Venezuela is ready to accept U.S. investment in its oil, Nicolas Maduro said late on Thursday, in a stark softening of the rhetoric from the embattled Venezuelan leader.
Maduro suggested serious talks between Venezuela and the United States in an interview aired on Venezuelan state TV late on New Year’s Day.
“If they want Venezuela’s oil, Venezuela is ready to accept U.S. investments like those of Chevron, when, where and how they want to make them,” Reuters quoted Maduro as saying in the interview.
“We must start to speak seriously, with the facts in hand. The U.S. government knows that, because we have said it a lot to their interlocutors, that if they want to speak seriously about the agreement to battle drug trafficking, we are ready to do that,” the Venezuelan leader said.
He also told the interviewer, “To the people of the United States I say what I have always said, Venezuela is a brother country… a friendly government.”
The U.S.-Venezuela tensions have escalated since early December, when U.S. President Donald Trump ordered a naval blockade offshore Venezuela to halt sanctioned tankers shipping oil and products to and from the South American country.
The blockade forced re-routing of tankers, delays in exports, and led to declines in revenues for Maduro’s government.
Venezuela has also reportedly begun shutting wells that pump extra-heavy crude in the Orinoco Belt, as the U.S. blockade is squeezing shipments and filling up storage space.
PDVSA, the key handler of Venezuela’s crude exports, mostly to China, began disabling producing wells in the Orinoco Belt a few days ago, following a decision taken on December 23, sources with knowledge of the plans of state oil firm PDVSA told Bloomberg earlier this week.
President Trump also said early this week that the United States hit a dock on a shore, where alleged drug boats “load up.”
By Charles Kennedy for Oilprice.com
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