ABSTRACT
In 1998, Hugo Chávez Frías, a former lieutenant-colonel cashiered for an attempted coup in 1992, was elected president of Venezuela. Chávez earned a reputation as champion of resource nationalism and critic of neoliberalism in Latin America and the Third World beginning with his hosting the Second Summit of Heads of State and Government of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) in Caracas in 2001. In that same year he decreed a new law that took aim at the apertura petrolera (oil opening), a set of policies by which executives of Petróleos de Venezuela S.A. (PDVSA), the state oil company, brought foreign investment back into Venezuela’s oil fields for the first time since nationalization in 1975. In 2006 and 2007 foreign companies in joint ventures and operating agreements were required to ‘migrate’ to comply with new laws requiring majority ownership by PDVSA, in a so-called ‘re-nationalization’ of the oil industry.
