Last week, the U.S. military attacked Venezuela, captured the country’s dictator, Nicolas Maduro, and his wife in a daring nighttime raid, and flew them back to New York to face charges of “narco-terrorism” and drug trafficking. Meanwhile, President Donald Trump said the U.S. would “run” Venezuela until stability could return to the country. While it remained unclear exactly how the U.S. would manage this, Trump did say that U.S. companies would work to repair Venezuela’s crumbling oil infrastructure and that the U.S. would lay claim to at least a portion of the country’s oil exports as compensation.
Reading the news brought back vivid memories. Twenty-three years ago, in December 2002, Fortune dispatched me to the Venezuelan capital to report on a national strike against Maduro’s predecessor, Hugo Chavez. It was just the beginning of Venezuela’s long decline, both as a democracy and as an oil producer. The strike had been touched off by employees of PDVSA, the Venezuelan national oil company, who objected to Chavez summarily firing experienced, technocratic PDVSA executives and replacing them with political cronies. At the time, striking PDVSA managers told me Chavez’s actions would eventually result in the country losing the expertise needed to maintain Venezuela’s oil production.
In this, they were prescient. Venezuela’s oil production facilities are so antiquated and in such disrepair that modernizing them will take years, as my colleague, Fortune Energy Editor Jordan Blum, wrote this week.
But the PDVSA execs were wrong about the political power of their strike. “With $46.3 billion in revenues and $3.7 billion in profits in 2001, the oil giant is Latin America’s largest company,” I wrote at the time. “It accounts for a third of Venezuela’s GDP, 80% of its export income, and half of government revenues. The opposition assumed that if it could shut down PDVSA, it could quickly compel Chavez to step down.” Even then, however, it was becoming apparent that Chavez would turn out to be harder to dislodge.
There was a febrile atmosphere in Caracas that winter, with long lines of cars waiting for gas snarling city streets and raising tempers, while the constant prospect of violence hung over the daily demonstrations. Several protestors had been shot in clashes with the police. I met with shadowy, right-wing members of the opposition who told me they had been in contact with the CIA and were certain that any night, U.S. military helicopters would sweep in over the surrounding hills to depose the man they accused of leading their country to economic and political ruin.
Well, those helicopters finally arrived. It just took a few decades longer than anyone anticipated.
