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The conspiracy theory version of why the Venezuela economy is a mess, is that they started selling oil priced in something other than dollars:

https://www.businessinsider.com/venezuela-publishes-oil-pric...

The other leaders to risk doing that were Saddam Hussein and Muammar Gaddafi.

Selling oil for anything besides dollars is the real line in the sand the US will not let any country cross.

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The timing seems off on that. That article dates from Sep 2017, at which point the Venezuelan economic crisis had been going for 7 years, and been serious for 4. Inflation was 69% by 2014, well before this announcement.

I think a more likely explanation is that Chavez instituted a number of policies that were extremely friendly to consumers and hostile to producers, with the result that the producers all left, which meant there were no goods for consumers to buy, which sent prices through the roof and instituted a (un)healthy black market.

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