The document that started it is dated March 9, 2015, and it reads like a formula. President Obama, by executive order, declared a national emergency over what the White House called the “unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security and foreign policy of the United States posed by the situation in Venezuela”. Seven individuals were listed in the order’s annex that first day, and the accompanying fact sheet carried a promise: “The E.O. does not target the people or the economy of Venezuela.” Eleven years and four more executive orders later, that promise sits oddly against the architecture it grew into.
Ground the paperwork in a person and the stakes sharpen. Among the seven named on day one was a Caracas prosecutor who had charged opposition leader María Corina Machado, and Caracas Mayor Antonio Ledezma, with conspiracy in alleged assassination and coup plots built on “implausible – and in some cases fabricated – information”. “The evidence used in support of the charges against Machado and others was, at least in part, based on fraudulent emails.” the fact sheet records. Another listed name was the brigade commander who headed the SEBIN intelligence service on February 12, 2014, when its officers fired on protesters and killed two people near the Attorney General’s Office; the annex also names National Guard and national police leaders whose forces used severe physical violence and live ammunition against demonstrators and journalists. That was the file the emergency was built on.
What followed was a ladder. The 2015 order, E.O. 13692, has since put roughly 150 Venezuelans and three entities on the sanctions list, among them Maduro himself, his wife Cilia Flores and Delcy Rodríguez, the vice president. In 2017 came E.O. 13808 against the financial sector, after the contested Constituent Assembly, banning dealings in new government debt above 30 days and PdVSA debt above 90, cutting Caracas off from American capital markets. November 2018’s E.O. 13850 opened sectoral authority over gold and oil; using it, OFAC designated PdVSA in January 2019, then Venezuela’s Central Bank and its national development bank, BANDES. By August 2019, E.O. 13884 blocked the property of the government as a whole.
There was one real thaw. On October 18, 2023, after Caracas committed to electoral reform, OFAC opened GL 44, licensing oil and gas operations in Venezuela through April 18, 2024, from new investment to production, lifting, sale and export. The reforms did not arrive; on April 17, 2024 the license was replaced by a wind-down authorization that ran to May 31, 2024. Chevron’s narrower license, granted November 26, 2022 for the PdVSA joint ventures, met the same fate: on March 4, 2025, after President Trump terminated the Biden-era authorizations, it too was cut to wind-down terms, through April 3 and then May 27, 2025. The stricter regime of the first term was back.
By the start of 2026 the file changed shape again. Nicolás Maduro was apprehended on January 3, 2026, and the White House began pushing for U.S. oil-company access to the Venezuelan market, hosting oil executives and floating what officials describe as a “three-step” plan; industry executives, reportedly, remain cautious, with no firm investment commitments announced. On January 9, 2026, E.O. 14373 blocked courts and creditors from Venezuelan oil-sale proceeds held at the Treasury, voiding attachments against the funds. The stated direction is “to enable the transport and sale of Venezuelan crude and oil products to global markets” through selective rollback, but as of mid-January 2026 no industry-wide licenses existed, and sanctions relief is expected to stay leveraged against democratic reform.
The constant across eleven years is the emergency itself. IEEPA gives the president unilateral power to license, modify or suspend the whole structure, which is why the same instrument that built the pressure can unwrap it, one general license at a time. What began in 2015 as an order promising not to target a people or an economy now decides, in effect, who may buy the country’s oil, and the question the 2023 episode left open is whether relief can be tied to reform that actually arrives.
Sources
- FACT SHEET: Venezuela Executive Order | whitehouse.gov
- Navigating Venezuela Sanctions: Legal Considerations and Anticipated Developments | Publications | Cleary Gottlieb
