Beneath Venezuelan soil lies an ocean of crude—the world’s largest reserves—an oil patch that shaped the nature of the global energy business. Unfortunately, a dysfunctional anti-American, leftist government controls this vast resource and has used its wealth to foster voter support, ultimately wreaking economic havoc. Crude Nation reveals the ways in which this mismanagement has led to Venezuela’s economic ruin and turned the country into a cautionary tale for the world. Raúl Gallegos, a former Caracas-based oil correspondent, paints a picture both vivid and analytical of the country’s economic decline, the government’s foolhardy economic policies, and the wrecked lives of Venezuelans. Without transparency, the Venezuelan government uses oil money to subsidize life for its citizens in myriad unsustainable ways, while regulating nearly every aspect of day-to-day existence in Venezuela. This has created a paradox in which citizens can fill up the tanks of their SUVs for less than one American dollar while simultaneously enduring nationwide shortages of staples such as milk, sugar, and toilet paper. Gallegos’s insightful analysis shows how mismanagement has ruined Venezuela again and again over the past century and lays out how Venezuelans can begin to fix their country, a nation that can play an important role in the global energy industry. This paperback edition features a new introduction by the author.
This book explains why Venezuela is so rich in natural resources—it has been producing oil since 1922 and harbors the largest oil reserves in the world—and yet it is also a failed nation of class-divided citizens exhibiting deep poverty in a corrupt, incompetent state. Venezuela is a bipolar nation, where two marked poles in the society exist which have historical origins and are mutually exclusive. The book provides a critical analysis of Venezuela's history, economy and politics and explains the context and implications of the bipolar poles, known as the elite pole and the resentful pole. Both, it shows, have done serious harm to Venezuela’s prosperity. The author describes the vicious circle of oil wealth, corruption, inefficiency and world market dependency and gives recommendations for a better future.
An indispensable resource for readers interested in Venezuelan history, this book analyzes Venezuela's economic crisis through the context of its political and social history. For decades, the economy of Venezuela has depended on petroleum. As a consequence of a reduction in the price of oil, Venezuela recently experienced an economic downturn resulting in rampant social spending, administrative corruption, and external economic forces that collectively led credit-rating agencies to declare in November 2017 that Venezuela was in default on its debt payments. How did this Latin American nation come to this point? The History of Venezuela explores Venezuela's history from its earliest times to the present day, demonstrating both the richness of Venezuela and its people and the complexity of its political, social, and economic problems. As with all titles in The Greenwood Histories of the Modern Nations series, this chronological narrative examines political, economic, cultural, philosophical, and religious continuities in Venezuela's long and rich history, providing readers with a concise yet up-to-date study of the nation. The volume highlights the country's wide variety of cultures, languages, political ideologies, and historical figures and landmarks through maps, photographs, biographies, a timeline, and a bibliographical essay with suggestions for further reading.
Hugo Chávez is heavily criticised by the international political class and the press and media. He is dismissed academically as a populista and dismissed more generally as a rabble rouser. However, a lot of the criticism and reporting lacks context.
At the beginning of the twentieth century, Venezuela had one of the poorest economies in Latin America, but by 1970 it had become the richest country in the region and one of the twenty richest countries in the world, ahead of countries such as Greece, Israel, and Spain. Between 1978 and 2001, however, Venezuela’s economy went sharply in reverse, with non-oil GDP declining by almost 19 percent and oil GDP by an astonishing 65 percent. What accounts for this drastic turnabout? The editors of Venezuela Before Chávez, who each played a policymaking role in the country’s economy during the past two decades, have brought together a group of economists and political scientists to examine systematically the impact of a wide range of factors affecting the economy’s collapse, from the cost of labor regulation and the development of financial markets to the weakening of democratic governance and the politics of decisions about industrial policy. Aside from the editors, the contributors are Omar Bello, Adriana Bermúdez, Matías Braun, Javier Corrales, Jonathan Di John, Rafael Di Tella, Javier Donna, Samuel Freije, Dan Levy, Robert MacCulloch, Osmel Manzano, Francisco Monaldi, María Antonia Moreno, Daniel Ortega, Michael Penfold, José Pineda, Lant Pritchett, Cameron A. Shelton, and Dean Yang.
Venezuela is the seventh largest oil producer and holder of the largest proven reserves in the world. It’s also a country full of problems, as evidenced by having the biggest inflation rates and, by some estimates the highest crime rates worldwide. Despite having an oil boom between 2004 through 2008 with income of around two billion dollars, in 2016 it suffered an immense economic contraction and probably the largest supply shortcut crisis in its history. This third edition of Historical Dictionary of Venezuela contains a chronology, an introduction, appendixes, and an extensive bibliography. The dictionary section has over 700 cross-referenced entries on important personalities, politics, economy, foreign relations, religion, and culture. This book is an excellent resource for students, researchers, and anyone wanting to know more about Venezuela.
Hugo Chávez’s extraordinary story—in his own words Hugo Chávez, military officer turned left-wing revolutionary, was one of the most important Latin American leaders of the twenty-first century. This book tells the story of his life up to his election as president in 1998. Throughout this riveting and historically important account of his early years, Chávez’s energy and charisma shine through. As a young man, he awakens gradually to the reality of his country—where huge inequalities persist and the majority of citizens live in indescribable poverty—and decides to act. He gives a fascinating description of growing up in Barinas, his years in the Military Academy, his long-planned military conspiracy—the most significant in the history of Venezuela and perhaps of Latin America—which led to his unsuccessful coup attempt of 1992, and eventually to his popular electoral victory in 1998. His collaborator on this book is Ignacio Ramonet, the famous French journalist (and editor for many years of Le Monde diplomatique), who undertook a similar task with Fidel Castro (Fidel Castro: My Life).
Among the top ten oil exporters in the world and a founding member of OPEC, Venezuela currently supplies 11 percent of U.S. crude oil imports. But when the country elected the fiery populist politician Hugo Chavez in 1998, tensions rose with this key trading partner and relations have been strained ever since. In this concise, accessible addition to Oxford's What Everyone Needs to Know® series, Miguel Tinker Salas -- a native of Venezuela who has written extensively about the country -- takes a broadly chronological approach that focuses especially on oil and its effects on Venezuela's politics, economy, culture, and international relations. After an introductory section that discusses the legacy of Spanish colonialism, Tinker Salas explores the "The Era of the Gusher," a period which began with the discovery of oil in the early twentieth century, encompassed the mid-century development and nationalization of the industry, and ended with a change of government in 1989 in response to widespread protests. The third section provides a detailed discussion of Hugo Chavez-his rise to power, his domestic political and economic policies, and his high-profile forays into international relations-as well as surveying the current landscape of Venezuela in the wake of Chavez's death in March 2013. Arranged in a question-and-answer format that allows readers to search topics of particular interest, the book covers questions such as, who is Simón Bolívar and why is he called the George Washington of Latin America? How did the discovery of oil change Venezuela's relationship to the U.S.? What forces where behind the coups of 1992? And how does Venezuela interact with China, Russia, and Iran? Informative, engaging, and written by a leading expert on the country, Venezuela: What Everyone Needs to Know® offers an authoritative guide to an increasingly important player on the world stage. What Everyone Needs to Know® is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press.