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Hi David, Hey Sarah.
Nice to see you in the studio.
And it's good to be here with you.
And we're never here.
We're never here. At the same time, we're like ships in the night.
And so rarely are okay, But now we're not ships in the night anymore. We've made it into the studio together. Yes, so, David. Ever since the US launched a major military operation in Venezuela in January, and even before that, we've been talking a lot about it on the show.
Yeah, I am fascinated by this story, in part because I used to live in South America. I lived in Bolivia when that country was going through a political transition. I'm very eager to see sort of what will come of this effort the US made to shake things up change the circumstances of Venezuela.
And today we're going to hear a brand new conversation you had this week about the state of play in Venezuela. And it's also airing on this new show that you're about to launch at Bloomberg. Yes.
So that new show is called Bloomberg this weekend, and it's going to debut on Bloomberg TV and Bloomberg Radio on Saturday. You can also stream it online. I'm going to host it with Christina Raffini and Lisa Matteo.
Kivigir, You're doing a show during the week and during the weekend. When do you sleep.
I'm trying to figure this out, but rest assured I'm not going anywhere. I will be here on the big tag.
Well, your first get was a great get. Tell us about this guest who's coming on the show.
Yeah. I sat down with Phil Gunsen, who is a bit of a rarity. He's covered Latin America for the better part of four decades, and he's focused on one country in particular.
What it says on my business card is that I'm Crisis Group's senior Analyst for the Andes Region. But in practice that means that I focus on Venezuela. Venezuela keeps me busy. I've lived in Caracas for nearly twenty seven years now.
Phil moved there in nineteen ninety nine, so he was there when ugu Chavas came to power. He was there when uguchav Has died, he was there when Nicholas Mudua became the president of Venezuela.
Was he there when the US went in and captured Nicholas.
He was there, and he told me his house is pretty close to the military base for Maduro was taken by US forces.
This is the point where I embarrassingly have to admit that I slept all the way you did, I mean the attack Venezuelan time the bombs and rockets started falling about two in the morning, I was fast asleep.
Wow.
Yeah, that chaos didn't wake him up, but his phone eventually did. And since then Phil has been really focused on how the US is engaging with Venezuela. Today, he and I talked a lot about that, and we dug into really how uncertain the country's future is.
As we like to say in Crisis Group, a transition is a process, not an event.
Well, I'm really excited to hear more. So here's my co host, David Gura with Phil Gunson. Don't forget to catch this and more on Bloomberg this weekend from seven to ten am Eastern Time every Saturday and Sunday. I'll be setting my alarm.
I'm David Gerra, and this is the big take from Bloomberg News Today. On the show, my conversation with International Crisis Group senior analyst Phil Gunson. We discussed how Venezuela has changed and how it hasn't since the US captured Diglas Maduro, and what could come next. Let's spend some time talking about the events of January the third with
the US's Operation Absolute Resolve. Remind us what the run up to that was like, with the weeks and months leading up to that date were like and felt like in Venezuela.
You know, it was very startling, I suppose because when Trump came back to power in January of last year, we and I think a lot of other analysts had concluded that Trump's approach to Venezuela was going to be rather less I fact. I mean, it was going to be a pragmatic approach, not regime change, not maximum pressure as we saw under Trump won and that was the
way he started out. And then August of last year we began to see this immense military build up which was framed as a counter narcotics operation, and to be honest, I think you know, in in Crisis Group and elsewhere, it was largely interpreted as a bluff. On the one hand, it's saber rattling in order to persuade Maduda to leave, because the consequences of not doing so would be severe.
On the assumption that that would be enough that there wouldn't be any need to put, as they say, boots on the ground, because clearly Trump was not willing to do that, and so I think we, I think President Maduda himself concluded, well, this is not going to really
come to anything. But the build up went on and on and on, and you had the aircraft carrier, you know, the General r Ford deployed to the Caribbean, this massive, massive build up to the point where we began to say, well, you know, they just can't just sail away, and Maduro showed no signs of leaving. It became very hard to understand how this was going to end. When it did conclude with January the third, it wasn't any of the scenarios that we had really anticipated.
Could you describe the uncertainty of those hours that followed for you and for others who live in Venezuela, just wondering what would happen next? And did it feel like a vacuum was opening up?
