Judging Freedom - Pepe Escobar : How Trump’s Oily Dreams May Collapse in a Venezuelan Dark Pit

Episode Date: January 9, 2026

Pepe Escobar : How Trump’s Oily Dreams May Collapse in a Venezuelan Dark PitSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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government? What if Jefferson was right? What if that government is best, which governs least? What if it is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong? What if it is better to perish fighting for freedom than to live as a slave? What if freedom's greatest hour of danger is now? Hi, everyone. Judge Andrew Napolitano here for judging freedom. Today is Friday, January 9th, 2006, Pepe Escobar will be here with us on just a moment on how crazy are Trump's oily Venezuelan dreams. But first, this. History tells us every market eventually falls. Currencies collapse. And look at where we are now. 38 trillion in national debt. Stocks at record highs defying gravity. So what happens next? Groceries, gas, gas,

housing, everything's going up, and this dollar, it buys less every day. When the system breaks, your stocks won't save you and your dollars won't either. But one thing will, gold. I've set it on my show for years. Gold survives collapse. Central bankers know this and billionaires know it. That's why they're buying more. Is it too late to buy or is it just the right time? Call my friends at Lear Capital find out. Ask questions. Get the free information. There's no pressure. And that's why I buy my gold and silver from Lear. And right now, you can get up to $20,000 in bonus medals with a qualified purchase. Call 800, 511, 4620 or go to Learjudgeonap.com today. Pepe Esco, our pleasure, my dear friend. Welcome here. You have this dynamite piece.

Thank you. How. How. Trump's oily dreams may collapse in a Venezuelan dark pit. With your permission, we'd like to post it on Judge now. Thank you. Yes, absolutely. Thank you, Judge. Thank you. It's very kind of you.

Can the United States successfully colonize Venezuela? No, they can. They will have to kill 28 million Venezuelans to do that, Judge. It's a bit an uphill struggle, isn't it? Well, I would... Trump didn't clear with the Venezuelan population. what he did a few days ago. And now we have, except for the 1% in Caracas,

and except for the 1 or 2% who live in Miami, the official capital of the Venezuelan diaspora and the Cuban diaspora, everybody is united in terms of defending Venezuelan sovereignty, which is the overall theme for the whole of Latin America. Now, Trump bought a war against the whole population of Latin America except the 1%. So just as the Israelis learned that their attack on Iran united the Iranians, behind anybody's wildest dreams, Trump's invasion of Venezuela, killing 100 people,

half of them in their sleep in order to kidnap the president. has united a country like it hasn't been united before. Absolutely, Judge. And not only the country, but let's put it this way, the South American and the Latin American street. If you go to a favela in Rio, if you go to the suburbs of Buenos Aires, if you go to Los Altos in Bolivia,

if you go to the Peruvian coast in Kusko, everybody is going to tell you the same. This is our. southern hemisphere. And we're not going to let any gringos to come here and take over our land. Who believes? Who in the international community seriously believes Trump that this is about drugs when Trump's own director of national intelligence, Chelsea Gabbard, who probably should resign after

what they did to humiliate her, not telling her about this and involving her, whatever. And she has said under oath, Venezuela is not a distributor of drugs. And Trump's own drug enforcement administration, five agents of which accompanied the thugs on their attack the other night for a window dressing, has said that cocaine and fentanyl do not come from Venezuela. Who believes internationally what Trump is saying? I would say that you wrote two hours, Judge. They are trying to find ways not to entourage. antagonize Donald Trump.

Everybody in South American and Latin America knows, first of all, the drugs, the channel, the top channels of, let's say, the drug connectivity corridor to the United States come from Colombia and Mexico. In Mexico, there are a lot of middlemen, and that includes a lot of Peruvians. Some of the cocaine comes from Brazil by air. Nothing has to do with Venezuela. And I would say the clincher is the Department of Justice admitting on the record that the Cartel de los Soles never existed, because it never existed, was fabricated by the CIA.

Yes, the original indictment from the first Trump administration of President Maduro accused them of being the head of this cartel. the new indictment, hastily written, sloppily written. It's got things in there that aren't even crimes. It's almost laughable what they accused him of. Conspicuously omits this nonsense about this non-existent cartel. Judge, can I go back to the Latin American street and tell you what's circulating everywhere.

Please. From Rio to Monte Vidal, to Santiago, to Caracca. to Lima, the only cartel that exists in this whole thing is the Cartel de los gringos. That's what they're calling the Yankees. Yes. Wow. Can Trump, because he's boasted about this and you wrote about it, can Trump actually expel Iranian and Cuban operative from Venezuela?

