Did the Netherlands abandon its Caribbean citizens to the chaos with Venezuela?
Aruba's and Curaçao's economies have historically depended on good relations with Venezuela. Growing up in Aruba, it was impossible to forget how differently small business owners remembered the American and Venezuelan visitors during tourism's golden decades. Those years coincided with Venezuela’s "petrodollar boom" well into the 1980s, before the onset of global Reaganomics put an end to the gold rush. By comparison, American tourists visiting Aruba seemed parsimonious: almost like the stereotypes of sober Dutch folk. Guarding their pockets and fanny-packs with dutiful thrift, the American tourists often clung to the amenities that came built into their package-deal vacations.
The Venezuelans spent lavishly, as if they knew on some level that these were the last of their glory days. One merchant joked, "You could strike it rich even if you were selling embalmed frog's legs on the mainstreet! Those Venezuelans would buy anything if they were in a good mood!" Our family souvenir shop was able to sell every kind of trinket on Aruba's commercial Nassau-street, renamed Caya Betico Croes after the charismatic socialist leader of the struggle for postcolonial semi-independence from the Netherlands. But as fate, or Reaganomics would have it, the Venezuelan economy crashed in 1986, sinking into its now-forgotten, pre-Chavez financial collapse.
Far less colorful symptoms of the Venezuelan tragedy have manifested in Aruba in recent years. Depending on how one classifies the terms "refugee" or "nation-state", Aruba is often ranked as the country having the highest population-density of refugees in the world, because of the small island's influx of Venezuelans. Many of these voyagers arrive on precarious, rickety rafts by sea. A seemingly innocuous distance of 50 nautical miles separates the coastlines of Punto Fijo Venezuela from Aruba. But sharks and modern-day pirates swarm in that stretch. Local polemics on migration have fueled notorious and reactionary populist politics in generally conservative island societies like tiny Aruba, whose desert-dry landmass measuring roughly 32 by 10 kilometers. Islanders have always oscillated between being inspired and being intimidated by the neighboring Latin American mainland’s vastness, and by its history, known to be much more dramatic and volatile than our own.
It might be possible to denote a comedic highpoint of island demagogues and political entrepeneurs exploiting national fears about Venezuela. That was when Booshi Wever, frontman of his own fringe-radical Aruban conversative party, went campaigning on promises of mass-deportation for Venezuelans, just before getting arrested red-handed while smuggling Venezuelan contraband into Dutch territorial waters.
Cultural differences between Arubans and Venezuelans seem much more trivial than what distinguishes European Dutch people's culture from the societies of Morocco, Syria, or Turkey, the origin-points of most migrants bound for the Netherlands. No comparable "Otherness" differentiates Punto Fijan Venezuelans from Arubans, once we consider the differences between Tangier and Amsterdam.
Arubans have similar folk songs and Gaita music that ensembles play around the Christmas season. The two share a similar gastronomy (the ubiquitous ayaca) and humor (as a child on Aruba I would watch the vulgar sketches of Venezuelan program Radio Rochela for instance, on Radio Caracas TV).
Many Arubans have Venezuelan ancestry. Including the late leader of Aruba’s grand semi-independence saga, Betico Croes himself. Croes’ political party MEP ("Movemento Electoral di Pueblo" in Papiamento, the official language of Aruba, Curaçao and Bonaire) took its name from a Venezuelan socialist party, also called MEP ("Movimiento Electoral del Pueblo" in Spanish), founded less than a decade earlier in 1967. While Betico's popular movement fell short of securing Aruban independence from the kingdom of the Netherlands, it achieved self-governing status, freeing islanders from the central planning and the bullying taxation-without-representation of a colonial bureaucracy, then nested in Curaçao.
The mother of Arubans’ most beloved freedom fighter was Venezuelan. And yet, the thinness of these differences only augments the anxieties of Arubans, as a regional minority, of being absorbed and vanishing into the overarching massiveness and the homogeneity of Latin America, with all its instability.