It was all really very quick, actually, I mean it almost was too quick for us to properly work out what we were feeling about. I mean, the first sensation is, well, okay, it's obviously a US attack. It's not a complete surprise because Trump had been threatening this repeatedly, pretty much every weekend for weeks before that. We'd been expecting some kind of attack, So in that sense, it wasn't totally shocking. What was really shocking was suddenly to realize Maduro was
snatched along with his wife. What did that mean. But by the time we got around to trying to work out what that might mean, you know, there was already press conference in Washington with Trump saying, you know, announcing the operation, and that was in a way the biggest surprise of the whole morning, which was Trump saying, well, Mario Corina Machaala was a great lady, but unfortunately she doesn't have the support in ven as weulla to be installed as the government. So we're going to be dealing
with Delcia Rodriguez, who's Medua's vice president. That was probably the most surprising thing in those few hours.
What is the state of political power in Venezuela today? So Maduro is gone, he's in a jail, cell and Brooklyn DLCI. Rodriguez is in power on an interim basis, Maria Kramachado is somewhere. We don't know exactly where. Who is in control? And how would you assess the longevity of the kind of political moment that we're in.
I think that's probably the key issue. Obviously, we heard from President Trump very soon after January third. I can't remember it was on the same day, but within a couple of days at least, he was saying, you know, the US is going to be running ven Azulla. We're looking around and going where are they, you know, because there's nobody here on the ground. There's not been an embassy.
There is now they're in the reopened the embassy and they're starting to establish a US diplomatic presence in Caracas. But since twenty nineteen, there was no There were no US diplomats in Venezuela. There certainly weren't boots on the ground, there's no military occupation in Venezuela. So in what sense is the US running Venezuela? And my immediate thought was it seems to me the Venezuelan government is running Venea.
But of course then it becomes more complicated. Then you have to work out, well, Okay, the US says that they're going to be running Venezuela because if the Delcea government doesn't do what they say, then there will be consequences. And therefore, you know, this is kind of a neo
colonial sort of operation. But to try to run, especially a country the size of Venezuela, country twice the size of California, twice the size of Iraq, nearly thirty million people topographically very difficult, politically, very difficult, full of guns in one among the security forces and outside, How you're going to do that? How are you going to run Venezuela. So we're still working it out. As the honest answer to that question, I think.
How do you think about the role that Delcia Rodriguez is playing, the apparent closeness she has with the Trump administration, the closeness that she had with Nicholas Maduro, the political power that she's amassed as a result of her career in Venezuela and politics, How she is navigating those those two things.
De Elsie Rodriguez and her brother Jorge, who's the guy who runs the National Assembly and is a key figure in all of this. He was Maduro's key negotiator for a very long time with the opposition and with the US. These two, the Rodriguez siblings, are smart people. They're very adaptable, They're very pragmatic. They're also very ideological. I mean they know ideologically they come from the same segment, if you like, of the ideological spectrum as President Madula himself. They come
from the far left. But they are adaptable, and I think that's the key to what ELSEI is able to do right now, because she turned on a dime, I mean, you know, and of course she has maintained the discourse, the narrative for internal purposes about this being a socialist revolution, anti imperialist and all the rest of it, whilst doing her best to comply with what Trump needs. That's not an easy thing to do. I think if anybody can do it, she can, and she's demonstrated that so far.
This is a power game. It's about staying in power, and in particular, I think what divides so called moderates from so called hardliners is whether or not they perceive a future for themselves under some form of political transition. I think the Rodriguez siblings can imagine. I don't think they want it, but I think they can imagine surviving a transition. But a lot of the people with guns cannot imagine that, and for them it's an existential issue. And so it's a case of day by day figuring
out where the boundaries are. But then, of course, apart from that, the opposition is divided, and that I think is one of the key obstacles that might lie in the path of some form of political settlement, some form of transition.
So what could us involvement in Venezuela tell us about Trump's approach to other countries? And is the president's endgame really just about oil? That's after the break After the US captured Nicholas Maduro, President Trump said the US would run Venezuela, which raised a bunch of questions. I asked Phil Gunson of the International Crisis Group what Maduro's expatriation has meant in real terms. I'd hope you and I
could talk about political transition. And I guess what's sort of peculiar about this moment is you have Madurea being removed from power, yet it seems like there hasn't been much of a political transition yet I imagine the key to that is elections. At some point are they being talked about what would they need to look like to remove for what imagine is a huge hurdle here for there being any kind of viable political change.
Well, as we like to say in Crisis Group, a transition is a process, not an event. And one of the things I think that is problematic about the way some people in the opposition regard the term transition and the idea the concept of transition is that they don't distinguish between transition and regime change. In other words, transition for them is you leave power, we take power. That's
a transition. A transition for us is a process whereby the government that is still in power concedes certain things over a period of time. The opposition also concedes certain things, and they come to an agreement about where this process is going, what the end results should be. Elections, at least a presidential election, to my mind, should be closer towards the end of that process than the beginning.
