Venezuela - how you can be poor when you're rich.

[Mister H]

Venezuela holds the largest oil reserves on the planet and yet remains, incredibly, insanely, poor and impoverished. How can this be?
When liberalism, or neo-liberalism, was imposed on most of South America, it did so on a continent that hadn't developed the institutions that could control, or even regulate, the theft of resources and capital. A similar thing happened in the late 1990s in Russia. When marxism arrived that didn't help either. So you had a toxic mix of left and right wing movements battling it out for control.
Venezuela now has some of the worst crime statistics anywhere, and despite petrol/gas, quite literally, being given away free at the pump. All because no one seems to have any idea how to sell the stuff.
Saudi Arabia set up a government agency decades ago to sell its oil and I believe Venezuela is a member of OPEC (as we, of course, should have been, I can talk for hours on that) but it looks as though, because it simply cannot get its act together and run a functioning state, the oil might as well be given away free for all the good it does anyone.
So, you can be poor when you are rich beyond the dreams of avarice.
Poor, when the whole world lies before you. Or should I say beneath you.
And not forgetting, as we are seeing with current geo-political events, when oil remains the propellant of the entire world economy.