Excerpts from Books and Wikipedia
"With more and more Venezuelans enraged at the way their oil-rich country was approaching bankruptcy without making progress toward a more equitable distribution of the national wealth, the way was cleared for the rise to power of the socialist radical, Hugo Chávez, in 1999 (with an apparent mandate from the urban poor and the increasingly penurious middle class). Chávez’s rule, however, quickly turned both autocratic and economically destructive. During his long presidency that ended with his death in 2013, relatively high oil prices brought in consistently high revenues totaling well over (U.S.) $800 billion. But there was very little to show for it: infrastructural improvements were hardly to be seen, bloated public-sector companies chronically underperformed, and the entrepreneurial sector of the population had fled the country soon after Chávez came to power. As for the poor, they intermittently benefited from new social programs, but life did not improve for them. Today, all Venezuelans are worse off, bedeviled by constant shortages of basic foods and vital retail products thanks to the staggering incompetence of the regime of Nicolás Maduro, Chávez’s successor."