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Speculation of more privatisations by the Nicolás Maduro government is growing amid fears incoming United States president Donald Trump may tighten sanctions on Venezuela. The moves also come as Maduro seeks to further consolidate the support of Venezuelan capitalists after his disputed re-election on July 28.

Colombian president Gustavo Petro raised alarm over plans to privatise Venezuelan state fertiliser company Monómeros in a November 10 . Based in Colombia, Monómeros is the second-largest Venezuelan state asset abroad, providing critical support for farmers in both countries.

Back in 2019, far right Colombian president Iván Duque handed the company to self-proclaimed Venezuelan “interim president” Juan Guaidó as part of a US-led plan to economically strangle the Maduro government.

With Petro’s election in 2022, Monómeros was returned to the Venezuelan state and the company currently operates under sanctions waivers issued by the US Treasury Department. But fears Trump could move against Monómeros seem to be driving Venezuela’s intentions to sell the company.

What is unclear is why the plan appears to be to , the Colombian subsidiary of US-based transnational Nitron Group. Nitrofert was set up with the help of Duque and far-right Venezuelan opposition leader Leopoldo López in 2021, with the purpose of handing Monómeros over to it when the company was under Guaidó’s control.

Petro has warned that the “sale of Monómeros will lead to higher prices for primary agricultural products in our countries. In addition, it will force our farmers to depend on foreign products and the price of agricultural inputs on the international market.”

“There is no doubt that this decision could condemn millions of people who represent the basis of food sovereignty in our region to poverty and hunger.”

Petro’s letter was followed a week later by comments from Venezuelan Confederation of Industries  stating Maduro had informed his organisation of plans to fully or partially privatise “between 500 and 600 companies”.

According to Pisella, the government intends to privatise these or run them in “an alliance as mixed companies”, adding Maduro also wants the private sector to invest in strategic sectors such as oil, gas and steel.

Regarding joint private-state projects, Pisella said the government was proposing contracts similar to those signed with US oil multinational Chevron, where “Chevron manages everything”.

“In other words, if there is an alliance, it will be the private sector that will operate the company from A to Z.”

The Maduro government has so far remained quiet on these plans. But they are in line with policies pursued during the past decade amid sanctions, economic crisis and declining popular support.

Sanctions on government officials started under US President Barack Obama in 2015, but were greatly expanded during the first Trump presidency to target the state oil company, PDVSA, and the Central Bank of Venezuela.

Describing Trump’s sanctions as a “weapon of financial destruction”, Venezuelan political economist Malfred Gerig told 91������̳ his “comprehensive sanctions regime … represented a de facto severing of the country’s ties to the global economy”.

These sanctions — illegal under international law — sought to cripple Venezuela’s oil industry, blocked its access to international financial markets and scared off potential investors under threat of financial punishment.

The combination of sanctions, the economic crisis already afflicting the country amid declining oil prices and production and Maduro’s economic mismanagement, “created a perfect storm …. culminating in a nuclear bomb of dispossession, social marginalisation [and] deteriorating conditions for production”.

The sanctions also contributed to Maduro's declining support, already evidenced by the government’s loss in the 2015 National Assembly elections.

Speaking to GL back in 2020, revolutionary activist and sociologist Reinaldo Iturriza said this period between 2015–19 was no doubt “a point of inflection in the Bolivarian process” — a phrase commonly used to refer to the process of pro-poor, radical democratic transformation that began in the country under former president Hugo Chávez.

Back then, party leaders and state officials began to publicly speak out in support of re-privatising certain activities in the oil sector, views that “until then had been inconceivable” within the revolution.

“Mismanagement of certain public companies and corruption, along with deliberate disinvestment and a profound lack of confidence in the organised people … contributed to positioning the idea that it was indispensable to establish ‘strategic alliances’ with 91������̳ of the capitalist class in order to get out of the quagmire.”

Establishing such alliances required opening up new areas for investment: “The choice was made to disinvest: to abandon public companies with the aim of privatising them.”

Venezuelan leftist Antonio González Plessmann told GL in 2021 that “when the blockade obliged the government to adopt emergency measures, the governing elite had little problems in embracing economic measures commonly associated with neoliberal adjustment programs and promoting the role of business to confront the crisis”.

This was facilitated by the fact that for the past decade, “corruption and the discretionary use of public resources to benefit certain economic sectors has generated a network of (legal and illegal) economic interests that have consolidated themselves and worked to undermine the anti-capitalist component of the Bolivarian Revolution”.

The problem with this shift in alliances away from the people and towards reliance on Venezuelan capitalists, according to Plessmann, was “that it involves a transformation in what Chavismo stands for. It reduces the role of the people, who were previously the protagonists of the Bolivarian Revolution, and represents an abdication in the face of capital.”