Alejandro Velasco

completely given up to foreign oil interests or companies, we have to be able to assert a kind of independence and sovereignty over this resource in a way that it hadn't been the case in the first decades of the oil industry.

And so, you know, they would give extremely generous concessions to these companies to come and extract oil.

And what Betancourt and others came up with was this formula in Venezuela.

It's called el 50-50.

50-50, right?

Like 50% goes to the companies, 50% comes to Venezuela.

It's just split it down in half.

That acknowledges that you're putting this tremendous investment, but it also acknowledges that what comes out of the subsoil is ours, right?

But that's in some ways going to change significantly with the oil shock that is the 1973 oil embargo.

Well, I mean— Or was it?

Is that like a— Yeah, I guess I would temper that a little bit, right?

Everything was going better.

Whether everything was going really right is more of a subjective question.

Yeah.

Even as the political system was stabilized and the democratic system really entrenched itself in the 1960s and by the early 70s, there were still those who had not seen the desired effects of this democratic system being able to distribute the wealth of oil in a way that seemed fair and equitable, right?

There were still significant amounts of inequality.

And in part, that's also because

Even though in the 1950s there was a period of oil boom, in the 1960s, coinciding with this incipient democratic experiment, it was also a period of lower oil prices.

So those governments, as they were trying to consolidate, also simultaneously were making the discursive promise of greater, more fair distribution of oil wealth, but with fewer resources to be able to distribute.

But they did distribute it.