Nearly a year after US forces extracted Nicolas Maduro from Caracas to face drug trafficking charges, the Trump administration is publicly urging Venezuela toward a three-phase plan: stabilization, economic recovery and political reconciliation, then democratic transition. Secretary of State Marco Rubio discussed the roadmap with Venezuelan Foreign Minister Oliver Blanco on Monday. Neither spoke to the press, but the State Department's readout confirmed the sequencing — elections come last. The phasing matters because of what Washington has already locked in during the pre-election period. In September, the Trump administration struck a deal giving the Pentagon a 35 percent stake in North American Blue Energy Partners (NABEP), owned by Venezuelan businessman Alejandro Betancourt. NABEP is Venezuela's second-largest private oil operator behind Chevron. Under the agreement, Caracas granted NABEP 100-year rights over 17 oilfields with proven reserves of 65 billion barrels. The US also secured the right to buy 20 percent of NABEP's output at cost. The interim government of Delcy Rodriguez — who served as Maduro's vice president before taking over after his abduction — is the counterparty to this arrangement. Rodriguez has assured Venezuelans that elections will be held "with the world as witness" but has not specified a date. The US three-phase plan points to 2027. The oil deal runs for a century. Opposition leader Maria Corina Machado, a Nobel Peace Prize laureate who returned to Venezuela last week, is threading a needle. She thanked Trump and Rubio for their support and said she had returned to organize a movement ahead of elections. But she also took a shot at the oil agreement, stating it "does not reflect the levels of transparency that Venezuelan society wants." Machado said she had received no message from Rodriguez or from Washington regarding any direct engagement. The structural tension is plain: Machado's democratic legitimacy claim rests on elections, but the US has already extracted its primary economic concession from the interim government before any vote takes place. The three-phase plan ensures the oil deal is fait accompli before democratic accountability enters the picture. Whether elections in 2027 could realistically revisit a 100-year concession is an open question the sequencing conveniently avoids. Rodriguez's government occupies a peculiar position — an unelected successor regime serving as both the US partner in oil extraction and the ostensible custodian of a democratic transition. Machado, the most popular opposition figure, has not spoken to Trump since October and has no formal channel to the interim government. The person with the democratic mandate is the person with the least leverage over the deals being struck in her country's name. The 20-year question writes itself: if the pattern holds — concessions first, elections second, and century-long resource locks that no subsequent government can easily unwind — Venezuela's democratic transition becomes a procedural decoration atop an already completed extraction architecture.
