Nicolas Maduro, the illegitimate former head of a narco-state and who was arrested with precedent, will face charges of conspiracy to traffick cocaine and conspiring with drug-dealers to do so.
While those appalled that Trump did anything trip over their own tongues to defend Maduro, or at least his arrest, no one is considering at great length what these recent events mean in the long run:
The reaction to the capture of Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro roughly falls into two camps: those who celebrate the downfall of a corrupt narco-terrorist and those who condemn it as a suspected breach of international law.
Prime Minister Mark Carney chose a third option, a wishy-washy, bland statement that neither praised the detention on moral grounds nor criticized it on the basis it might be illegal.
Remember - he was purported to be the strong-man to stand against Trump.
Venezuela has gold and then black gold, the very stuff Carney will keep in the ground:
With his removal of Nicolás Maduro from Venezuela, Donald Trump has opened another front in his economic assault on Canada by indirectly targeting our oil industry. Canada must respond decisively with diversification to the world market via the rapid construction of at least another pipeline to the coast, and ideally more.
There is now a new urgency to Canadian pipeline construction that didn’t exist prior to the weekend. The reason is simple: Venezuela has the world’s largest proven oil reserves, and its oil – from the Orinoco Belt — is extra heavy crude, similar to that found in Alberta’s oilsands. With around 303 billion barrels of proven reserves, Venezuela has nearly double the proven reserves of Alberta’s heavy oil. Further, until 1997 Venezuela was the no. 1 exporter of heavy crude to U.S. Gulf Coast refineries. This only changed in 1999 with the election of Hugo Chavez who raised export prices and royalties.
Due to sanctions and mismanagement of the Maduro regime, the Venezuelan flow of production has dwindled to a trickle. In the 1970s, Venezuela produced over 3.5 million barrels per day and was producing 2.5 million in 2011; that number has now shrunk to under 1 million barrels per day because of infrastructure decay and general mismanagement of the country’s most valuable resource. All this is to say that Venezuela is a potentially serious player in the oil market, which has self sabotaged itself for the past decade or more. Alberta’s production, in contrast, has increased continuously from around 200,000 barrels per day in the 1980s to nearly 3.5 million today.
Another important aspect to understand here is that oil is not just oil. There are heavy and light crudes and this difference matters for the oil refineries. U.S. Gulf Coast refineries are calibrated and built to process and crack heavy crudes like those from Venezuela and Canada. This is why, during the current trade spat with the U.S., the one product which has always avoided tariffs — despite Trump’s threats — was Alberta oil, for the simple reason that the Gulf refineries couldn’t just switch to lighter, sweeter crudes, like U.S. shale, overnight. That switch would cost billions of dollars and would take several years. However, if there were another reliable source of heavy crude for U.S. refineries, then Canadian crude would not be nearly as valuable as it currently is due to the increased competition and Canada’s lack of ability to get our oil to tidewater.
Donald Trump has already said the U.S. will now “run” Venezuela and added that “We’re going to have our very large United States oil companies, the biggest anywhere in the world, go in, spend billions of dollars, fix the badly broken infrastructure, the oil infrastructure and start making money for the country.” That should set off every economic warning bell and siren in Ottawa immediately. If Trump achieves his aim, it could be a massive blow to Canada’s oil industry, and a devastating hit to our sluggish economy.
The one mitigating factor here is time. Venezuela’s oil infrastructure has been so badly neglected that production cannot come back immediately. It will take years and billions of dollars to get back to full production and that gives Canada a small window of opportunity to diversify away from U.S. dependence. That opportunity window is the construction of one — or more — pipelines to our coasts. Pipelines give us the ability to seek a fair price on the world market, rather than being tied the United States and forced to offer a discount because over 80 per cent of our export pipeline capacity currently goes south and as a result we have no alternative buyers.
I don't remember any hand-wringing over threats to arrest Benjamin Netanyahu:
Roughly 50 civilians and 32 Cubans in Maduro’s praetorian guard were killed in Maduro’s apprehension — not quite a war, but an operation that clearly violates international law, as Trump’s adversaries will tell you. But Maduro’s savageries also violate international law, and international law allows him to get away with it, which only illustrates the useless irrelevance of international law in these matters.
A popular “hot take” that should be avoided at all costs is the one that runs along these lines: Trump has just given the “green light” to Russia to invade another European country, or a green light to China to invade Taiwan. No he hasn’t. Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping did not require any American precedent to be the monstrous criminals they are. It is true enough that Trump should not be counted on to obey any rules of decency with respect to Canadian sovereignty in Alberta, or Danish sovereignty in Greenland, without having to bring the Maduro caper into it.
Another factor that forces Iran and Venezuela into the same story is that the cliché works: It really is all about oil. It’s what Trump zeroes in on when he’s asked about his intentions for Venezuela. The point is to force Venezuela to give back “all of the Oil, Land, and other Assets that they previously stole from us,” Trump wrote on Truth Social. “We had a lot of oil there. As you know they threw our companies out, and we want it back.”
Strictly speaking, no American companies owned any oil or land in Venezuela and oil concessions were nationalized long before the Bolivarians came along. American oil companies weren’t thrown out. It’s a complicated story. The U.S. oil giant Chevron still traffics in Venezuelan oil, but other companies had their interests expropriated and arbitration awards have been difficult to enforce. A paradox: The regime-owned CITGO oil subsidiary contributed $500,000 to Donald Trump’s first inauguration. To be perfectly parochial: It could be years before American access to Venezuelan oil cuts into the privileged place Albertan oil occupies in U.S. imports. But so long as Donald Trump is the American president, nobody knows what tomorrow may bring, so there’s no point in even guessing.
A final symmetry: Iran’s crude oil exports remain close to a seven-year high — 1.7 million barrels a day, more or less — and almost all of Iran’s production goes to China with the revenues funding the IRGC and the regime to no obvious benefit to Iran’s suffering people. Sanctions and gross incompetence have crippled Venezuela’s industry, but Caracas still manages to export about 921,000 barrels a day, almost all of it going to. . . China.
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