Alejandro Velasco

There was simultaneously lots of hope, but also lots of anxiety.

But the kinds of questions that were being asked were future-looking questions without any real sense of the previous past.

And so I wanted to figure out, is there anything that we can learn, not from the distant past, Simon Bolivar or long-dead figures, but from the more recent past that could help explain why we were where we were?

I guess I don't know that I would say that it's unique.

I think that some of the patterns, especially having to do with resource dependency and the ebbs and flows of what that occasions, both in terms of economy and politics, and then how that, of course, has a broader impact on society as a whole.

You know, I think that's more generally patterns that you can find elsewhere.

I think what's significant about Venezuela, especially in terms of its relationship with oil, is that, and I'm not the first one to talk about this, there's a wonderful anthropologist historian of Venezuela himself, Fernando Coronil, who wrote a wonderful book called The Magical State back in 1997, in which he basically argued that what's particular about Venezuela is that we have this strange relationship with past and future, and oil conditions both.

What do you mean?

Oil induces illusions.

It induces the capacity to imagine that the future is infinite in terms of possibilities.

But it also, in terms of the structural dynamics of oil, induces catastrophe.

But

The way that you get from illusion to illusion is through collective amnesia.

You have to forget the moments of catastrophe that the very state of illusion induced so that by the time you get to the next possibility of a limitless future, you don't see what's right in front of you, which are all the evidence of the failure's past.

And by that, I don't mean metaphor.

I mean literally.

If you, for instance, go to Caracas,

You see in various parts of the city, you know, massive architectural projects that were at one time, usually during boom times, of illusion about a limitless future.

And then when the collapse came, they became dilapidated, abandoned, and the people there had to fend for themselves.

And you can index that.