Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Hello. Before we begin this week, an update. The very strange experiment we started last episode, where, along with our friends at the Hard Fork Podcast, we decided to try to help build the Fediverse. Basically, we made a small social media website that is not particularly algorithmic, not run by tech moguls, unless you count us, that we called the Forkiverse.
The Forkiverse has taken off with, frankly, much more energy than I expected. And if you want to hear about what's been going on, the micro scandals, the Russian disinformation campaign, the users we've had to ban, we covered it all on today, Friday's episode of the Hard Fork podcast, which I will include a link to in our show notes. Okay, some quick ads, then this week's story.
One of the well-documented problems with life on Earth right now, mentioned ad nauseum on this very podcast, is that it's very hard to answer the question of what any of us should be paying attention to. The internet, the news, offers so many competing stories, most of them highly emotionally charged, deeply complicated.
It's sometimes hard not just to know where to look, but almost like, what exam am I cramming for this week? What is the topic that I know very little about that I now have to rapidly fashion myself into a pseudo-expert on just to be a citizen? Last year, for me, one of the stories I chose not to dig into was Venezuela.
It was there in my peripheral vision, Trump complaining about Venezuelan migrants, actively targeting them for deportation. I noticed, of course, when we launched missile strikes against Venezuelan boats. I could tell something weird was going on, but this is America under Trump. Lots of weird things are always going on. And I was just more worried about other parts of the front page last year.
But then, a couple weeks ago, our country sent troops to arrest their president and his wife, and Trump announced we were now in charge of Venezuela and that we were taking their oil. And that was the point where I really felt like, okay, I need to understand this. Not Trump, but Venezuela, this country we just got into a much more entangled relationship with.
So, I read some books, I talked to some experts, and I have to say, I kind of wish I'd started this earlier, because the history of Venezuela is just, as a story, so compelling, so fascinating. So, without further ado, I just want to introduce to you the person who will guide us through that story today.
My name is Alejandro Velasco, and I'm Associate Professor of History at New York University. And what is your relationship to Venezuela? Well, I have two. I have a personal and a professional relationship. I was born and raised in Venezuela, born in a small town called La Victoria, about an hour and a half west of Caracas.
Then my family and I moved to Caracas when I was eight, which is to say that I root for the Caracas baseball team, which is really important when you think about people's relationship to Venezuela. Who do you root for? Are they a good team? I would say they're the best. But, you know, others may disagree. But then I also study Venezuela as a profession.
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Chapter 2: What led to the U.S. invasion of Venezuela?
There was no real vision of progress, growth, modernity. It was under his rule, of course, that oil then begins to become this thing that seems like it might be a ticket somewhere, but it's unclear where. And so once people understand the power of oil, what begins to change? What happens? It took a while, right? And so it's not like 1914, oil gushes out, everything changes.
At the time, of course, you have to remember, it's still unclear what oil is going to do to the world. Right, it's 1914. It's 1914, so it's not a sense like, for instance, Norway later in the 60s, when they discover vast reserves in the Arctic, they're like, oh, well, this is great. 1914, there's still no real sense of what this is going to do to the rest of the world.
But really by the 1920s is when you begin to see a tremendous insertion of capital from oil companies from the United States, from Britain and elsewhere, right? That it seems to be changing the dynamic of Venezuela. Right. By the 1930s, and Gomez's dictatorship lasts 27 years, so it really coincides with these first two decades of oil production and exploitation.
By the time his dictatorship comes to an end in 1935, it is unquestionable that oil not only will be the defining factor driver of Venezuelan economy, but every political faction in Venezuela understands that how they were going to relate to oil, how they're going to define oil, will be the hallmark feature of Venezuela's future.
And so what does that look like? What does it mean for this one resource to be so central to the country itself?
Well, even at the time, which is to say the 1920s and 30s, it's not to say that everybody saw this as an unproblematic or uncritical, simple path towards a kind of future, whether that's going to be modern or something else. As early as the 1920s, intellectuals in Venezuela are sounding some alarms about oil being the excrement of the devil.
that if we're not too careful, this thing that seeps seemingly freely from the ground and is viscous and inspires all these visions about the darkness of the subsoil and what that means metaphorically and spiritually for Venezuela, that this may not be the bountiful resource that we might imagine. It might come with some significant strings attached.
And so people are seeing this very early, even if it's more like an instinct, like just this feeling of like, oh, this goopy... Black discharge from the soil that's so valuable. Like, people have a feeling that this could be a problem.
Yes. So there are alarms raised, although they're not generalized. And really, again, what the consensus among Venezuela's political elite intellectual class, including its cultural elite, who begin to write novels and, you know, poetry and plays and music around oil. They're writing poems to oil?
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Chapter 3: How did Alejandro Velasco's upbringing influence his perspective on Venezuela?
Is that like aā Yeah, I guess I would temper that a little bit, right? Everything was going better. Whether everything was going really right is more of a subjective question. Yeah.
Even as the political system was stabilized and the democratic system really entrenched itself in the 1960s and by the early 70s, there were still those who had not seen the desired effects of this democratic system being able to distribute the wealth of oil in a way that seemed fair and equitable, right? There were still significant amounts of inequality. And in part, that's also because
Even though in the 1950s there was a period of oil boom, in the 1960s, coinciding with this incipient democratic experiment, it was also a period of lower oil prices. So those governments, as they were trying to consolidate, also simultaneously were making the discursive promise of greater, more fair distribution of oil wealth, but with fewer resources to be able to distribute.
But they did distribute it. They distributed it in the context of building an educational system that eventually became a real envy of many parts of Latin America. Social services that were also increasing in terms of its capacity as well as its efficiency. Building new cities that were meant to extract other resources like steel in the southern part of Venezuela.
And building infrastructure beyond just the major cities to try to link up the country. And so there was a palpable sense of progress, but not quickly enough to satisfy everyone.
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.
And that is key to understand the balance between dictatorship and democracy in Venezuela. Patience. Which is to say, one of the things that the boom and bust cycles of oil generates is, in moments of bust, the breach between those who have and those who have not accentuates and extends and grows.
But then that means that when the next boom period comes, you have a choice to make, whoever is in power. You can either try to close that gap, and you have the wherewithal to do so with petrodollars coming from abroad. but you don't know how much time you have in power, right?
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Chapter 4: What role did oil play in Venezuela's historical development?
And so when he returns, you see all sort of pack peddling on the part of the White House. But really, by that point, I think the damage is not only done, but irreparable.
Ayer... Ladies and gentlemen, from this very podium, the President of the United States, whom I call the Devil, came here speaking as the owner of the world.
I think by that point, it really convinces ChƔvez that there's no possibility to think about the United States government as anything other than this kind of, that if anyone steps outside of what the U.S. government, especially as a, at the time, a unipolar power in the world, that there's nothing that they won't do to try to countermand that.
We can't allow the world's dictatorship to be established, to consolidate itself. that the world dictatorship be consolidated. The speech of the world tyrant president, full of cynicism, full of hypocrisy, is imperial hypocrisy.
And then the other big thing that changes is just the price of oil, which, as you said, at the beginning of his presidency was at $8 a barrel. It just shoots up. At one point, it's at $100 a barrel. I mean, it rises as high as around $160.
How fast does that happen? So it takes a little bit of time. It really begins to surge after 2003 and the U.S. invasion of Iraq. 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.
So you have this like huge, huge, huge, you both, the supply gets constricted a little bit by the U.S. entering Iraq, but what you really have is like a huge demand surge because of China.
Massive. And so both of these things kind of coincide right around 2003 to induce this massive boom in oil prices.
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