PJ Vogt

Just paint me a picture of what life looked like when everything was going really right.

So it's too simple to say, oh, life is great for everybody.

But the truer thing to say would be...

Like, things were relatively stable.

There were a lot of people in Venezuela for whom life was good, but there were also have-nots.

And part of the problem was just in a given year, no matter who's in charge or what their ideology is, what is the price of oil?

And so even if you're making promises about fair redistribution, if the price of oil goes down, what you have to redistribute is less.

And people who aren't getting anything...

might not be very patient about that.

Exceptionally.

We're going to take a short break and then all the people who've tried to govern this exceptionally difficult place and what befell them.

Welcome back to the show.

We're in the 1970s now.

Venezuela, at this point, has a democratic government, and crucially this decade, the price of oil is going to skyrocket.

there will be a series of oil shocks, huge spikes in the international oil price.

The first big one is intentionally caused by OPEC, an alliance of oil-selling countries that Venezuela is a part of.

This big reduction in oil raises prices precipitously.

And later, there's a second oil shock during the Iranian revolution, the revolution craters Iranian oil production.

The 1970s in general, a time that was as economically good for Venezuela as it was bad for the U.S.

Here is Alejandro Velasco with chapter three of our story, Petrostate.