What is the US getting from this leadership change? I suppose it's somebody who will return their phone calls. But what makes Delsier Drigez more palatable to the US, and I should say US leadership the Trump administration than the Nicholas Madruau was.
If you ask some people, they would say, oh, it's oil, right, I mean Trump wants the oil, Dolsy is giving in the oil, and therefore you know, that's the beginning in the end of the story. I think it's a lot more complicated that and I don't actually think that oil in the purely material sense is necessarily even most of what it's about. I think the US wants a stable, friendly Venezuela, open to US capital, that excludes forces seen by the US as hostile to US interests.
So part of this grander plan for the continent, and even beyond.
I mean, it's a geopolitical issue. And you know that the fact of what happened in January the third in Venezuela, that the very facts of that, the way it happened, what happened, then the implications of that are particularly significant for the region and the way the US relates to the region and vice versa. But they're also have implications beyond. I mean, I think, for example, that what we're now seeing around Iran is partly Trump saying, well, look, at
what really well in Venezuela. I mean, you know, let's try and do the same in Iran. There's a sense in which the US was emboldened by that event to say, oh, well, look, we don't even need to put boots on the ground. We can do these really you know, very sophisticated military operations, and we can make people do what we want.
You mentioned oil, and the President talks an awful lot about the potential for that to be good for Venezuela and good for the US if US energy companies were to go into Venezuela, build new infrastructure, repair old infrastructure, that could benefit both countries. First of all, I'm wondering, just does the prospect of that has that improved the economy in Venezuela at all? Just the fact that the US is showing more interest in improving the economic situation in Venezuela.
Yes, and no. The most immediate impact of that is, Okay, the US took something like fifty million bounds of oil, sold it more or less at market prices, and via complicated financial arrangement, sent hundreds of millions of dollars into Venezuela, which were then sold by a set of private banks
on the open market for more or less rates. So that helped to bring down the exchange rate, but it's not yet filtered through or trickled down if you like, to the extent that ordinary Venezuelan's doing their weekly shopping
can see a benefit. One of the huge problems that we have in Venezuela is that this is a country which ought to be rich, and it ought to be you know, you ought to have you know, a per capita income among the highest in the region, used to be among the highest in the world, and yet more
than eighty percent of the population lives in poverty. And it's also worth mentioning that one of the first things Trump did when he came back to power last year was to slash Overseas aid and that had an immediate impact on malnutrition in Venezuela because the World Food Program
immediately found its budgets. So right now Venezuelans have hopes that this will improve, but what economists says, it's going to say probably six to eight months before the real benefits they if they do filter down eventually do do that.
There is this trip a couple of weeks ago Chris Wright, the Energy Secretary traveled to Caracas, and my colleague and Rehorder and was on that trip with him, and there is just something extorted about that image of seeing a US Energy sectory, a cabinet member on the ground in Venezuela. What did that trip signal to you? And here I'm getting into the kind of longer term prospects of US engagement in the energy sector.
I mean, one of the striking things about that was just reading the body language and the fact that you know, the Energy Secretary and the interim President were, you know, chatting away happily to each other and touring oil installations. This is a really strange thing to see in Venezuela. But Dela Rodriguez certainly is not reluctant to see the economy open up and more money come in. And in that sense, there's an awful lot of common ground. Where, of course it may break down is if the US
starts to insist on a political transition. And so the danger that we see, I think, is that this could reach a new or we could basically maintain this new equilibrium of friendly relations between Washington Carrakas that have absolutely nothing to do with what the bulk of Venezuelans ultimately want to see because they're not part of the discussion.
I want to ask you lastly, what you'll be watching for in the months ahead, what's most important to pay attention to.
You know, I think what most concerns me and what most concerns us in Crisis Group is precisely what I said about the fact that this is a dialogue between two governments, neither of which we're elected by Venezuelans. Really, let's face it, over the heads of the Venezuelan people. What I think is going to be one of our biggest questions is to what extent is the US prepared to push for this, given that moves towards a political transition could destabilize the rest of what they're interested in.
They could create a backlash, for example, on among the people who fear they might end up in jail of the transition happened. That's the sort of thing that we're really looking at.
Phil. Thank you very much.
Thank you, it's been a pleasure.
This is the Big Take from Bloomberg News. I'm David Gera. To get more from The Big Take and unlimited access to all of Bloomberg dot com, subscribe today at Bloomberg dot com slash podcast offer. If you like this episode, make sure to follow and review The Big Take wherever you listen to podcasts. It helps people find the show. Also check out Bloomberg This Weekend, our new live weekend morning show. We bring news, analysis, and some fun to
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