Venezuela has the world's largest proven oil reserves.
The industry's gradual deterioration was 18 years in the making, tracing back to then-President Hugo Chávez's 2003 decision to fire the oil industry's most experienced engineers in an act of petty political retribution.
In the mid-1970s, Venezuela nationalized its oil industry, and Petróleos de Venezuela, S.A. was created to manage operations.
The company was given a high level of autonomy and was known as a "State within a state." The nation's oil wealth allowed for a massive investment in infrastructure and the industry attracted talent from all over the world.
Chávez sought control of the nation's oil wealth to fund his political ambitions, but first, he had to dismantle the mechanisms that were put in place to protect PDVSA's autonomy.
"Now, instead of producing five to six million barrels of oil [a day], which is the amount we should be producing, last month's report from OPEC showed that our production, based on external sources, was 339 thousand barrels per day. After once having been a major player in the oil industry, we've become nothing. An insignificant exporter of oil," he says.
"[T]he erosion of checks and balances and the restructuring of PDVSA, allowed Chávez to convert the oil sector into, in essence, the regime's checking account," wrote the political scientists Javier Corrales and Michael Penfold in their 2011 book, Dragon in the Tropics: Venezuela and the Legacy of Hugo Chávez.
https://reason.com/video/2021/02/01/how-socialism-wiped-out-venezuelas-spectacular-oil-wealth/
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