One of the most dramatic episodes for Arubans was the sudden closure of the oil refinery, formerly Lago, which Aruban historians claim played a pivotal role in the history of world war II because it refined the petroleum used by the Allied Forces. At the time, Lago constituted one of the critical and largest oil rigs in the world, making it the prime Caribbean target for Axis warships. The refinery was likely designated to function “offshore” in Aruba and not in mainland Venezuela to elude the frequent strikes by Venezuelan oil-worker syndicates. Whether or not Lago's heroic wartime performance is exaggerated to mythic proportions, it behooved me to believe it as a child: my grandfather, a Jew who left Poland for the Caribbean roughly around the time of the genocide, earned his right to reside on the island by working as a welder in the refinery. There, his supervisors where Surinamese creole black men who were fluent in Dutch, a language which strikingly resembled his own Yiddish.
The sprawling refinery passed through the hands of American and Dutch owners, into Venezuelan state ownership during the 21st century, as Venezuela under Chavez experienced yet another economic "black gold-rush” in its industrial monoculture, almost entirely based on fossil fuels. Indirectly, Venezeula depended largely on China's demand for petroleum.
The US-ordained, global sanctions-regime against Venezuela dealt a deathblow that put PVDSA-owned refineries on the islands Aruba and Curaçao out of business. The timing was most unfortunate for Curaçao: shortly after the much-hyped developments of 10-10-2010, when more islands agreed to become “independent countries within the Kingdom”, modeled on the confusing Aruban example of Status Aparte. What went seemingly unforeseen by local politicoes, was that such performances of pseudo-independence on paper, could leave these islands unable to pay their staggering debts owed to The Hague. The Dutch Caribbean archipelago steadily grew its over-dependence on a monolithic, all-consuming mass tourism industry.
Former Aruban prime minister Evelien Wever-Croes, Betico's niece, attempted to negotiate exemptions for Refineria di Aruba and Citgo to continue refining Venezuelan crude on the island, thereby maintaining industrial jobs for Arubans. That project intended to renovate the refinery that had first won Aruba's wealth, so that it could function as more than the dessicated relic it became at the height of a US blockade against Venezuela. The American-based Citgo corporation, eager as it was to remain in Aruba, could not obtain clarity from the US as to whether it would be able to operate on the island in the context of Trump-era sanctions.
The Aruban oilworkers' union had collaborated, one could even say conspired, with none other than the much-lauded opposition figure Juan Guaidó. Union workers intended more than to sidestep a hyperbolic and off-kilter Maduro. They believed Guaidó would negotiate between the US and Caracas, allowing for Venezuelan oil to be refined on Aruba, on the premise that the administration of profits from these resources would benefit Venezuelan opposition-member shareholders, rather than Party officials. Thus, in typical Aruban fashion, these disaffected refinery workers had betted on a situation in which the result is "everybody happy" on what, according to Aruban license plates, is “One Happy Island.”
Diplomatic efforts led by then-leader Evelyn Wever-Croes, the tiny island’s first female prime minister, involved going on junkets to plead for the Aruban interests in Washington DC. The way in which these intentions were cynically overpowered, are tragic. During these failed negotiations, where was NATO-and-EU member The Netherlands? Perhaps Dutch former PM Mark Rutte recently clarified his approach to foreign policy, when he infamously called Trump “daddy” at last year’s NATO conference.
Without backing and diplomatic aid from the more powerful Dutch state, the prime minister of a tiny and little-known country like Aruba, which is widely perceived as anachronistic colony, had already slim chances of being taken seriously as a negotiator. The failure sowed unrest for the island's present and future. Aruba’s coveted autonomous status has become increasingly jeopardized and fragmented under the banner of loans and repayment programs to the Hague.
The Hague never had many reasons to love Wever-Croes' and Betico's MEP political party. During months leading up to the 1977 general strike remembered "Augustus Scur" or "Dark August", MEP-aligned activists had even concocted some threatening plans to carry out a bombing and guerrilla-terror campaign against Dutch offices, and schemed about going into exile in Venezuela. But in typical Aruban style, those threats were empty bluster: following through on the bluff would have required a degree of fanaticism and severity that is most uncharacteristic of fun-loving Arubans.
