S8 Ep608: 6. Evan Ellis Headline: Venezuela’s Oil Interests and Democratic Hopes While the Trump administration views Venezuela as a success, the Chvista regime remains entrenched through hardline appointments. Opposition leader Maria Corina Machado pushes for demo
The John Batchelor Show
John Batchelor
4.5 • 2.8K Ratings
🗓️ 20 March 2026
⏱️ 7 minutes
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Summary
6. Evan Ellis Headline: Venezuela’s Oil Interests and Democratic HopesWhile the Trump administration views Venezuela as a success, the Chvista regime remains entrenched through hardline appointments. Opposition leader Maria Corina Machado pushes for democratic stability to attract essential foreign investment into the oil sector. (6)
1887 VENEZUELA
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | I'm John Batcher. This is the New World Report, Professor Evan Ellis, U.S. Army War College, |
| 0:21.7 | Caracas, Venezuela, a success, question mark. The political prisoners remain in the dungeon |
| 0:27.8 | in Caracas. The opposition is not permitted to return without harassment, I'm told, by the courts |
| 0:35.0 | because of something called an amnesty law. |
| 0:47.0 | Deodalo de Bello, the name of the interior minister, remains a curse every time I hear about him, the man with the guns. |
| 0:49.6 | All of that is in place and then this. |
| 0:55.9 | Venezuela and opposition leader Machado to participate in Houston Energy Conference next week. |
| 1:00.8 | There's a wonderful picture of Ms. Machado smiling and greeting people outside of a vehicle. |
| 1:09.4 | And the Reuters explains Venezuela opposition leader Nobel Peace Prize winner, Maria Karina Machado, is scheduled to participate in a C-E-R-A-week conference by S&P in Houston next week. |
| 1:17.2 | That's all positive, Professor, so I can be puzzled about the way that the opposition is being not quite threatened but frozen out of Venezuela. |
| 1:27.5 | And Ms. Machado's smile is convincing that all is well. Not quite threatened, but frozen out of Venezuela. |
| 1:32.1 | And Ms. Machado's smile is convincing that all is well, is it? |
| 1:35.4 | It's a great question, John. |
| 1:42.3 | Perhaps for Venezuelans, despite all of this drama, the most important thing that happened this past week was that the Venezuelan national team beat the |
| 1:45.2 | U.S. national team in a friendly but dramatic baseball game, scoring the winning point in the |
| 1:51.2 | ninth inning. So ironically, for a moment, baseball actually has eclipsed the tragedy of politics. |
| 1:58.9 | The other thing that just occurred literally within the past, |
| 2:02.9 | I believe, 24 hours is that Delci Rodriguez replaced the defense minister of Vladimir |
| 2:09.3 | Perdino-Lopez, seen to be in some ways a rival of hers within Chivismo, with a new general |
| 2:15.3 | Gustavo Gonzalez-Lopez, who is actually in many ways considered |
| 2:19.9 | worse than Prudino-Lopez in terms of his ties to corruption and torture and various other |
| 2:25.7 | things. And so there is a sense of something's going on within Chivismo. Was it that |
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