Kenny Malone

And in the not-so-small print of that agreement was a longer-term plan that Venezuela would in fact take over the country's oil completely.

It would own everything in 40 years.

At that time, if they wanted, the Seven Sisters would have to negotiate new contracts.

And these...

would be the moments in a petro-state that seem wonderful, that make people gloss over what could be the downside.

Because that single resource just feels like abundance.

I mean, it is abundance.

Yes, an oil camp, a company town built by the American company, one of the seven sisters, Creole Petroleum.

In fact, we found a little promotional video about their Venezuelan oil operation.

Miguel's mother worked at the Creole Petroleum Hospital.

His father worked at the ports on the docks in the refinery.

And even at that age, Miguel says he could see the profits from the oil were not necessarily being distributed equally across the country.

This single resource fueling the entire country's economy meant that Venezuelans were completely at the mercy of these oil companies, though.

By the 1960s, Juan Pablo Perez Alfonso had become the oil minister of Venezuela.

He was working on a way to expand Venezuela's power even further by banding together with other petro-states like Iran, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait.

He didn't want them to compete with each other, and he said that they should standardize how oil is bought and sold.

They became an oil cartel.

Now the OPEC countries were setting the rules, not the multinational oil companies like Chevron.

Boom and bust.

Monoeconomic vulnerability.