Venezuela’s leader, Nicolás Maduro, is considered likely to retain power after Sunday’s presidential election. But his government faces a mounting threat from something he can’t control: creditors targeting the oil shipments that provide nearly all the country’s foreign income.
A series of court orders in recent days has authorized U.S. oil giant ConocoPhillips to seize as much as $2.6 billion in Venezuelan oil from Dutch Caribbean islands as compensation for assets that Venezuela’s Socialist government expropriated from...