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Trump is counting on investment from the US private sector to rebuild Venezuela’s economy. Lobbyists see an opening — and dollar signs.
“There hasn’t been a bigger opportunity since the fall of the Soviet Union for people’s lives to be changed for the better, for wealth creation at every level,” said Robert Stryk, whose firm, Stryk Global Diplomacy, has been a registered lobbyist for the Venezuelan government since 2020.
He spoke with Semafor from Caracas, where Delcy Rodríguez’s government is trying to firm up its hold on power and stay in the good graces of the White House. Stryk, who publicly thanked Trump for capturing Maduro in a letter this week, is a self-styled cowboy lobbyist with a long career proudly operating in what he calls the “sh*tbag world.”
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US companies have been mostly quiet since Maduro’s capture, suggesting they don’t see a battered South American country emerging from years of despotism as a home-run market. That’s especially true for big oil producers, which learned hard lessons in Iraq and elsewhere about the risks of nation-building and are still owed billions of dollars by Venezuela for past projects.
“This is not Iraq. This is not Syria,” Stryk said. “This is a country that has a deep bureaucracy and no massive hatred toward the United States. Their national pastime is baseball.” (Stryk says Maduro cut short their first meeting in Caracas, years ago, to watch Game 7 of the World Series.)