Quote:
Originally Posted by janelle144
https://www.quora.com/What-caused-Ve...YxA4J3OPZdH7kw
"Venezuela has the world's largest oil reserves. But during the country's oil boom in the 1970s, Venezuela's politicians decided to keep all of the country's oil revenues instead of sharing them with the foreign oil companies helping operate Venezuela's oilfields."
Feel so sorry for the people.
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The biggest problem Venezuela has is the oil it has. Only American refineries can refine the thick, sludgy Venezuelan crude. All the other refineries in the world can't handle their oil.
So, being dependent on America's refineries makes Venezuela dependent on the prices Americans will pay for their oil. And since we pump a great big lot of our own oil, we aren't going to pay them more for theirs.
And since we are pumping as much oil as we're using, we don't even need Venezuelan oil right now.
The other half of Venezuela's problem is, like most of Central America and much of South America, they keep electing a strong man who swears he will cure all their woes. Once any of these guys gets in office, the first thing they do is strip out the Treasury and line their pockets and their crony's pockets.
Of them all throughout the 20th century, by far the most corrupt and the biggest looter of all was Hugo Chavez.
Chavez was also the smartest of them all. He spent the first half of his plunder on civic projects, schools, rural hospitals, and electrification, which made the citizens so happy he was allowed to take the second half of his plunder with no fear. The only problem he had was his cancer killed him long before he could spend it all.
Maduro, the guy who followed Chavez, was Chavez' hand-picked successor, and Chavez' popularity was still so high at his death Maduro swept in like a cool breeze. And then took the half that Chavez left and put it in his pocket. Around the same time that America quit importing Venezuelan oil.
So Venezuela never has the financial resources it needs to build their own huge refineries. It's too small a country. Who's going to invest in many Venezuelan refineries? No one but Venezuelans. Nobody else needs them. And now, they're so broke they can't build them in the foreseeable future.
Here in the U.S., not all our crude is so heavy, so our refineries were built to take whatever they were getting at the moment to refine. This happened at the very first of our oil business, so refining sludge is no big deal for us.
In the rest of the world, where oil is scarce, those refineries are still way too expensive, but since the Middle East, the British offshore fields, and other sources of crude all produce light, sweet crude, even if their crude costs more, it's still more economical to refine.
Venezuela is caught in a 3-cornered trap. It's too small to ever be an industrial giant, too poor to use it's greatest natural resource, and most of the nation isn't good agricultural land.
Now, even an all-genius leadership can't pull the country out of the trap.
The only way Venezuela won't become something like another Syria or another Bangla-Desh is if the rest of their neighbors in Central and South America are willing to sacrifice on Venezuela's behalf over theirs.
That's unlikely to happen for lots of reasons. It's much more likely that Venezuelan citizens who flee are more easily absorbed until the country's population drops to a level where subsistence living can be achieved.
Who will flee? Those who can. And those who can will be the most valuable immigrants because they have the most skills, the most intellectual, and the best trained. The ones with the most money, know-how, and means of escape.
The others will either have to get out any way they can or stay put.
So Venezuela will become the poor relative who invites itself to dinner for a very long time to come.
Don't expect peace is in any part of all this. Desperate times make desperate people.
The upside is we will all get to see what living in the 19th century was really like, not what we imagine it was like.