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Was Venezuela a rich nation?

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Was Venezuela a rich nation?

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lived there for years, it has never been rich, only the goverment and a few amount of people have been always rich, there is a lot of corruption and what is worse a very poor common sense about prosperety and willingness, the nation has seen better days in the past.

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Venezuela was never a rich country. By "rich" one implies the country as a whole, not a bunch of lunatics that hold all revenue of their oil.

Ever been to Caracas? - a lovely city by all means, but with 16 other lovely cities surrounding it as shanty-towns on the sides of the hills which overlook the capital.

There is a saying there, "If ever those shanty-people decided to walk down on Caracas all at the same time, no army could stop them."

Oil is their main income - corruption, the other.
Yes, It has lots of oil.
1979 was the peak of Venezuela wealth due to the high price of oil ($100 a barrel in today's equivalent dollars). Only 15% of the population was poor. Oil dropped and venezuela became poor. Oil bottomed out at $10 a barrel in 1998 and you-know-who became President. Oil surged to $80 a barrely by last year and some of the people credited Chavez with some of the "miracles", although he isn't close to where they were in 1979. The country is being gambled on high oil prices and wild spending. It will probably hit a crisis soon even if ol doesn't drop. The rest of the economy is in tatters and the laws respecting private property have been destroyed. Rish people and a former small but respecatbly sized middle class are becoming poorer. Most of the poor have imporved a bit, but won't be able to maintain what they have if oil drops. At $50 a barrel - Big Problems. At $40 - Disaster. Chavez is lucky so far, maybe oil will stay high and over $60, maybe it won't. It's not the way to run a country, though.
Venezuela was a rich nation a long time ago, many people went to venezuela to invest, and all the money produced by oil made venezuela a rich country. However, after the years corruption became popular and venezuela's weakened.
It is a rich country, it hasa lot of oil and the prices of it are as high as it has never been, but the population is in poverty at its most. They do not produce much of anything else, they do extract iron. Most of all there are services for the population, the agriculture is poor.
We have always been a rich nation in the matter of resources. We have oil, land, agriculture, tourism. The goverment has only sold for many years the oil because that's what gives the nation a bigger income.

But, 8 years from now Venezuela started to be less rich because Chavez has been giving away our oil, and he isn't selling our other resources, and our income is less, and he's taking away most of it for personal stuff.