By Nick Corbishley
Exxon has a long, rich history in Venezuela dating back over a century. Its predecessor, Standard Oil, was one of the first companies to explore for oil in the South American country in the 1910s. Between the 1930s and the first decade of this century, Exxon was a dominant player in Venezuela through its 95 percent control of the Creole Petroleum Corporation—so much so that the country became known as the “ranchito de los Rockefeller“.
But that all came to a halt in 2005, when Hugo Chávez ordered all existing “operating agreements” with foreign oil companies to be converted into joint ventures in which the state oil company, Petróleos de Venezuela (PDVSA), held a mandatory majority stake (over 50 percent ownership and operational control). Exxon refused to sign while most other companies, including BP, Total and Chevron, took the deal.
In 2007, Exxon left Venezuela for good and began a long court battle against the Chavista government at the International Center for Settlement of Investment Disputes (CIADI). The US oil giant sought compensation of $18 billion, but after several appeals the courts sided with Venezuela and in 2014 the oil company was awarded only $1.6 billion in damages.
When Trump accuses Venezuela of stealing US oil, he is presumably referring primarily to Exxon’s experience in the country. As NC reader Ignacio rightly points out in the comments, “Carlos Andrés Pérez nationalized Venezuelan oil in 1975, and this was a legal sovereign decision. The oil in Venezuelan land and sea belongs to Venezuela no matter who extracts it.”
Exxon’s revenge came with the the discovery of oil off the coast of Essequibo, a sparsely populated 160,000 square-kilometer chunk of land in neighboring Guyana. The ownership of Essequibo has been the subject of an ongoing territorial dispute between Guyana and Venezuela since the mid-19th century—a territorial dispute whose initial antagonist, readers will be shocked to learn, was the British Empire.
Exxon was one of the first companies to begin drilling for oil in Essequibo’s disputed waters. As the Washington Post reported in 2017, it was the “perfect revenge” for Exxon’s then-CEO Rex Tillerson, whom Donald Trump would later go on to appoint as his Secretary of State.
Rex Tillerson hadn’t been CEO of ExxonMobil very long when the late president Hugo Chávez made foreign oil companies in Venezuela an offer they couldn’t refuse. Give the government a bigger cut, or else.
Most of the companies took the deal. Tillerson refused.
Chávez responded in 2007 by nationalizing ExxonMobil’s considerable assets in the country, which the company valued at $10 billion. The losses were a big blow to Tillerson, who reportedly took the seizure as a personal affront.
Only Tillerson didn’t get mad, at least in public. He got even.
Flash forward to May 2015. Just five days after former military general David Granger was elected president of the South American nation of Guyana, unseating the country’s long-ruling leftist party, ExxonMobil made a big announcement.
In the deep blue waters120 miles off Guyana’s coast, the company scored a major oil discovery: as much as 1.4 billion barrels of high-quality crude. Tillerson told company shareholders the well, Liza-1, was the largest oil find anywhere in the world that year.
For tiny Guyana (population 800,000), the continent’s only English-speaking country and one of its poorest, it was a fortune-changing event, certain to mark a “before and after” in a country long isolated by language and geography.
There was just one problem with this undersea bonanza. Venezuela claimed the waters—and the hydrocarbons beneath them—as its own.
Clearly drilling in the disputed area was potentially a good business decision for ExxonMobil, not some sort of elaborate revenge scheme by its CEO.
But revenge had been served. Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, Chávez’s successor, was livid.
“There is a brutal campaign against Venezuela of lies, funded by ExxonMobil … which has great influence at the Pentagon,” Maduro declared, calling the dispute an attempt to corner Venezuela and precipitate “a high-intensity conflict.”
That high-intensity conflict is now closer than ever. But it needs to be packaged and sold to US lawmakers, media, members of the armed forces, and Trump’s war-weary MAGA base. And that is where CSIS’ “experts” come in. And they appear to be marketing this war on behalf of a company that has much to gain from a military intervention, and which also bears the biggest grudge against Venezuela’s Bolivarian movement.
Nick Corbishley is a writer, journalist, teacher, and translator based in Barcelona. Formerly a senior contributing editor at the San Francisco-based economics and finance news site Wolf Street, he is currently a regular contributor to the US financial news and analysis blog Naked Capitalism
Source: nakedcapitalism.com, December 19, 2025. This is an excerpt from a longer article.