Despite that past insurrectinary resolve, by the 21st century, MEP had abandoned its pro-independence ferocity, along with its pseudo-socialist protectionist policies. The party, whose colors are red and yellow, had long since melted into the neoliberal consensus.
In late 2025, Dutch outgoing prime minister Dick Schoof visited Aruba, promising to help dismantle remains of the refinery, while inaugurating a new era of “sustainability” and cooperation between The Hague and the new Aruban and Antillean governments. Heralding that “partnership,” the island representatives signed to take out new and massive loans from the former colonial metropolis in northern Europe.
For decades, the Netherlands' political class has unquestioningly, uncontroversially, and uncritically supported all of Washington’s destructive sanctions against Caracas. All while never pausing to reflect on how the aiding and abetting of "maximum pressure" might damage lives and livelihoods of Dutch Caribbean citizens in Aruba, Curaçao, St. Maarten and the BES (Bonaire, St. Eustatius, Saba) archipelago.
Now, once again, the Hague is either mute or moot on its overseas territorial stakes in the face of US-Venezuela geopolitics. Perhaps they are no longer jubilant about the poisoned chalice of Corina Machado's Nobel Peace Prize, the leaderess departed from Curaçao to receive the award in Sweden, before transferring it to Trump against the Scandinavian committee’s rules. Neither do the prospects of US regime-change in the Caribbean elicit as much optimism as previosuly among EU member states, who once cheered on such US-driven policies.
The resumed flow of Venezuelan fossil fuel to the US hints at some betterment eventually splashing over into the Dutch Caribbean. But Venezuelan crude will clearly not go through Aruban and Curaçaoan refineries under the present status quo. Ironically, Aruba has in a sense come to resemble what was wrong with Venezuela’s business-model, in that both countries are vulnerable due to their economic monocultures: Aruba depends exclusively on its tourism product; Venezuela, despite its diverse resources, strictly on oil.
Venezuela in 2026 did not become Iraq in 2003. But American neoconservative military adventurism in Venezuela still implicates devastating consequences for borderlands Aruba and Curaçao, not least because of the tensions around a quadrupled influx of refugees and heightened uncertainty. After many years of Arubans having lost access to Venezuela, once a source of affordable imports to hold down the prices of food in a very expensive island, the current, newly elected AVP-Futuro government has been reorienting towards the next closest neighbor, Colombia. The hope is that tapping into these markets will make life affordable again in the Dutch Caribbean, where on average the costs of living scale now much higher than in the Eurozone Netherlands.
But Trump and Rubio also regularly threaten the Colombian and other regional governments. The “Donroe” doctrine might soon take another, more dramatic turn. The Hague’s eagerness in upholding boycotts against the islands’ closest traditional trading partners, while decrying these island nations' inability to repay their debts, is hypocritical at best.
In the Dutch street, it is often asked what purpose the islands’ inclusion in the Kingdom serves, if any. But the Netherlands has enormous territorial waters in the Caribbean, approximately 93,000 square kilometers, dwarfing the mostly-dehydrated landmass of the archipelago. Aruba, Curaçao, and the BES islands’ remaining in the Kingdom, are the keystones that make it possible for the Netherlands to contain such valuable, immense maritime territory, centuries after the “Gilded Age” ended.
The Hague’s silence when it comes to the immediate interests of citizens who share the Dutch maritime borders with Venezuela, is an unethical and destructive complicity. There is no guarantee that our history books, published and imported from the Netherlands along the routes of colonial education, will ever commemorate that intimate betrayal.
About the author:
Arturo Desimone (Bushiri, Aruba, 1984) has had essays, journalistic articles and fiction pieces published in outlets like openDemocracy, El País Digital Argentina, Informed Comment, Sydney Review of Books, and elsewhere. He has also worked as an interpreter, as a fixer for reporters, and as the artistic director of Aruba’s international poetry festival, which he founded. Around the time of the “Arab Spring” he was studying Arabic and French in Tunisia. His poetry collections include “La Amada de Túnez” and a book of poems written in Papiamento, "Kibocacion Entre Luz y Boca" which was translated into Spanish last year for distribution throughout Latin America.