Former ‘Citgo 6’ political prisoner sees ‘karma’ in Maduro ouster, but Venezuelan oil won’t rebound until there’s true regime change |
Former ‘Citgo 6’ political prisoner sees ‘karma’ in Maduro ouster, but Venezuelan oil won’t rebound until there’s true regime change
Watching Nicolás Maduro transported in handcuffs by U.S. officials in January, José Pereira felt a sense of retribution and a release of eight years of pent-up anger.
“That is exactly what this guy did to us,” Pereira said of the former Venezuelan strongman leader. “For me, it was like, ‘Wow, now you’re suffering. Now, this is karma.’ I was very glad. It’s not vengeance; it’s justice.”
Rewind nine years to the beginning of 2017, Pereira, then 55, was freshly promoted to the top of his profession as the interim CEO of Citgo Petroleum in Houston.
The year would end with Pereira in handcuffs in Caracas in a military prison, tried and convicted in a kangaroo court for corruption and treason with five of his colleagues—the “Citgo Six.” Citgo, the storied American oil refiner, was acquired by the Venezuelan government and its state oil company, PDVSA, in 1990, eventually becoming a political pawn of Maduro.
That’s how Pereira—and five other Houston-based Citgo executives—became the unfortunate “Citgo Six” political prisoners in Venezuela for five years before their negotiated release in 2022. Eventually, he published his memoir of the ordeal, “From Hero to Villain: My True Story of the Citgo 6,” as his form of writing therapy.
Pereira, who was born and raised in Venezuela, was the only one of the six prisoners who wasn’t an American citizen. He had worked for more than 25 years with Venezuela’s state oil company—often with U.S. companies until their assets were expropriated in 2007—before he moved to Texas to work for Citgo in 2012 and obtained permanent resident status in the U.S.
His decades of insight into the inner workings of Venezuela politics and its oil sector are why he’s confident his home country can only thrive again politically and economically following the U.S. military intervention in the South American country—if fair democratic elections are enacted as quickly as possible.
Venezuela cannot grow and oil companies will not want to invest if interim president Delcy Rodriguez—Maduro’s former vice president—remains in charge with the rest of the old Maduro regime, Pereira says. They may be acting moderately and cooperating with the Trump administration for now, but they’re just biding time, Pereira insists. “They are masters........