There is a very wide-ranging and quite intense discussion taking place among Caribbean heads of state and government and other regional leaders, calling on the U.S. to lift sanctions against Venezuela so that the successful PetroCaribe program established some years ago by the late Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez can be reinstated. PetroCaribe allowed Caribbean nations to purchase oil at market price but only pay a portion of the price up front, providing oil and financial benefit to many Caribbean nations. When the Trump administration unilaterally sanctioned Venezuela’s state-owned oil company PDVSA, and impeded Venezuelan transactions with U.S. financial institutions, the program came to an end, causing great hardship for Caribbean nations, particularly in the recent period as energy prices have soared.
The issue was debated at the July 4-5 Caribbean Community (Caricom) heads of government summit in Paramaribo, Suriname where energy security was a major topic of discussion. Prime Minister of St. Vincent and the Grenadines Ralph Gonsalves reported there that Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro told him during a meeting in May that he wants to revitalize the PetroCaribe program and is offering to sell oil at a 35% discount to the region once sanctions are removed. Maduro is also offering to reduce some nations’ PetroCaribe debt.
At the same summit, Belize Prime Minister John Briceno warned that fuel prices “have been too high for too long. We in the Caribbean call for the immediate lifting of the sanctions imposed on Venezuela so that the revolutionary PetroCaribe program can be reinstated, providing our economies with much-needed relief.” Several other leaders echoed his call. The Belizean daily Amandala reported July 10 that the cost of fuel that week reached an all-time high of $17.60 a gallon.
Caricom leaders who attended the June 6-10 Summit of the Americas met with Joe Biden and told him they wanted sanctions to be lifted, and now Caribbean leaders say they want another meeting with Washington to press the issue. At the Paramaribo summit, Gonsalves pointed out that American officials have twice traveled to Caracas to try to carve out exemptions to the sanctions to facilitate Venezuelan oil exports to European countries. Now, he said, “you can’t on the one hand be looking for carve-outs for Europeans … going to Venezuela looking for some special arrangement to get more oil, and then we are suffering,” Amandala reported him as saying.
The U.S. is quite aware of the fact that Russia has made agreements with Venezuela to help resuscitate its oil industry, as has China. In a visit to Iran in June, Maduro signed a 20-year “cooperation road map” which, among other things, included oil, petrochemicals and defense.
