Venezuela has one of the world's largest and highest quality oil reserves.
On paper, this meant prosperity.
In reality, it has meant poverty, hunger and migration.
It is the same in many countries:
Gold comes out.
Oil comes out.
Natural gas comes out.
The diamond comes out.
But the people don't get their share.
This is the natural resource curse:
When a country's underground wealth, instead of improving the lives of its people, makes them more vulnerable.
There are resources, but no development.
There is income, not justice.
The first curse starts from here.
When resources cease to be the common property of the people and fall under the control of a narrow circle of power, corrupt state apparatuses or closed elites, wealth does not produce development.
On the contrary, it deepens injustice.
Production does not diversify.
The economy is locked to a single source.
Education is pushed to the background.
The future is postponed.
But the curse doesn't end there.
States that fail to manage their natural resources with their people, transparently and fairly, do not only rot from within;
it also becomes a target from the outside.
Wealth that is not shared cannot be protected.
The resources that are taken away from the people are opened to the outside world.
And this time the second curse comes into play.
Great powers come.
He calls it democracy.
He says stability.
Freedom, he says.
The real issue is the source.
They are not satisfied with some of this wealth that has never been distributed to the people.
They get more.
What remains is poverty.
Addiction remains.
Debris remains.
The natural resource curse is therefore a double curse.
It produces injustice inside.
It whets the appetite outside.
Wealth underground
is first cut off from the people,
then it is taken away from the country.
And the price
always
poor people pay.