CARACAS.- The dictator Nicolás Maduro intends to use the Deportation of Venezuelan migrants To blackmail the administration of President Donald Trump, which this week ended the license that allowed the American oil company Chevron to operate in Venezuela.
In statements transmitted by the State Canal, Maduro said that the decision of the US government to eliminate General license 41, issued by former president Joe Biden in November 2022, “has damaged” communications and deportation flights of Venezuelans, who had agreed to the regime with USAafter the visit of Trump’s special envoy, Richard Grenell.
“Now we have a problem there, because with what they did they have damaged the communications we had opened. And I was interested (…) because I wanted to bring all the Venezuelans who have prisoners and persecuted there unfairly, just for being migrants,” Maduro justified not to repatriate their nationals.
The blackmail
He said that “they were prepared” for more deportation flights of Venezuelan migrants, but that the position of the Republican administration “affected the trips.”
“We already had our planes scheduled to bring us to our migrant brothers”said Maduro, who insisted on blaming the US sanctions of the massive exodus of Venezuelans, caused by the humanitarian crisis that the country has been experiencing for more than 10 years for a combination of the almost total destruction of the private sector, the collapse of world prices of oil and corruption that faint thousands of dollars of the public treasury.
Maduro, who according to the opposition leader María Corina Machado used the income of the license that Biden gave to fill the “corrupt pockets, buy weapons, repress and pay the elites and the elite groups that persecute civilians”, now intends to use their suspension as a blackmail method, when refusing to receive their own citizens.
The Wall Street Journal He had reported on Friday that Maduro’s regime, in private, had warned the Trump government that he would not welcome deported Venezuelan migrants if the US ended the license of the US oil company.
The first deportation flight arrived in Venezuela on February 10, 10 days after Grenelll’s visit to Caracas, where he left with six American citizens that Maduro kept kidnapped. In total, the regime received 366 Venezuelans in three deportation flights from the US.
End of the Chevron license
On February 26, Trump announced his decision to revoke the concessions granted by the Biden Administration, which allowed Chevron to increase their production in Venezuela and export oil from the country.
“We are reversing the concessions that the corrupt Joe Biden granted to Nicolás Maduroof Venezuela, in the Agreement on Petroleum Transactions of November 26, 2022, as well as those related to the electoral conditions within Venezuela, that the Maduro regime has not fulfilled, “he said at that time.
The Republican president considered that the Biden license, in exchange for free elections in Venezuela and to accept deported migrants, “strengthened” Maduro when he was “ready to leave.”
On March 4, the Office of Assets Control (OFAC) formalized the elimination of the Chevron license and gave the 30 -day oil company a deadline to finish its operations in Venezuela.
For Maduro, with the cancellation of the Chevron license, the USA “He shot himself in the foot”considering that it represents a “sanction to an American company that is one hundred years here (in Venezuela) working.”
“If it were for us, moreover, I say it clearer, if it were for me, as president, if it were for the high political-military command of the Bolivarian Revolution, if it were for our people, that company Chevron stays working in Venezuela a hundred more years,” he said in an attempt to minimize the impact of sanctions on his règimen.
