Alejandro Velasco

And if a boom comes, a bust comes, as it always does, then you're left holding this bag of not only promises, but investments that you can no longer pay.

It's a very hard country to govern.

So my parents are both from Colombia, and they immigrated to Venezuela in the 1970s.

In that moment, Colombia was, you know, wracked by civil war.

You know, its economy was really in tatters, lots of instability, and this neighboring country seemed to be doing pretty well, you know, relative to other parts of Latin America where they had the chairship, civil war, et cetera.

This seemed to be a pretty stable political system where there were opportunities for economic growth, not just...

at the level of the oil industry, but really, as we were talking about before, potentially at the small and middle-sized industrial level.

So one of the major challenges of all Venezuelan governments have been to diversify the economy, to make it less completely dependent on this single resource.

And the idea is to then direct some of the wealth coming from the oil industry, not just into services and social programs, but rather into productive,

alternative non-hydrocarbons-related sectors of the economy.

Steel, for instance, was one, but what that does is generate other kinds of derivative industries.

My father, for instance, he started a company manufacturing nails, screws, bolts, and things like that, which, of course, then become the thing that literally tie other things together.

And so there was a real moment in the 1970s where the government was investing, but that investment

was in part also founded on this sense of an illusion about a limitless future.

And what I mean by that is, I'll give you one example.

One of the dreams of the president in the 1970s during the oil boom was to

have cars made in Venezuela, like have a Venezuelan made car, like a Venezuelan branded car.

Now, the market in Venezuela does not sustain

a locally made car.

Yeah.