Offshore drilling platform during sunrise with work vessel, Venezuela. Alamy.com/Cavan Images

Several months after US forces captured President Maduro and following two devastating earthquakes, Global Insight examines what’s changed in Venezuela and the challenges ahead.

In late August the White House announced an agreement with Venezuela for US control of about 20 per cent of the country’s oil reserves. The Pentagon’s Office of Strategic Capital will acquire a 35 per cent equity stake in North American Blue Energy Partners (NABEP), one of the largest private oil producers in Venezuela. The US will gain access to over 65 billion barrels of proven oil reserves.

Venezuela’s Interim President, Delcy Rodríguez, says the wealth generated by the deal – which she claims will amount to $100bn in investment and over $209bn in tax revenue – will be ‘converted into wellbeing’ for her country’s people. It’s expected that the money paid by NABEP in royalties and taxes will help fund Venezuelan social programmes as well as crucial relief for the country as it recovers from two devastating earthquakes suffered over the summer.

The deal is the latest development in an especially turbulent year for the Latin American country. In January, US forces entered Venezuela and arrested President Nicolás Maduro, bringing him to New York alongside his wife to face numerous charges, which both deny. In the days following Maduro’s removal, the Trump administration agreed that Rodríguez, then-Vice President, would lead the country and open its vast oil and gas fields to foreign investment under Washington’s supervision.

In June, two earthquakes hit the centre and northwest of the country. Official figures put the death toll at over 6,500 as of late August, with tens of thousands more receiving hospital care. The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) has said that around 1.3 million people overall have been directly affected by the earthquakes. The OCHA has described the earthquakes as having ‘exacerbated the needs of a population that was already facing significant challenges in accessing basic services and economic opportunities.’ As of mid-September, the OCHA’s humanitarian response plan had only obtained about 43 per cent of the required funds.

‘The earthquakes constitute one of this decade’s biggest tragedies,’ says Elisabeth Eljuri, a Venezuelan lawyer and former Vice-Chair of the IBA Oil and Gas Law Committee, who’s based in the US. ‘Venezuela was not prepared for this and, beyond loss of life, there is a tremendous need to prioritise reconstruction and access to basic services for the displaced population,’ she says. ‘This should be a top priority at this time.’

The grand opening

In the run-up to the NABEP deal, Venezuela’s government introduced a number of legislative changes aimed at bolstering the economy. Partial reforms to Venezuela’s organic hydrocarbons law (OHL) – backed by the US – were passed in January. These represent ‘the most significant adjustment to the country’s hydrocarbons legal framework in twenty years,’ says Eljuri, whose practice focuses on energy, oil, gas and infrastructure. In response to the OHL reforms, the US announced an easing of sanctions against Venezuela, specifically regarding certain oil sector activities.

In April, Venezuela passed a new Organic Mining Law, which opens the sector to private and foreign investment. It allows for full foreign ownership in certain mineral categories and extends licence terms to 30 years, with the option to renew twice, for a further ten years each time. The new legislation aims to modernise the country’s mining industry and removes previous restrictions on private sector participation.

Speaking at a conference hosted by the American Association of Petroleum Geologists in Texas in May, Venezuelan Minister of Hydrocarbons, Paula Henao, explained that the reforms allow for disputes with investors to be resolved within international forums, rather than parties being limited to Venezuelan courts. Henao emphasised that this provision represents an additional guarantee for investors, highlighting that Venezuela had received substantial interest from companies considering operations in the country.

Carlos Pérez-Cotapos, Co-Chair of the IBA Mining Law Committee, says the most significant legal changes cover three areas. ‘First, the reforms have opened the possibility for private investors to participate directly in sectors that were previously reserved to the state, particularly the oil and mining industries,’ he says. ‘Second, the reforms provide a legal framework to regularise contracts that had previously been executed under Venezuela’s Anti-Blockade Law and that were not fully recognised from an international perspective.’ The new legislation, says Pérez-Cotapos, provides a clearer legal basis for the granting of licences and their recognition internationally.

‘Third, the reforms permit the use of international arbitration and introduce protections commonly found in international investment frameworks,’ says Pérez-Cotapos, who’s a Managing Partner at Cariola in Santiago. ‘These include mechanisms designed to protect investors from adverse legal changes and to restore the economic balance of contracts if subsequent legislative reforms negatively affect an investment.’

Eljuri highlights that Venezuela’s new mining law also includes incentives to attract investment into the country, such as licence terms of 30 years and the option to renew these for two additional periods of ten years each. Licences can also be transferred between companies.

After the end of what Eljuri calls an ‘initial wait and see period’, other major international investment deals besides the NABEP-US agreement were announced in late August and early September. For example, Chevron will invest $7bn in Venezuela to access two further heavy oil fields, while Italy’s Eni also signed a new deal. Chevron, whose Venezuelan joint ventures currently produce approximately 250,000 barrels of oil per day, plans to increase production to more than 600,000 barrels each day by 2031.

The remaining ‘structures’ of repression

While these developments may help to address Venezuela’s economy, the country has long faced significant challenges from a rule of law and human rights perspective – and these haven’t disappeared overnight. Some 7.9 million people migrated away from Venezuela to other countries during Maduro’s authoritarian and economically disastrous rule.

