ABSTRACT
This chapter presents the role that multi-national oil companies played in the promotion of social and citizen participation that developed in the oil camps of Venezuela. During most of the 20th century, Venezuela has been identified with its principal export, oil. The oil industry transformed the rural Venezuelan countryside, displaced older population centers, and created new communities. The possibility of work in the oil industry also expanded opportunities for an emerging and ambitious middle class. One critic of the oil companies, Rodolfo Quintero, believed that the foreign oil companies sought to “create a new oil culture” in which workers and their family would be completely absorbed by company-sponsored activities. The oil camps that arose in Venezuela after 1930 represent adaptations of the Fordist model in which the foreign company organized production and also attempted to influence the social and cultural lives of its workers.
