelans had never heard of, and whose political party received just 2% of the vote, to be a so-called “Interim-President”.