In late 2025, Venezuela was ranked in last place out of 143 countries in the World Justice Project Rule of Law Index. In a 2024 report, the International Commission of Jurists (ICJ) found that ‘Venezuela has been in a rule of law crisis for more than a decade, with the institutions and mechanisms that conduct core governance and the administration of justice severely compromised.’ It highlighted ‘arbitrary arrests conducted by security forces for political reasons, violations of freedom of expression and other fundamental freedoms, torture and ill-treatment, and extrajudicial executions.’ Further, the ICJ found that ‘systemic failure by the Prosecution Office to tackle gross human rights violations’ in the country had brought about ‘near-total impunity’. The Venezuelan government has rejected allegations of human rights abuses.

Ben Keith, an officer of the IBA Criminal Law Committee, says there have been positive steps since Maduro was removed, such as the release of more than 500 political prisoners under an amnesty law passed in February, the recent agreement regarding Supreme Court reform and the opening of a dialogue between the government and part of the opposition.

However, ‘it is too soon to observe any real change in the rule of law in Venezuela,’ says Keith, a barrister at 5 St Andrew’s Hill in London. Markus Beham, Co-Chair of the IBA Human Rights Law Committee, believes that ‘any attempt at reform must be greeted with enthusiasm’ but also with scepticism, as it’s possible that positive developments might later be co-opted for political ends.

‘The structures that sustained repression remain mostly intact,’ says Cristian González Ruiz, a lawyer at International Human Rights Advisors. He highlights that key members of Maduro’s government are still in power in Venezuela and that certain legislation previously used for the purpose of repression, such as the country’s anti-hate speech law, remains on the statute.

Figures dated 20 September produced by rights group Foro Penal suggest that 344 political prisoners continue to be held by the Venezuelan state, with ‘at least 40’ having been released mid-August. Many of those released so far have been let out under conditional ‘alternative measures’ rather than being freed, says González. In March, a UN Fact-Finding Mission to the country documented a number of politically motivated arrests, including of journalists and protestors celebrating Maduro’s fall. Meanwhile, a date for new elections in Venezuela has yet to be set.

As such, ‘the safeguards the NGOs are demanding,’ which include ‘public and weighted evaluation criteria, access to the complete files of the candidates and an independent technical committee with UN participation […] are the minimum required for the outcome to be credible,’ says González, referring to a joint statement issued by numerous civil society organisations in August.

Rule of law in a disaster zone

The humanitarian emergency that has resulted from June’s earthquakes, says González, carries the risk that ‘a government that was never enthusiastic’ about the transition to democratic elections ‘now has an unimpeachable reason to postpone it, and to distract the public from the reforms it has promised.’ States of emergency concentrate power, he says, highlighting that, immediately following the earthquakes, ‘the armed forces were deployed in the thousands, access to the disaster zone […] was restricted and social media was throttled.’

Keith says that US-hosted dialogues between the Venezuelan government and the country’s opposition placed post-earthquake reconstruction at the top of the agenda. ‘The first round of talks produced agreements on recovering frozen assets abroad, including the roughly $4bn in gold held at the Bank of England,’ he explains. Keith says that issues that took priority prior to the earthquakes, such as the renewal of the mechanism for oversight of elections and the release of the remaining political prisoners, ‘were left out of the joint statement’ made following the talks, however.

‘The control of billions of dollars in reconstruction funds by a government of this kind, without independent oversight, is a serious rule of law concern in itself,’ says González. ‘It now falls to the international community and the different stakeholders – the US, the EU, the UN, the multilateral lenders and Venezuelan civil society – to ensure that the emergency does not become a permanent alibi, and to turn the promises made at the dialogue table into deadlines, transparency mechanisms and verifiable results.’

As part of this, the international community can use reconstruction financing to ensure the strengthening of Venezuela’s rule of law, says González. ‘Reconstruction financing gives the international community considerable leverage,’ he says. ‘It should be tied to progress towards elections, the release of all political prisoners and the institutional reforms the government has already committed to on paper.’

The ‘long and serious’ transition

Investors have been cautioned by legal experts to remain vigilant given the state of the rule of law in Venezuela. ‘Opportunities related to Venezuela should be continually assessed,’ reads a briefing written by a group of Freshfields lawyers based in the US, published in early September. ‘Although Maduro was removed, power remains concentrated among key figures from Maduro’s government,’ says the briefing, adding that US sanctions continue to target the Venezuelan government broadly, ‘including state-owned entities, numerous officials, vessels, aircraft, and hundreds of Venezuela-linked persons on the US Office of Foreign Assets Control’s (OFAC) list of Specially Designated Nationals and Blocked Persons.’ An arms embargo and strict export controls also remain in force, the briefing notes.

The Freshfields briefing says that prospective investors are invited to Venezuela on terms that promote US policy objectives and are, in some cases, subject to the discretion of the American government. Specifically, it explains, the OFAC has emphasised that the new licences remain tied to US foreign policy and national security priorities and are subject to significant conditions.

Ultimately, it is ‘Venezuelan lawyers, judges and prosecutors who will have to rebuild the system from within,’ says González, who adds that the international legal profession should support them in this task. ‘What Latin American transitions show is that this work is long and serious,’ he says.

‘Chile took more than a decade after 1990 to reform its criminal justice system and remove the authoritarian enclaves from its constitution,’ says González, while ‘Argentina replaced its Supreme Court in 1983 but spent the following two decades fighting over accountability.’ He adds that ‘reforms of this kind always face resistance from the previous regime, and in Venezuela the previous regime is still in government.’ Beham, Chair of Public International Law at the European University Viadrina, adds that ‘there should be awareness of the high risk and backlash for legal practitioners and, among them, human rights advocates in particular who are engaged in bringing forward the rule of law in Venezuela.’

Ann Deslandes is a freelance journalist based in Mexico. She can be contacted at anndeslandesconsult@gmail.com