Alejandro Velasco

And so that's contriving to give a sense that the kind of, you know, high level of professionalism and expertise is no longer there.

But it really begins to kind of kick into overdrive right around 2008 and 2009.

Again, the mission of PDVSA has shifted dramatically.

And it's also, of course, now grown massively in size.

We talked about how, you know, the entire oil industry before the strike was around 42,000 people and almost half of them were fired summarily.

By 2007, 2008, because of the incorporation of all of these social programs within the scope and the remit of the oil industry, now the oil industry employed directly or indirectly hundreds of thousands of people.

If you send your kid to school, you get this amount of money.

If you yourself go to school to learn how to do whatever, you get this amount of money.

Everyone is tapping into the state quite directly in this moment and the reinvestments.

into the oil industry become secondary.

I'll tell you one that brings together this domestic component of trying to refashion the nation now under socialist lines, beginning in 2006, 2007, with larger governments.

hemispheric ambitions.

So in 2006, 2007, there are now an array of leftist presidents elected throughout Latin America, some of them neighboring Venezuela, Ecuador, Bolivia, Brazil, Argentina, all the way down to Chile.

And again, this is a region that is very rich in natural resources, one of them being gas, natural gas.

And so the idea in terms of refashioning solidarity and alliances, no longer just around material interests, but around a shared purpose of political and ideological solidarity, is made manifest in a project to build a continental gas pipeline

that is going to stretch all the way down to Argentina and go all the way up to Venezuela.

And then from there, gas can be exported elsewhere.

And all the various countries that have natural gas will just pipe their gas into this pipeline and then ship it off to the benefit of the entire continent.

It's an effort to create a united Latin America, which is Bolivarian in nature, right?

It goes all the way back to Bolivar's ideas of