“Chevron has been in Venezuela for 102 years, and I want it to be there for 100 more years, and to work without problems,” the Venezuelan president celebrated.

Chevron’s return to the South American nation occurs after an unprecedented prisoner exchange mediated by the Salvadoran president and is perceived as a more flexible stance by President Trump towards the Maduro regime.

According to the agency Reuters, Washington is preparing new authorizations for key partners of Venezuela's state-owned oil company PDVSA, which also include European companies, to allow them to operate with certain limitations in the sanctioned nation.

In a statement, a senior State Department official told Reuters that they could not comment on any specific licenses and specified that the US government would not allow Nicolás Maduro's regime to benefit from income from oil sales.

At the end of January, Trump announced that he would revoke the license that "corrupt Joe Biden granted to Nicolás Maduro" in November 2022, which allowed Chevron to operate on Venezuelan soil.

He added that His decision was due to Caracas's failure to comply with the electoral guarantees stipulated in the agreement and the Maduro government's failure to accept quickly enough Venezuelan migrants with deportation orders from the United States, whom he described as "violent criminals." The policy change is a victory for the Venezuelan government and for Chevron, which protested when its license was revoked. It is also good news for Venezuela's battered economy, which since the beginning of the year has been showing warning signs of rampant inflation that is already affecting the pockets of millions of Venezuelans.

Sanctions and Economic Collapse

The sanctions were progressively tightened after Maduro declared himself the winner of the 2018 presidential election, which the United States government called a "farce."

Experts say that these measures accelerated the collapse of Venezuela's highly oil-dependent economy, leading to further impoverishment of the Venezuelan population and helped drive the exodus of millions of people.

But in 2022, some of the sanctions that prohibited most U.S. companies from doing business with PDVSA were eased by the Joe Biden administration.

The former Democratic president was seeking guarantees for the elections that Venezuela held in July of last year and in which the Chavista-controlled National Electoral Council (CNE) proclaimed Maduro the winner without showing the necessary evidence.

Several countries and international organizations consider that the true winner of the contest was the opposition candidate Edmundo González Urrutia.

Importance for Venezuela's economy

The revocation of Chevron's license In February, it was seen as a severe blow to the Maduro government, but above all to the Venezuelan economy.

According to economists, the oil company had become a key tool for the economic recovery of the Caribbean country, whose gross domestic product (GDP) fell by nearly 80% between 2013 and 2022, one of the worst economic collapses of a nation in modern history.

The restart of Chevron's operations in Venezuela at the end of 2022 contributed to the Venezuelan economy's return to growth.

In an interview with BBC Mundo in February, Asdrubal Oliveros, director of the economic consultancy Ecoanalitica, explained why why the Chevron license is so important for Venezuela's economy.

"According to our calculations at Ecoanalitica, 85% of Venezuela's foreign currency income comes from oil production and of that percentage, around 30% of the dollar income comes from Chevron," he stated.

"Chevron is also responsible for 40% of the dollars that are liquidated to the private sector to finance imports," he added.

"These figures can give an idea of the great weight that this license has for Venezuela."

Likewise, Oliveros noted that the company's dollar-denominated revenue is typically reinjected back into the economy in local currency through private banks. This has in the past provided a boost to other sectors of the Venezuelan economy. Chevron also played a key role in Venezuela's ability to boost oil production to just over 1 million barrels per day, after it fell to a low of 365,000 in 2018. Although both figures pale in comparison to the 3,120,000 barrels of crude oil per day that the country produced in 1998, -the year before the late President Hugo Chávez came to power-, the recovery of the sector is a source of pride and celebration for many in the government.

"The oil industry has already averaged 1,057,000 barrels of oil per day in January, and we are heading towards 1,500,000 with our own lungs, our own money, our own effort," said Nicolás Maduro at the end of January.

It was feared that oil production would be reduced after Trump's decision to revoke Chevron's license.

But Maduro maintained this Thursday that during all this time, Venezuelan oil production "has grown a 12%”.

“That's why I've always said, we don't need licenses to produce, we've learned our own way, little by little we go far,” he said.

According to data sent by Venezuelan authorities to the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, the country closed May with an oil production of 1,066,000 barrels per day, an increase of 15,000 barrels compared to April.