I have spent some time trying to understand the situation in Venezuela.  How could a country with such natural wealth end up in so much economic trouble?  Most of the articles I found seemed to cast the problem in political terms.  The conservatives were corrupt and stole all of the oil money.  The socialists were corrupt and stole all the oil money.  I suppose both could be true.

A friend from Iran recently used the term Black Curse for oil,  The article I just read used the same term several times.  I suppose that is a good way to look at it,  Throw a group of people of any sort into a vast supply of easy money, and watch things go down hill.

The article below isn’t ‘impartial’, but it does seem to be factual (it is a book review of a biography of Hugo Chavez).  A good read if you are interested in how things got so bad in Venezuela and how it could happen in other places.  From the London Review of Books, from a few years back (it turned up in a mailing I get):

Down from the Mountain

Greg Grandin

Vol. 39 No. 13 · 29 June 2017