The Room Where It Happened: A White House Memoir

by John Bolton

Under Chavez and now Maduro, Venezuela’s revenues from petroleum-related exports had dropped dramatically, as production itself fell, from approximately 3.3 million barrels of oil pumped per day when Chavez took power in 1999 to approximately 1.1 million barrels per day in January 2019. This precipitous decline, dropping Venezuela to production levels not seen since the 1940s, had already substantially impoverished the country. Driving the state-owned oil monopoly’s production as low as possible, which the Opposition fully supported,8 might well have been enough to crash Maduro’s regime. There were many other sanctions necessary to eliminate the regime’s illicit income streams—especially drug trafficking with narco-terrorists operating primarily in Colombia, with safe havens in Venezuela—but striking the oil company was key.