Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Hi. Quick note before we start this week. While this episode is about Venezuela, a country that recently found itself the focus of our country's confusing ADHD-inspired imperial ambitions, Greenland has also landed in a similar spot. And very surprisingly, we happen to have reported an hour-long documentary about Greenland.
I went to visit there a few years ago to a melting glacier on a trip with climate change activists and crypto people. Our Greenland story contains a lot about Greenland's history, just what the place is like. It's very strange. Even ideas about resource extraction there. The story is absolutely one of my favorite things I've ever gotten to work on. If you want to hear it, it's called The End.
We'll throw a link to it in our show notes. That is Greenland. This week, Venezuela. After this short break.
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Hello, Search Engine listeners. This is the final part, part two, of our very fascinating, in my opinion, history of Venezuela, told to us by the platonic ideal of a history professor, Alejandro Velasco. If you've not yet heard part one, please go listen. But if you have, we pick up our story where we last left it.
The country's president, Hugo Chavez, star of the TV show, A lo Presidente, is in an extremely strong position. The year is 2005.
Now Chávez has control over the military, control over the national oil industry, international credibility, democratic credibility, and control over the Congress, just at the time when oil prices are hitting their peak. Just an immense amount of power. It's complete power, is what it is. It is total power, which eventually will be the Achilles heel and the reason why Chavismo fails.
So today we're gonna talk about that failure. We're gonna chart a series of really heartbreaking mistakes. Chavez will make many of them himself. The US will contribute at some crucial moments as well. And as we follow the story, we'll see a country gripped by the strange amnesia Alejandro Velasco described in episode one.
A place that during the boom times seems to almost forget the bust, forget that everything that rises eventually falls. So to begin, chapter one, the socialist oil company. Even before Chavez, Venezuela had been engaged in a multi-decade project of nationalizing its oil industry. PDVSA, the state oil company, had begun back in the 1970s. But before Chavez, it's a more complicated picture.
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Chapter 2: How did Hugo Chavez consolidate power in Venezuela?
And Chavez's power meant that he would get to direct that cash wherever he thought appropriate. Which brings us to chapter two, pipe dreams. Alejandro said there are many examples from these years of wild blank check government infrastructure ideas, but there's a specific story he wanted to share.
I'll tell you one that brings together this domestic component of trying to refashion the nation now under socialist lines, beginning in 2006, 2007, with larger governments. hemispheric ambitions. So in 2006, 2007, there are now an array of leftist presidents elected throughout Latin America, some of them neighboring Venezuela, Ecuador, Bolivia, Brazil, Argentina, all the way down to Chile.
And again, this is a region that is very rich in natural resources, one of them being gas, natural gas. And so the idea in terms of refashioning solidarity and alliances, no longer just around material interests, but around a shared purpose of political and ideological solidarity, is made manifest in a project to build a continental gas pipeline
that is going to stretch all the way down to Argentina and go all the way up to Venezuela. And then from there, gas can be exported elsewhere. And all the various countries that have natural gas will just pipe their gas into this pipeline and then ship it off to the benefit of the entire continent.
Okay. So it's going to be a national gas pipeline going through the continent. And the idea is that it's like the same way countries are internally sharing their natural resources. It's like it's towards a more communal idea of this as an export from the region to the rest of the world. Exactly.
It's an effort to create a united Latin America, which is Bolivarian in nature, right? It goes all the way back to Bolivar's ideas of a Gran Colombia of, you know, Latin American nations that come together as a confederacy of nations. Obviously, there's tragedy involved in the billions of dollars that were misspent in these kinds of projects.
But there's also kind of, you know, dark humor in the idea of the jokes tell themselves. Like, the pipe dream literally is a pipe dream.
right?
Of this, you know, pipe that I remember in Alopresiente, it's like Sunday TV talk show that Chavez had, where he would bring up maps and then he would show these maps of the continent and tell you exactly where the pipeline was going to go.
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Chapter 3: What were the consequences of Chavez's nationalization of the oil industry?
Perhaps recognizing the implication here, that they were at risk of losing significant amounts of government money in contracts, the engineers changed their tack. They agreed, for a million dollars, to help create a fake train ride for Venezuelan TV.