Only if he, well, he promised and then he backtracked, I think from yesterday to today, a second strike against Venezuela against Del C. If Del C doesn't do what she's being told. Well, Trump, Rubeo, Viceroy of Venezuela, Gusano Rubio, they underestimate Del C. Del C is a real Chavista revolutionary. Her father was a revolutionary killed by the CIA. Del C. Rodriguez, the current interim president of Venezuela, she is an old school chavista. She is very well educated. She is a lawyer.

She knows how to negotiate. She is on a lula level of hardcore negotiating. So she can negotiate anything with the Americas, except the loss of sovereignty for Venezuela. She was talking to Marco Rubio even before the Netflix-style abduction of Maduro. So if they think that they're going to bend, they'll see into following their dictates, by the way, which includes going after drug cartels which don't exist in Venezuela, expelling Iranian and Cuban advisors, which is not going to happen, and stopping a Venezuela to sell oil to Iran, for instance.

This is not going to happen. Forget it. No way. So this is, once again, bragging threats. Everything is built in this mafioso style criminal organization, disguised as the Trump or the Trump administration. And the fact that all over Latin America, people see this very, very clearly, when I mean people, not this.

1% Comprador, fifth columnist elites all across Latin America, from Brazil to Colombia, to Venezuela, to Peru, Chile, Argentina, everywhere. No, I'm talking about the Latin American street. So if Trump wants to really antagonize and fight the whole of the southern hemisphere, he'll keep doing what he's doing. But it won't get to that, Judge, I think, because the initial objective was not even reached. There is no regime change in Venezuela, period.

The Chavista framework of government is still in place. We have Diosdado Cabello, Minister of Interior, in place. We have the Minister of Defense in place. They are meeting with Del C every day. The Parliament is in place, including the son of Nicolas Maduro in Parliament. And you have 98 to 99% of the population totally supporting, not only the return of Maduro, but total rejection of anything that the United States wants to impose over there as well. So the lady that won the Nobel Peace Prize.

She's going to the U.S. next week, right? She's going to the U.S. and she's supposedly going to give her Nobel Peace Prize to Trump, which is probably the only way he would get one. What is the purpose of such a meeting? Are they going to plan and plot to install her? in the presidency that would result in a revolution. No, but the most pathetic aspect, Judge, is that Trump himself dismissed the female Liguido. Ah, she doesn't have public opinion support in Venezuela.

She has probably less than 1% of public opinion all across Venezuela. So she's going to Washington as a PR operation to hand over the Nobel Peace Prize to Trump, So he can say that, hey, okay, I finished nine wars, 10 wars, 15 wars, million wars, more than James is cunning his lifetime. What is the relationship between Venezuela and Iran? That's a very, very good question because it's basically made in the shade. It involves Iran helping Venezuela to fight the effect. of those deadly sanctions, something that Iran understands very well.

They are under sanctions for over 40 years. And when you go to Iran, you see the effects of sanctions after 40 years. It's absolutely devastating. It's something that I saw with my own eyes a few months ago when I was traveling across Iran. In Venezuela, maybe, what, 12, 15 years of hardcore sanctions. but the effects are equally devastating. And these sanctions were fundamentally the key vector that led many Venezuela's to leave the country and to, in different ways, as part of the diaspora, to start protesting against the Maduro administration.

It's a very complicated affair because without the sanctions, you cannot explain how Venezuela, was impoverished this past few years. The sanctions is the number one vector. And every analysis between commas coming from the U.S. from the West, they obviously obliterate the most important element. It's the same thing of analyzing Iran without understanding the effects of sanctions after 40 years. You're in my mutual friend, Professor Mohamed Mirandi. We'll be on judging freedom next week from Iran to give us an update on exactly what's going on there.

I'm deeply grateful for him. It's risky for him to do so, and we have to jump through a lot of hoops to make the technical aspect work. But Chris always succeeds in that project. Is Trump realistic when he was Trump realistic? He lives in the fantasy world. But is it realistic that he could reduce it? the price of oil to $50 a barrel? No, he can't, Judge.

