By Luis Vicente León – Sep 10, 2026The discussion about the US-Venezuela oil deal has focused on legality, legitimacy, sovereignty, and the conditions that were accepted. All of this is valid, and I do not mean to say it does not matter, because it does. But I have been following the debate for days, and I find it hard to come across someone asking the other question. The one about how it could impact people’s lives.Venezuela has the largest crude oil reserve on the planet. We have been repeating it for years, and that oil is still where it was — underground, and still not paying anyone’s electricity bill. We have been a poor country sitting on a fortune that we cannot extract. Yet when you ask people what their problems are, no one mentions oil production, but rather electricity, water, salary, and medicine.Almost all criticism of this deal concerns what we are going to receive vs what we should receive. But what we should receive is a chimera. Reality is that this country has been deprived of resources for years, and has yet to address things that can no longer wait.No one should misunderstand me: investment does not depend on a single variable. Political stability, institutional quality, clear rules, all that matters — and any investor would love to have it. But in this case, those things operate more as risk and return variables than as a closed gate. What does work as a closed gate is the absence of a protective architecture. I have seen how these decisions are made: no investment committee approves billions for 30 years just because the expected return is high. They measure the return against the risk, and for years, Venezuela has always lost that calculation.And here comes the uncomfortable part, the one that almost no one wants to say in public. We are a country of risks. That risk has a price, and that price is paid in conditions. Comparing a Venezuelan contract with a Canadian one is an exercise that sounds good on Twitter, but does not withstand the first serious examination. The discount that is being applied to us is the bill of reputation, and to start lowering it, something must be sacrificed first. This is an adult conversation that we in Venezuela continue postponing.What changes with this agreement is not the geology, which remains just as good. The risk premium is modified. And not because of a diplomatic speech, but because there is a partner with the real capacity to uphold what they sign. For those who are going to put up the money, that holds a different weight.Is it the best imaginable deal? Almost certainly not. But the best imaginable one is not on the table; this one is.It is worth considering what gets activated when this starts, because the value of a large-scale project is not exhausted in the royalty to the treasury. A development like this is not just about putting in a drill and that being the end of it. To bring in the drill, you need road access, and for road access, you need earthmoving, and there are already companies hiring people. We need to set up power generation, for that energy to supply nearby towns and cities.Hinterlaces President: 82% of Venezuelans Approve US-Venezuela Oil DealThen comes what people see. The workshop that gets customers again, the inn that fills up from Monday to Thursday, the grocery store that starts billing again. A young man who gets certified as a welder under international standards, and no longer has to go around looking for odd jobs. An engineer who is now in Houston, and for the first time in years, sits down to consider returning to Venezuela. It is around the well, and not inside the well, where the greatest amount of income is employed and distributed.And when income rises, consumption rises. This sounds like an economist’s term, but is simply the everyday life of people: eating better, being able to buy medicine, having the roof fixed before the rain comes pouring down. This is what this discussion is about, even though the public debate is about something entirely different.Criticizing is a right, and demanding conditions is a duty. But this country has let too many opportunities slip by while we debated whether they were good enough. We have gone years without anything that looked like a real possibility. Now there is something with serious problems, but not greater than the benefits that it can reap. (X Luis Vicente León)Translation: Orinoco TribuneOT/SC/SH