If Venezuela had an investment authority where they owned stakes in some Mexican and Brazilian football teams, to where there’d be the PDVSA logo on some Mexican and Brazilian football jerseys like how you see Emirates or Qatar Airways on some European football jerseys, or some department stores in Latin America, etc. like what the UAE and Qatar have done for example, would things have been different in regards to Venezuela’s economic trajectory?
If Venezuela managed to kill two birds with one stone in regards to funding social programs for their citizens along with a theoretical investment authority like the UAE did, would the post-Chavez Venezuela have looked differently?
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Venezuela will drown in oil over and over, it will never rise from it. It’s a weak foundation for a 30m people economy.
If that’s the only thing that changes? No.
If you can go back to 2003-2004 and start building a sovereign wealth fun Norway-style? Sure, provided you can get enough investment in the rest of the economy to fund all those social programs oil used to fund. But investors like stable countries, so another condition would be not devolve into authoritarianism.
The wealth fund is the least of the issues, honestly.
If you don’t want to be shocked, don’t google what FONDEN was.
Long story short, they tried that and the Socialist Party elite didn’t just skim off the top, no, they stole everything.
I wonder if the slaves in Qatar are ok with their condition because Qatar sponsor football teams.
These sponsorships are just to paint a better image of countries that still, in 2025, use slave labor. Venezuela could simply use their oil reserves to improve the lives of the people there and they would never need to sponsor a football team to do so.
Why don’t their leaders do that? Corruption and USA’s cancerous presence in our continent.
I mean yeah but the moment Chávez was elected that hypothetical future died. And while I do believe we would be more wealthy, we wouldn’t be like the rich arab gulf countries. Qatar, Kuwait, and the UAE are extremely wealthy because they are small countries with authoritarian regimes where foreign workers getting exploited is an expectation. Venezuela is a country of 30m people and just oil and investing wouldn’t employ the entire country.
No. Venezuela has oil reserves. The oil is much more expensive to extract than Middle Eastern oil and has a cheaper market value.
The problem is one of scale. The Venezuelan population might have boomed hugely over the 20th century, but there was no point in time when Venezuela had as small a population of citizens as small as theirs. In the 1950s and 1960s, at Venezuela’s apogee when it was as rich as Italy or even West Germany, Venezuela had a population of at least six million. There was never enough oil money relative to population to copy the Gulf States.
The US destroyed any chance that Venezuela could serve as a model for an alternate form of socioeconomic development, an independent state outside the North American umbrella. Just like it did to Vietnam and Cuba, and all over Central America, since those threats aren’t tolerated. It no longer matters what Venezuela does. Their future is guaranteed to be misery. The US will see to that.
Interesting, usually people compare Venezuela to Norway in this regard. Norway did a fantastic job managing their oil wealth. Venezuela… didn’t, and they got a bad case of Dutch disease as a result; after that, everything went to shit.
Nowadays the country faces more problems than its oil potential could fix. It’s probably going to take a lot to recover, and it’s going to take time.
This would never happen
Latino countries are too densely populated
Saudi Arabia wasn’t densely populated
Our latino citizens always will say what’s in it for me all this wealth and I get nothing
This is why Venezuela is poor
We had one such fund: FONDEN (Fund for National Development). It was Chavez’s black box, and, of course, he squandered it in about 7 years.
In the 70s-90s, we also had much smaller development funds for specific sectors and regions, but they were focused on the domestic market so inflation diluted them and corruption just made that process way faster.
When prosperous, Venezuela also promoted and lead (i.e. funded from its own pocket) the creation of multilaterals for regional development. One of them, Corporación Andina de Fomento (CAF), has been quite successful. So much so, foreign “partners” had to limit said institution’s relation with Venezuela to keep it safe from the incredibly corrupt castrochavista nomenklatura and its clique in the region.
Baby you came 50 years later Venezuela lived its biggest development between 1940s to 1980s, it used to be the second biggest economy in the region and have the second most demanded currency in the world.
The 1970s Venezuela was known as Venezuela Saudita by the level of wealth and prosperity that had.
Between 1950s and 1970s the country population grew almost 300%
Basically was about to be a developed nation but shit happens mismanagement and high reliance on one product makes the country fall for what is now