And this is what I tried to explain in my latest article. I talked to energy specialists from the Persian Gulf, people that I have been talking to since even before the Iraq War. And I talked to some Chinese as well. The most realistic projection that they have, assuming that American energy majors would invest, 183 billion over a period of 16 years,

then by 2040, Venezuela would be able to start producing 3 million barrels of oil a day, which is nothing compared to Saudi Arabia production, Kuwait production, UAE production, even Russian production or Iranian production. How different is uranium oil excuse me,

Venezuelan oil from the oil that comes from the Middle East. It's very heavy, very, very heavy, and it needs to be diluted by diluance after it's extracted. So you need

0.3 barrels of diluent that you have to import into Venezuela to have one barrel of Venezuelan oil able to be exported. This is completely crazy. So you have to invest into all that. And on top of that,

and this is something that our Chinese connections explained in detail. The whole energy infrastructure in Venezuela, even though it's falling apart because of the sanctions, of course, but the nodes that are not falling apart, they were reconditioned by the Chinese. So this is according to a Chinese energy ecosystem, let's put it this way.

So the Americans will have to destroy this Chinese ecosystems without the Chinese engineers and technicians. And at the same time, upgrade everything that is falling apart in the old system even as well. They gave me a very approximate timeline of how fast could you do that? around five years. And then we still have, okay, let's say they did it in five years. So by 2013, they would start producing again. So this would take them at least another 10 years or more to reach where they were before the sanctions 10, 15 years ago.

It's completely absurd. If you talk about this to a Chevron on an Exxon Mobil CEO, he'll say, of course not. Of course we can do it. And there are no guarantees. And worse, even worse. If the Trump administration imposes a fifth columnist completely bought out new government in Caracas after Del C, after getting rid of Del C, there's going to be chaos all around in an early humanitarian crisis. and Venezuela will be plunged into deep, deep chaos. As a CEO of an energy major,

do you want to invest in a country like that? Obviously not. What are the consequences to American companies of China's loss of its ability to import Venezuelan oil? It's not a big deal, Judge. And I put that in my column. in numbers as well and confirmed by the Chinese. Venezuela is 2% of the 20% of oil that China imports from the rest of the world.

China is energy sufficient. This is something that, you know, people at the Trump administration, you know, they still haven't got their numbers right. China is 80% energy self-sufficient. The 20% that they import, Venezuela is responsible for only, 2% of this 20%. So it's until the last numbers that we have,

it's 730,000 more or less barrels a day, which is nothing. In terms of Chinese consumption, is nothing. And the Chinese already said two days ago, and I'm not mistaken, everything that we were buying from Venezuela, we're going to start buying from Iran. And they can also

access Saudi Arabia and Russia. some of their top suppliers. And very, very important. If they import from Iran and if they import from Russia, this is within bricks, which is absolutely what the bricks are doing now, which is evading the petrodollars, which brings us to the number one reason of the Trump Netflix special 30 minutes kidnapping a sitting president in his bedroom at 3 in the morning,

is to try to sustain the inevitable decline of the petrodollah. Wow. Well, but by cutting off Venezuelan oil to China, isn't the Trump administration hurting various American companies who are the middlemen and financiers of all of this? Middleman and finances, Judge, absolutely. So American companies and American middlemen, we're going to lose a lot of money, of course.

Don't forget that, which is very, very important. I stress it in my latest piece. All the agreements between Caracas and Beijing own energy from Venezuela, these are very, very serious agreements, legalistically binded with everything, and that includes binding them with the way the international financial system works. And that's something that in my past two columns I have been stressing, you know, it's extremely important. If, okay, and this if is quite possible, Vice Roy of Rubio decides to cut off the stream of Venezuelan oil being sold to China.

China is going to go after the US in every court anywhere on the planet, period. it's going to be a legalistic battle. That's why the Americans have to... Because he will be interfering with contracts. We contracts. Everything is contracted. It's not that Xi Jinping picked up the phone and called Maduro, look, I need 700,000 barrels of oil.

It doesn't work like that. Everything is in contracts, legally binding, everywhere with lots of lawyers involved. And that's it. If the Americans want to mess with that, they're going to have serious legal problems. Got it. Pepe, we have to run. Thank you very much.

I know it's the middle of the night where you are, but this article of yours is terrific. Chris will post it hasn't been done already. And thank you for your time, my dear friend. It's a great, great insight. We'll look forward to seeing you next week. My pleasure. Next week we should talk about Iran, Judge. Yes.

Yes. Absolutely. Absolutely. Thank you so much. Cheers. Thank you. If you're watching us live coming up in five minutes, that is at 4 o'clock Eastern today, the Intelligence Community Roundtable.

Judge Napolitano for Judging Freedom.