Nicolas Maduro

Chevron, Venezuela and the Paradox of Plenty adds Maduro to the sanctions-and-license phase of the oil story. After Maduro took over in 2013, the source says U.S.-Venezuela relations worsened, Venezuelan oil was sanctioned, and Chevron kept negotiating with both Caracas and the United States to continue operating while fields, equipment, and skilled labor deteriorated.

Nicolas Maduro appears in Venezuela’s recent economic history (Update) as Hugo Chavez’s successor, inheriting an economy already organized around Oil Revenue Dependence, official exchange rates, and government-controlled access to dollars. The source says the 2014 oil-price collapse exposed this structure because Venezuela had not saved enough during the boom.

The episode uses Maduro’s period to show how policy avoidance can deepen a monetary crisis. Instead of accepting the exchange-rate break, the government kept old official dollar prices, added multiple rates, printed more money, tightened import approvals, and stopped reporting some economic data. Later, the update connects Donald Trump-era sanctions and oil-market isolation to the source’s account of hyperinflation and partial Dollarized Stabilization.

Connections

• Venezuela - country context.
• Hugo Chavez - predecessor whose system Maduro inherited.
• Chevron, PDVSA, and Oil Nationalization - oil-industry branch extended by the Chevron source.
• OPEC - organization Maduro appealed to when oil prices collapsed.
• Currency Control Trap, Import Approval Bottleneck, and Dollarized Stabilization - main mechanisms attached to the source.
• Economic Sanctions As Violence and Donald Trump - sanctions branch added by the episode.