The US' top envoy in Venezuela John Barrett highlighted Venezuela's crude exports reaching a multi-year high of 1.25mn b/d, which he attributed to the administration's continuing intervention.
The exports are the highest in seven years and come as US authorities "continue collaborating" with the interim government of Venezuela, Barrett said.
Venezuela's crude exports were slightly above 1.25mn b/d in the weeks starting 18 and 25 May, and averaged about 1.1mn b/d for all of May, based on Kpler shipping data. May's exports were the highest since February 2019, the data show.
President Donald Trump's administration has stepped up efforts to showcase the increase in Venezuela's oil production and exports after the US intervention, to push back on critics of its handling of the war in Iran, which resulted in the greatest recorded disruption of global oil supply.
"Venezuela really stands out as one of the great foreign policy successes of the Trump administration," assistant secretary of state Caleb Orr said at the Atlantic Council's Global Energy Forum in Washington on Tuesday.
"We have more oil and gas and coal and everything else than any other country on the planet," Trump told reporters last week. "And then when you add Venezuela to it, we have probably 64pc of that type of energy."
But Trump's Venezuela policy has as many critics in Congress as his approach to Iran. A group of Democratic US lawmakers on Monday renewed calls for free elections in Venezuela — the US did not recognize former leader Nicolas Maduro as president because of allegations of electoral fraud in the 2024 vote. The US left Maduro's vice-president Delcy Rodriguez in power after seizing Maduro on 3 January.
"The Delcy regime is still stacked with the same Maduro regime officials, the regime has yet to outline an electoral timeline and 473 political prisoners continue to languish in prison", House Foreign Affairs Committee ranking member Gregory Meeks (D-New York) and Senate Foreign Relations Committee ranking member Jeanne Shaheen (D-New Hampshire) said in a letter to US secretary of state Marco Rubio on 8 June.
"We understand that elections and a true democratic transition cannot happen overnight," the senators said. "But neither will happen at all if the Trump administration fails to exercise its leverage to insist on the necessary institutional changes that would make a democratic possible".
In Caracas, relatives of political prisoners demonstrating outside the US embassy were promised individual interviews with US officials there to explain their cases.
