Erika Barris

This episode of Planet Money was produced by James Sneed and edited by Marianne McCune.

It was fact-checked by Willa Rubin and engineered by Sina Lafredo and Kwesi Lee.

Alex Goldmark is our executive producer.

I'm Kenny Malone.

And I'm Erica Barris.

This is NPR.

Thanks for listening.

I've got one here, but I don't know if I'm ready to give it up.

You did this whole thing to make Sasquatch noises.

In the wake of news that the United States had captured and arrested the leader of Venezuela and would run the country for some amount of time, one specific American company found itself suddenly in a very strange spotlight.

President Trump assembled basically the entire American oil industry to discuss his goal of turning Venezuela back into a booming petroleum exporter.

Yes, Chevron was there in Venezuela from the time that oil literally rained down on the country, caused a boom, and turned Venezuela into the biggest oil exporter in the world.

But most notably, Chevron kept being there when things went bad and when Venezuela took more and more of the oil industry away from foreign companies.

And I'm Erika Barris.

Venezuela and Chevron are perhaps one of the strangest public-private partnerships ever.

One of the world's most famous and profitable corporations has for decades been plugging away in one of the world's most famous and infamous socialist countries.

And oddly, along for that ride, little old Chevron.

Or at least it was little at first, because thanks in part to Venezuela, Chevron is now the second largest oil company in the U.S.

To understand what happened to make all those companies leave while Chevron stayed, we called up Stanford political economist Terry Carl, who told us she's interviewed every Venezuelan president except Nicolas Maduro since she started following the story of oil in Venezuela back in the 1970s.

Over the next couple centuries, Venezuela became a Spanish colony.