ABSTRACT
This chapter begins with the concessionary era and nationalization in Venezuela so that people can better understand: why nationalization did not mean the final triumph of national sovereignty over foreign capital; how nationalization weakened rather than strengthened state capacity to regulate extraction and maximize appropriation of rents generated by oil exports; and why the old international regime of production and trade in minerals and hydrocarbons is unlikely to be reborn in the age of transnational capital. The chapter examines the forces that gave impetus to the apertura petrolera, but which ultimately produced a nationalist reaction in the Chvez era. After nationalization, executives of Petrleos de Venezuela S. A. (PDVSA) stepped into a vacuum of state power left by the collapse of the Punto Fijo regime to transnationalize the company and implement the apertura petrolera. Resource nationalism in Bolivarian Venezuela took the form of a reaction to the apertura, which was a neoliberal project linked to the global transnationalization of capital.
