Wednesday’s Latin American Pulse opens with a second American supermajor entering the Venezuelan frame as ExxonMobil and ConocoPhillips both negotiate contractual guarantees to return to the country with the world’s largest crude reserves, Argentina’s MERVAL closing at a record 2,924,355 on a wave of named Wall Street buying that pushed bank shares up as much as 6%, Bolivia opening two parallel dialogue tracks this morning as the state-of-exception abrogation advances and the labour federation rejects all parallel talks, Mexico’s president reporting a record first-quarter foreign-investment print of $23.6 billion alongside a contested 44% homicide-reduction claim, Colombia’s Ecopetrol launching a tender for a quarter of Brazil’s Brava Energía as the COLCAP jumped 4.48% four days from the first round, and Chile cutting its 2026 growth forecast to 2.1% on flat mining as the Codelco governance crisis runs on. Today’s intelligence brief tracks six institutional decisions across the Tuesday close.
01 · Venezuela — Exxon and Conoco Both Negotiate a Return as a Second Supermajor Enters the Frame Volatile
ExxonMobil and ConocoPhillips are both in active negotiations with the government of acting president Delcy Rodríguez for contractual guarantees to return to Venezuela’s oil industry, nearly two decades after the 2007 nationalisation expelled them, according to a Bloomberg report. Both majors are pressing for durable production-sharing terms and a path to resolve the billions in arbitration debt owed to them, and both are described as privately encouraged by Caracas’s willingness to negotiate. With crude near $100 and Chevron’s Petroindependencia template already operating, a second supermajor entering turns a single-company story into a structural reopening. A deal could be announced before month-end.
