SPECIAL REPORT: Is The US About To Invade Venezuela? | Mario Braga, RANE

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**Mario Braga** (0:45)
Venezuela has the largest proven oil reserves globally. Around 17 percent of the oil reserves are there. About 303 billion a barrels. That's not something we can't ignore, of course. It has also the eighth largest natural gas reserves, in addition to mineral rich, so from gold to diamonds and including now to rare earths. The US views the Western Hemisphere as a natural area of influence of the United States. It's important to the Trump administration that China, Russia, Iran do not have a free pass to be present in the continent.

**Adam Taggart** (1:32)
Welcome to Thoughtful Money. I'm its founder and your host, Adam Taggart. At the time of this recording, tensions are high between the US and Venezuela. American warships have been deployed off Venezuela's coast. Speculation of a U.S.-driven regime change to oust Venezuelan president, Nicolas Maduro, is all over the headlines. And just a few days ago, US officials told Reuters that the United States is, quote, poised to launch a new phase of Venezuelan-related operations in the coming days. So, how did we get to this boiling point? What's most likely to happen from here? And what would the geopolitical and economic implications of a regime change in Venezuela be? For perspective, in this Thoughtful Money special report, we're fortunate to be joined today by Mario BragA, Latin American geopolitical analyst for RANE. Mario, thanks so much for joining us today.

**Mario Braga** (2:22)
Thank you, Adam. It's my pleasure to be here.

**Adam Taggart** (2:24)
All right. Well, like, I very much appreciate you doing this. We've done this in the past with some of your colleagues to give us kind of real-time insights for other conflicts that have gone around the world, most notably in the Middle East. Very much appreciating you coming here upon request to do this for us in Venezuela here. So Mario, if you can, let's start just kind of by leaning back for a second here. Set the table for us. What is the history of the bad blood between the US and the Maduro regime?

**Mario Braga** (2:56)
Sure. I think when we think about Venezuela, the thing that comes to many people's minds is Chavez, Maduro, this socialist autocracy that came to be. But it's important to take a step back and understand how they came to power and then how the dynamics between Venezuela and the US changed over the past decades. Because basically Venezuela, after gaining independence, and I promise I'll not make this into a Venezuelan history class, but until the 1950s.
Then in 1958, there is the Punto Fijo Pact, the main three political parties agree to respect election results. Then Venezuela has a democratic period starting in 1958 But of course, with these political arrangements, they become fragile at some point, they stop working. With Venezuela, of course, oil prices had a lot to do with that. So when we come to the late 80s and early 90s, that's already crumbling down, and that's basically when Hugo Chávez, who then was a career military officer, who had already founded a Bolivarian militia within the army, in 1992, he tries to stage a coup to get to power. He does not succeed, he is arrested, and then one can think, well, that's the end, he's in jail, he's not coming back. But that's not what happens, because a couple of years later, he is pardoned and he became this voice for the dissatisfaction that there was within Venezuelan society with the existing political establishment. So in 1998, he gets to power via democratic norms, he is elected, and he comes to power with a very ideological approach to governing. So he declared himself a Marxist, so he seized the US and labels the US as an imperialist regime. And then he starts to turn Venezuela from what used to be kind of a regular Latin American democracy, of course, with corruption, with many issues, but he makes a lot of constitutional changes and he grows increasingly autocratic over the years by relying on the large oil reserves that he had. So cash handouts, social programs, social benefits, to have this popular support at the same time when he's deteriorating the country's institutions, the kind of electoral rules. He managed to kind of hold sham elections to remain in power. And that works, especially in the 2000s, on the back of the commodities boom that was mostly driven by China.