Francisco Rodríguez

And sometimes when they're tried, they can end in crises where you find declines of GDP of 10, 15, 20, 25%, but not of 71%.

So when I started looking and trying to study what was happening in Venezuela, what I found is that a lot of what had happened had to do with the collapse of the oil industry and the country's oil revenues.

And it's because the oil industry had become the focus of a political struggle.

So both sides of the political struggle, the government and the opposition,

tried to gain control or stop the other side from gaining control over the country's revenues.

And ultimately, from the opposition side, that took the form of lobbying the US government to impose economic sanctions.

And these sanctions were incredibly damaging to the Venezuelan oil industry and to the Venezuelan economy.

They don't explain all of the collapse.

And what I describe in my work is a pattern where both Maduro and the opposition started weaponizing the economy

because they thought that it worked to their political advantage.

They thought that if they controlled oil revenues, then they would, in the case of Maduro, that would allow him to stay in power.

In the case of the opposition, that would allow them to drive first Chavez and then Maduro from power.

So ultimately, what we saw in Venezuela was political conflict getting out of bounds.

Well, what Trump has said is that the US is going to be running the Venezuelan economy.

And I think that

The best way to understand what he means is through a meeting that he had with oil industry executives a few days ago, in which he tried to convince them to invest in Venezuela, to invest in recovering Venezuela's oil production.

And he tried to convince them that there was a lot of money to be made in that.

There was not one representative of the Venezuelan government or of the opposition for that matter in that meeting.

And Mr. Trump actually pointed that out.

He said, you don't have to deal with Venezuela, you have to deal with me.