Raphael John-Lall

Free­lance Con­trib­u­tor

Venezue­lan Op­po­si­tion Leader María Co­ri­na Macha­do is cel­e­brat­ing the US gov­ern­ment’s de­ci­sion to re­voke oil and gas com­pa­nies’ li­cences as part of the on­go­ing trade and eco­nom­ic war against the South Amer­i­can coun­try.

Al­though Macha­do did not specif­i­cal­ly re­fer to the re­vo­ca­tion of li­cences for T&T to ex­plore gas fields in Venezue­lan wa­ters, she said she is sat­is­fied that every­thing is be­ing done to iso­late the Nicolás Maduro regime and cut off funds to Venezuela.

In an in­ter­view with Mi­a­mi-based TV Venezuela, Macha­do said the mea­sures by Wash­ing­ton seek to stem the flow of mon­ey to the coun­try, with the goal of un­der­min­ing in­sti­tu­tions and gen­er­at­ing chaos among the pop­u­la­tion.

“If these fi­nan­cial flows de­crease, these struc­tures col­lapse and this is what’s hap­pen­ing when these li­cens­es are re­voked,” she said.

“At this mo­ment, Venezuela is a threat to the se­cu­ri­ty of the hemi­sphere and must be ad­dressed ac­cord­ing­ly,” Macha­do added.

Venezue­l­analy­sis, an in­de­pen­dent Eng­lish lan­guage web­site, said the move which strips T&T of the li­cences is a ma­jor blow.

On its X ac­count, the Venezue­l­analy­sis ed­i­to­r­i­al team wrote: “Crack­down con­tin­ues w/ the U.S. re­vok­ing li­cens­es for off­shore nat­ur­al gas drilling projects with Trinidad and To­ba­go and Shell/BP. While these were very un­favourable deals for Vzla and de­vel­op­ment was years away, it’s an­oth­er blow against much-need­ed rev­enue.”

The Venezue­lan Gov­ern­ment has not of­fi­cial­ly com­ment­ed on the love by the US to kill off the Drag­on gas deal, the is­sue has been gen­er­at­ing much dis­cus­sion on so­cial me­dia.

There was a heat­ed pro- and an­ti-gov­ern­ment de­bate on In­for­ma2’s In­sta­gram ac­count with al­most 800 likes and dozens of com­ments.

One per­son con­demned the US say­ing: “Dic­ta­tor Trumps think he owns the world.”

An­oth­er per­son wrote: “Ex­cel­lent news, this is very good for Trinidad. He is an ac­com­plice of Pres­i­dent Maduro, now take that.”