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.

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“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 in gaining time.”

“These guys don’t operate like a normal government; they operate like the mob. You take out the head of the mob, and somebody is going to replace him,” Pereira told Fortune. “It’s the same regime. There’s no real change there.”

Still, he remains confident elections are coming. He’s just not sure if they can come by the end of 2026 as he prefers.

“This transition has to be shortened,” Pereira said. “It will take time, but it will be done. You need a reliable [business] partner in the government, and the only way you’re going to get that is having a free election and having a democracy.

“I’m sure Venezuela will become an energy hub if this is done right.”

Energy dreams

Indeed, Rodriguez and the interim Venezuelan leadership have cooperated and passed a new hydrocarbons law to re-open the country’s energy sector up to more foreign investment—a legal reform that the CEOs of Chevron, Shell, and ConocoPhillips said shows progress but still falls short of what’s needed. And, in large part because of that cooperation, there’s no fast-tracked timeline for elections yet.

In January, Exxon Mobil chairman and CEO Darren Woods famously called the Venezuelan oil sector “uninvestable.” Exxon now has a small team on the ground there to evaluate the state of the industry. Pereira says Exxon is right to tread cautiously: “If I were Exxon, they expropriated me two times already. What will be the guarantee that they’re not going to do it the third time?”

While Venezuela counts the world’s largest oil reserves on paper, the country’s oil production volumes have plunged from 3.2 million barrels daily in 2000 to about 1 million barrels today due to a combination of mismanagement, underinvestment, and U.S. sanctions. Largely thanks to Chevron, the only U.S. producer which never left, Venezuela is on track to grow to roughly 1.2 million barrels by the end of this year—still a shell of its former self. Chevron and, yes, Shell, count among the few planning to invest more thus far.

Pereira confirmed that the Venezuelan oil industry is “totally deteriorated.” An economic resurgence is possible, but it will take years, he said.

“There has to be a lot of investment. At the end of the day, it’s going to get done because the assets are there, the oil is there,” he said.

A long, crude story

When Trump intensified sanctions on Venezuela in 2017 and relations between the two countries became further strained, Pereira expedited his plans to retire in early 2018.

He didn’t make it that long.

“I said, ‘Oh, I don’t like this.’ I was appointed as interim CEO in the worst moment of the relationship. This is a nightmare,” he said.

Fast forward to November 2017—thr