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 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—three months prior to his retirement—and Pereira was fatefully summoned to Venezuela to make Citgo business presentations to government leadership. He brought five of his top executives along with him.
After the presentations seemingly went well, they trekked to the airport to return to Houston—two days before Thanksgiving. That’s when all hell broke loose for their lives.
“I was in my retirement mode. The plane was waiting for me to begin my new life, and that’s when the guards came,” Pereira recalled.
It seems as if the six Houston-based Citgo leaders made ideal bargaining chips and, therefore, political prisoners for Maduro.
“We were accused of being spies, corruption, treason of the country, and like 10 more charges,” he said. As the boss, Pereira was sentenced to 13 years in prison, while his colleagues got nearly nine years each.
“Everything was false. We were the first experiment of Venezuela taking [political] hostages. We were the guinea pigs,” he added. “After us, they began to do it very frequently. This is a business model—take people and negotiate.”
Rats the size of rabbits
He initially was sent to military prison, or “dungeon” as he called it, and then eventually transferred to the infamous El Heliocide prison in Caracas that’s well known for its torture and long list of human-rights violations. It was somehow a slight improvement from the military dungeon, he said, but the rats were the size of rabbits.
He lost nearly 100 pounds from starvation and suffered through bronchitis, pneumonia, and scabies, he said. There was no running water and sometimes he’d go months without seeing the sun.
“On the other side of the wall, there was a room they called the ‘madness room,’” he said. “We heard in the night when they were torturing people. Can you imagine sleeping in the middle of the night and hearing the screaming and the yelling and the crying and the beatings? It was like living in a hell.”
The lack of food forced his family to make a big sacrifice, but eventually offered a semblance of hope. His family had to ship him food to eat for lack of prison funding, which proved impossible from the U.S. So one of his sons moved to Colombia, where he could buy and ship the imprisoned Pereira weekly grocery boxes of food.
Pereira eventually figured out how to smuggle letters to his family, and he and his wife and children began writing letters back and forth to each other—both for his sanity and to keep him abreast of political, prisoner exchange negotiations that remained stagnant for years. The saved letters also served as the basis for his memoir.
Eventually, came Oct. 1, 2022. He and the rest of the Citgo Six—one of them was released months prior as a goodwill gesture—were told they were being sent to a meeting. It was ominous, but eventually they learned they would be released. “We didn’t believe it.”
Without being told where they were headed, they were flown to the Caribbean island country Saint Vincent and the Grenadines—a neutral ground for the negotiated prisoner exchange that swapped the Citgo employees for two nephews of Maduro who had been arrested seven years prior for narcotics trafficking (the so-called “Narcosobrinos”—or drug trafficking nephews—affair).
Then they finally flew back to Texas. The relief was great, but so was the post-traumatic stress disorder.
“After almost six months, I began to feel like I had my life back,” Pereira said. “I felt like I’d come in a time machine. All those years lost.”
For him, writing and talking about his experience became his “healing process.”
And watching Maduro behind bars offered its own therapeutic assist.
“Our story is very tied to what’s going on today in Venezuela,” Pereira said, but now there’s reason to hope again.
