Evanan Romero was at the Maracaibo airport, boarding a flight to Caracas where he was scheduled to meet representatives of Spain's Repsol and India's Reliance Industries to discuss reactivating Venezuela's Orinoco Belt — the largest heavy crude reserve on earth. He never boarded. Venezuela's police, accompanied by Interpol agents, detained him at the gate.In a single arrest, the Nicolás Maduro government — or whatever remnant of its security apparatus remains operational in the ongoing political transition — delivered a warning signal to every foreign energy executive contemplating Venezuela: the rules, whatever they are, can be enforced against the people you need most, at any moment, for reasons that may never be formally stated.The detention of Romero, reported by the Spanish newspaper El Nacional, is not the story of a minor official. Romero is a petroleum engineer of exceptional standing: founder of Intevep, Venezuela's premier petroleum technology research center; former Vice Minister of Energy and Mines between 1996 and 1999; and a senior Pdvsa executive whose career spans the institution that was once among the most technically sophisticated state oil companies in the world. He is, in the estimation of those who follow Venezuela's energy sector closely, among the handful of people with the expertise and international relationships to broker the kind of partnerships that could actually reverse Venezuela's oil production collapse.He was held overnight at an Interpol facility in Maracaibo, then moved to a private clinic in the city where he remained under police surveillance, his mobile phone confiscated. Romero himself characterized the action as "political persecution," stating he had never been formally notified of charges and that his situation stemmed from a long-resolved family administrative dispute. No formal judicial notification was made public by authorities at the time of reporting.The timing is the story. Venezuela's oil sector requires foreign investment at scale if it is to recover from two decades of decline. At its late-1990s peak, Venezuela produced more than 3 million barrels per day. By the depth of the crisis, output had fallen to below 400,000 barrels. The Orinoco Belt — an ultra-heavy crude formation stretching across the country's eastern interior — holds the technical key to any meaningful production recovery, but extracting it requires the kind of upgrading technology and capital that Venezuela's state oil company PDVSA cannot provide alone. Repsol and Reliance represent exactly the category of partner Venezuela needs. Detaining the expert brokering their introduction is not incidental: it is a demonstration of how thoroughly the state's security logic can undermine its own economic interests.This pattern is neither new nor unique to Venezuela, but it has been refined here across a generation of authoritarian consolidation. The former Maduro government built a system in which political loyalty and personal connection to the ruling network determined who was safe — and no technical credential or international standing provided protection when factional dynamics shifted. That system did not disappear when Maduro himself was removed from power. Its apparatus — the SEBIN secret police, regional military commands, Interpol coordination arrangements — remains embedded in the state's operational fabric.The editors of this report note that Repsol and Reliance had not issued public comment at the time of publication. A 'no comment' from either company's press office, should one be forthcoming, would itself carry significance: it would signal that major international investors are recalibrating their risk assessment of Venezuelan operations in real time.The broader financial picture adds context. Venezuela's monthly oil revenues have recently crossed $1 billion — a milestone that signals partial recovery but remains far below what full Orinoco Belt development would generate. The Trump administration's elimination of the Qatar-administered escrow account that had previously held Venezuelan oil revenues in trust has already raised governance questions about where those funds flow and who controls them. An arrest like Romero's compounds those concerns: international investors who might have been willing to accept governance uncertainty in exchange for commercial opportunity will find it harder to sustain that calculus when the technical experts they need can be detained without notice.For the seven million Venezuelans who fled the country since economic collapse began — Latin America's largest refugee crisis, straining neighbors from Colombia to Peru to Chile — the arrest of Evanan Romero carries a familiar and painful meaning. It is another data point in a long accumulation of evidence that the structures which destroyed Venezuela's economy remain capable of protecting themselves, even at the cost of the recovery they claim to support.In Venezuela, as across nations experiencing collapse, oil wealth that once seemed a blessing became a curse — and ordinary people pay the price. The arrest of the man who might have helped reverse that curse, on the day he was scheduled to begin doing so, is a parable the country can ill afford to repeat.Reporting is ongoing. This correspondent is seeking comment from Repsol and Reliance Industries' press offices, and pursuing a second independent source on the timing of the planned Caracas meetings. Sources in Venezuela are protected and cannot be named.