Alejandro Velasco

That takes a significant player out of the picture, at least for some time.

It also, of course, creates instability in neighboring oil-producing nations.

But that couples with the rise of China, an industrialization that at the time is going to require massive amounts of natural resources to underpin.

Massive.

And so both of these things kind of coincide right around 2003 to induce this massive boom in oil prices.

The entire premise of the national oil company PDVSA, after it was founded in the wake of the nationalization in 1976, was that it was going to run

as an oil company, not anything else, right?

It was going to be free of politics.

It was going to provide a subsidy to the state, but its primary mission is only and exclusively to pump oil from the ground and to export it abroad and to hopefully generate market share, especially in the United States.

Chavez was trying to change that.

Chavez was trying to exert actual direct control

over the oil industry because the oil executives in PDVSA were resisting the idea of like, you know, let's cut back on production.

Let's not flood the market with oil.

And so what he wanted to do was change the governing board of PDVSA and appoint loyalists.

to his vision of the oil company and therefore of the country.

They resisted that and then the coup happened.

But then he tried again in late 2002, and then the oil industry, most of the engineers and all of the executives conducted a lockout.

They went on strike.

But what it did for Chavez, he had already again purged the military after the coup.

What it did is identify very clearly for Chavez who in the oil industry was not supportive.