The solution was to attach a thin wire to the train, run the wire down the tracks to a winch they'd hidden, one of those devices that turns a wire, like you'd use to pull a Jeep out of a ditch. The train couldn't actually run, but with this winch, the idea was that they could fake it. So here's what Venezuelan TV viewers saw that day.
Their president, standing on a train platform, the train in the background, extolling the virtues of Venezuelan socialism. Chavez is saying, this is only possible in socialism. The kingdom of God on earth. The kingdom of Christ on earth. And then he tells the crowd to applaud because here's the train. The train, though, is barely moving. And so Chavez has to just keep vamping to kill time.
That train can reach a speed of up to 50 kilometers per hour. Chavez is saying, it's going slowly because this is just a test run. The real Bolivarian cable train, when it launches, will go much faster, 50 kilometers per hour. The train, meanwhile, finally arrives at the station. Let's see.
My Spanish is terrible, but even I can feel the effects of the political charisma of this president selling me gleefully on his somewhat dubious train project. Eight days after this TV appearance, Chavez would go on to win the election handily. It was later calculated that just this section of railway track, less than a mile, cost the country $440 million.
At the end of Chavez's time in power, he'd leave Venezuela with its external debts quadrupled to about $150 billion. Alejandro says part of the reason that a lot of Venezuelans missed what was going on, it wasn't just that there was so much money that you could hide the waste. It was also that Chavez had many projects whose results were actually quite tangible.
Government subsidized gasoline, pennies per liter. Free apartments and free houses that Chavez would give away to citizens on TV. Cuban doctors brought in to give people better health care.
Another project, for instance, Chavez funded this continental program to remove cataracts from people's eyes. And so people would travel from all over the continent. They would, you know, send Venezuelan planes or they would charter planes. Oh, it's not just Venezuelans. It's like people, oh, Bolivia, Ecuador, Peru, Argentina, you know, Central America, Caribbean.
This was a continental project for people, certainly Venezuela, for people to come from elsewhere and have their cataracts removed. Now that I think about it a little bit more, there was something about the metaphor of seeing and of visibility that was important to Chávez. You know, removing the cataracts so you can see clearly.
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Chapter 4: What ambitious infrastructure projects did Chavez propose?
who is trained to read behind the blacked-out parts of declassified CIA documents. Suddenly, I'm being told all of that, and my first instinct is, well, maybe there's something else behind this, rather than the thing itself. It can't just be the American president saying, we're going to the country to take the oil. It can't just be that.
Or it can't just be Stephen Miller saying, no, no, no, the continent is ours. How dare they sell their natural resources to China? Or it can't just be Marco Rubio saying, the left is over in Latin America for centuries to come. Or it can't just be Pete Hegseth saying, you're next, whoever next might happen to be.
It all feels so contrary to instinct that the reaction, at least to my part, and I think more generally we might be sensing this, is somewhat of a delay.
People are shocked because they can't believe what they're seeing. And so they react more slowly.
That's my sense.
Yeah. I mean, I find it, that is how I have felt. And it has just made me want to understand the story of Venezuela better. At least I think like I did not feel, um, I was not a buyer for the grand promise of the Trump administration, like, uh, getting involved. Understanding the history of Venezuela, I think I feel more pessimistic than I was, and I was pessimistic before. It just feels like...
You know, there's this temptation, I think, in America, for understandable reasons, when I talk to my fellow relatively uninformed friends about the country, it's like we channel... The arguments end up being, were the problems problems of socialism? Were the problems problems of imperialism?
When you really hear the story, sure, I think you can make arguments for both, but it more sounds like a resource curse. It sounds like... while wealth can be helpful, immense sudden growth of anything really risks being destructive. But if you understand it as a country where the rise and fall of the price of oil has encouraged very, very short-term leadership,
Having Trump, who engages in that kind of leadership anyway, take control and explicitly not on a project of democracy building or like without even the pretense of anything. But we would like to further ravage this, not even for short term Venezuelan gain, but for American gain. It really sounds dire.
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