Venezuelan opposition leader questions US oil deal with ‘illegitimate regime’

Opposition leader says interim government lacking democratic mandate to negotiate on natural resources

The Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado has questioned Donald Trump’s oil deal with Venezuela’s interim government, saying the country’s natural resources do not belong to “an illegitimate regime”.

In her first public comments since Trump announced what he called “the biggest oil deal in world history” with Venezuela last Friday, Machado walked a diplomatic tightrope between challenging the agreement and trying not to rile the White House.

In a video posted on social media, the Nobel peace prize winner said: “Of course the United States is the principal partner Venezuela needs to fully develop its strategic potential. This is what the majority of Venezuelans believe … and it is something I’ve spent my whole life defending.”

However, Machado said, the current occupants of the Miraflores presidential palace in Caracas were “enemies of the US”, saying they did not have the right or the democratic mandate to negotiate Venezuela’s natural resources. “The wealth of our subsoil does not belong to an illegitimate regime – it belongs to the Venezuelan people,” she said, adding that supporters felt “sadness and anger” at being excluded from the decision-making process.

Venezuela has the world’s largest proven crude oil reserves with an estimated 303bn barrels, of which more than 65bn barrels are involved in the agreement.

Trump’s deal was struck with the un-elected interim president, Delcy Rodríguez, who took power in January after her predecessor, Nicolás Maduro, was abducted by US special forces.

Many observers expected Trump to replace Maduro with Machado, a conservative democracy activist who later gave the US president her Nobel prize award. But instead Trump backed Rodríguez, threatening: “If she doesn’t do what’s right, she is going to pay a very big price – probably bigger than Maduro”, and sidelined Machado.

The White House claims the oil deal will help secure US “energy dominance for the next century” as well as “purging foreign malign influence from our back yard” by excluding China and Russia.

Speaking outside the Miraflores palace on Wednesday, the US energy secretary, Chris Wright, said the aim was “to massively grow production and economic opportunities in Venezuela”, adding: “President Trump has a clear mission in Venezuela. The mission is to bring peace, freedom, opportunity, and prosperity to everyone in Venezuela.”

But there has been widespread condemnation of what critics call a predatory and colonial-style land grab. Machado’s supporters fear the deal makes Washington far less inclined to push for fresh presidential elections.

Machado’s movement is widely believed to have beaten Maduro by a landslide in the last such vote, in 2024, but he refused to accept the result and clung to power until his dramatic rendition on 3 January this year.

On Wednesday, Trump and Rodríguez brushed off questions about when an election might be held. “You had a very powerful, very nasty dictatorship in Venezuela – and they’re just not going to be ready for it yet,” Trump told reporters, before adding vaguely: “But soon.”

Rodríguez said: “There will be an electoral process, but when Venezuela is ready.