The prominent Venezuelan journalist Boris Muñoz published an in-depth analysis on Saturday in El País regarding the oil agreement between the Trump administration and the Venezuelan government led by Delcy Rodríguez, in which he issues a direct call to opposition leader María Corina Machado: “she must simultaneously challenge both the Rodrigato and the oversight that supports it”.
Muñoz describes the so-called "greatest oil agreement of the century" as a "Faustian pact" and summarizes it with a phrase that serves as the title of his column: "They have sold Venezuela with the Venezuelans inside." In his view, the agreement—negotiated through the controversial businessman Alejandro Betancourt—is "spurious from start to finish" due to its opacity, lack of democratic legitimacy, and the cession of sovereignty it entails.
According to the terms disclosed so far, the United States will acquire a 35% stake in the parent company of North American Blue Energy Partners (NABEP), while the State Department will be guaranteed the right to purchase 20% of the production from the fields operated by the company at cost price.
The pact grants NABEP rights over 17 Venezuelan oil fields with approximately 65 billion barrels of reserves, and according to Washington, the concessions will last for 100 years, although Caracas has mentioned a bilateral project lasting 25 years. The agreement is expected to mobilize around 100 billion dollars in investments. Its terms have sparked criticism from both opposition leaders and figures from the dissident chavismo, an unprecedented coincidence in over two decades.
Muñoz coins the term "Rodrigato" to refer to the government of Delcy Rodríguez (whose brother, Jorge Rodríguez, heads the National Assembly) and accurately describes the logic of the agreement: "The Rodrigato exchanges the country for power." The ruling Chavismo gains political survival; Washington secures privileged access to one of the largest oil reserves in the world.
The Secretary of State Marco Rubio reaffirmed that the United States must control Venezuelan oil revenues to prevent rulers and elites from "stealing the income" again, although —Muñoz points out with irony— those rulers and elites are the same ones that have been in power for almost three decades.
The columnist identifies Betancourt as the central figure in the scheme. According to an investigation by Marc Caputo in Axios, he is the one who connected Rodríguez with Rubio in the early hours of January 3, 2026, while U.S. troops were storming Fuerte Tiuna to capture Nicolás Maduro. The Financial Times also revealed that the agreement opens the door to oil, financial, and communications companies linked to Trump, including Sable and Primavera, the analyst notes.
The analysis dedicates its most critical section to Machado's position. After several days of silence, the opposition leader broke her silence with a video in which she expressed "sadness and anger" and questioned the regime's legitimacy to compromise the national heritage: "The heritage of our land does not belong to an illegitimate regime; it belongs to the Venezuelan people." However, she avoided pointing to the Trump administration as a co-responsible party in the agreement.
Muñoz considers that caution a strategic error: denouncing only one of the signatories amounts to accepting the other. He warns that "Machado risks getting trapped within the logic of the Faustian pact" and recalls that the diplomacy of deference has already failed: Machado handed Trump her Nobel Peace Prize diploma after January third, "when the MAGA leader humiliated her by calling her weak and lacking respect."
Trump, for his part, dismissed immediate elections, stating that Venezuela "is not prepared," a stance that —Muñoz points out— is not coincidental: elections would introduce the uncertainty that the new power structure was designed to prevent.
Faced with this crossroads, the columnist proposes a third option: that Machado "asserts herself," just as Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney did by responding to Trump with reciprocal tariffs, even knowing the economic cost for Canada. Muñoz argues that Machado does not need to match Trump’s power but should leverage the one asset that no one else possesses: the overwhelming support of Venezuelans, who elected her as the opposition leader by a crushing majority.
The roadmap outlined by the journalist is clear: disobey Trump, return to Venezuela immediately, regroup a fragmented opposition, and mobilize the population to demand the renewal of the National Electoral Council and free presidential elections. Muñoz concludes his analysis with a warning that encapsulates the gravity of the moment: "Only in this way will Venezuela keep alive the hope of achieving its freedom and renegotiating the oil agreement of the century, without being remembered in history as a de facto colony that never even becomes the 51st state of the Union."
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