It's (Not About) Oil, Stupid!

In the last flailing days of Maduro's Venezuelan regime, it's become common for the rump of Chavistas both within the country, and the Internationalists without, to argue that greed for petroleum lies at the heart of the crisis.

We can take this as shorthand to claim that the dastardly U.S.A. is responsible for the tragedy currently ravaging this beautiful South American nation.

Nothing could be further from the truth, as this recently-published NYT article (above) graphically illustrates.

Now Uncle Sam, with his Monroe Doctrine, does indeed have a shameful record of political skullduggery in Latin America. Mexico, Haiti, Guatemala, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Chile, Nicaragua, Panama -- where would you like to start? But trying to steal Venezuela's oil is not among his sins.

Venezuela has the world's largest proven reserves of petroleum, but the remaining oil is mostly tar-heavy and will be very, very expensive to extract.

Besides, given the U.S. fracking bonanza, "El Norte" will soon overtake even Saudi Arabia as the world's biggest fossil-fuel energy producer.

If the Maduro-Chavistas want to blame anybody for their country's dire predicament they need not look far. A glance in the mirror will suffice.

Anyone who lived and worked in Venezuela in the early 1980's, as I did, will tell you that the seeds of the current destruction had already been sown. The Venezuelans, quite simply, didn't turn up for work.

Apart from oil, whatever industry they had was owned, predominantly, by the scions of former German Nazis and members of the post-World War Two Jewish diaspora. Top executives were recruited from Europe and the United States, the universities were staffed by professors from Chile and Argentina, who had fled right-wing repression in their homelands, Basques ran the restaurants, Portuguese drove the taxis and repaired shoes and the Colombians, who were treated with disdain, cleaned the toilets.

Venezuelans, meanwhile, partied like the party was never going to end. Their now-humbled bolivar currency was tied 4.5 to the U.S. dollar. They did their shopping in Miami and worked strictly 11am to 3pm, Tuesday to Thursday. They drank imported scotch, like wine, at dinner and enjoyed the finest bottled beer (ice-cold Polar) and some of the best beaches in the world.

Meanwhile, their rulers -- COPEI (Christian Democrat) and AD (Accíon Democratica) -- had a cosy plutocratic agreement to take it in turns to govern and full licence to rip the country off. The tradition continued through Chavez's "dictatorship of the people" down to his second-rate deputy Maduro, the former bus driver who is now driving his country into oblivion. Make no mistake. No Castro he.

It used to be said: "Will the last person out, please turn off the lights."

As we've seen, the lights all over Venezuela are already going out.