By: Ricardo Abud
To devastate is not to neglect. It is not to mismanage. It is not to make wrong decisions with good intentions. To devastate is to raze. It is to leave in ruins what once existed. It is an act that has a direction, a systematic nature, and specific beneficiaries, even if no one names them aloud. Venezuela was devastated. And the difference between saying that Venezuela failed and saying that Venezuela was devastated is the difference between an accident and a crime.
A country with the largest oil reserves on the planet, extraordinary water resources, fertile farmland, a strategic geographic location, an educated population, and a skilled technical and professional class does not fall into ruin through bad luck or unavoidable forces. It falls into ruin when it is subjected to sustained and simultaneous attacks from organized corruption, institutionalized impunity, protected incompetence, and the boundless greed of those who have turned the exercise of power into the most profitable business of their lives.
Venezuela's wealth didn't save it. It made it more vulnerable. Because where there are more resources, there's more to steal, and where there's more to steal without consequences, the plunder has no reason to stop. For years, a volume of money flowed into the state coffers that would have been enough to definitively transform every corner of the country. That money didn't disappear into thin air. It was taken. It was deliberately diverted, through mechanisms built for that purpose, with the complicity of those who had the institutional obligation to prevent it and chose to participate instead of resisting.
The infrastructure that was supposed to be maintained with that money crumbled in real time while the budgets allocated to sustain it fed accounts that had nothing to do with the country. Power plants shut down. Water systems dried up. Refineries rusted. Hospitals ran out of medicine and equipment. Roads disintegrated. Industries expropriated in the name of the people were systematically abandoned until they stopped producing, stopped functioning, and ceased to exist as real assets. All of this happened while contracts were signed, budget allocations were approved, and speeches were given about the transformation of the country.
What makes this devastation particularly atrocious is its human dimension. Venezuela didn't just lose infrastructure, institutions, or productive capacity. It lost its people. More than eight million people left the country, driven by a misery that wasn't inevitable but manufactured. Doctors who could no longer practice. Engineers who had nowhere to work. Teachers who couldn't support their families on their earnings. Young people who grew up seeing that hard work and education led nowhere within their own borders. Entire families scattered across the continent and the world, carrying Venezuela like a scar and leaving behind a country being emptied of the only wealth that can't be bought with oil.
That exodus was not a side effect. It was the direct and predictable result of having destroyed the conditions that make a dignified life possible within a territory. When a country cannot guarantee electricity, water, food, health, security, or a future, its population doesn't stay and wait. They leave. And when they leave in the proportions that the Venezuelan population did, what remains is not a wounded country. It is an emptied country.
The ruin of Venezuela has concrete faces, even if they aren't named here. It has specific decisions made with full knowledge of their consequences. It has signed contracts that never produced the promised work. It has projects started that were never finished. It has companies seized that never produced again. It has funds created that were never accounted for. It has institutional controls that were deactivated one by one until the looting could operate unhindered. None of this was accidental. The accumulation of so many decisions in the same direction for so long cannot be explained as a mistake. It can only be explained as a method.
And the method worked. It worked for those who designed and implemented it. The country was left in ruins, but some became obscenely wealthy while the ruins piled up. That is the harshest truth of Venezuela's devastation: it wasn't a failure for everyone. For most, it was a catastrophe. For a minority, it was the deal of a lifetime. And until that asymmetry is clearly acknowledged, any analysis of what happened to Venezuela will be incomplete.
What remains today defies any softened diagnosis. Venezuela is not in crisis. Venezuela is in ruins. And ruins cannot be managed or reformed. Ruins are rebuilt from the ground up, with nonexistent resources, with dysfunctional institutions, with human talent that has left and has no concrete reason to return, and with a collective trust that was destroyed as methodically as everything else.
Devastated. Brought to ruin. Not by fate, nor by history, nor by abstract forces. By concrete, sustained, and protected human decisions. That is the phrase Venezuela deserves, and one that political analysis too often avoids uttering in all its starkness.
THERE IS NOTHING MORE EXCLUSIONARY THAN BEING POOR
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