The greatest source of income for Venezuela has been, for the last century, oil extraction. During the late 1990’s, Venezuela began selling oil shares to foreign private oil companies. The country started to allow international companies to extract crude oil instead of just limiting the oil extraction to the national oil company, Petróleros de Venezuela (PDVSA). However, in 2007, Chavez abruptly ended many contracts with private oil enterprises, including American companies Exxon Mobil and ConocoPhillips. These two companies dig in the oil-rich Orinoco belt for the super-heavy crude. Instead, all of their oil contracts were given to the Pétroleros de Venezuela (PDVSA). (Romero (c)) In 2008, though, these U.S. oil enterprises sought compensation for the removal of their oil extraction permits in the Orinoco belt. This compensation to both Exxon Mobil and ConocoPhillips cost Venezuela tens of billions of dollars. Although PDVSA has more than $100 billion dollars of holdings around the world, the decline of the oil prices and the compensations they must pay will reduce their assets considerably. In April 2009, PDVSA reduced its company’s executive salaries by 20% and suspended the salaries of 75,000 workers due to the decrease in world oil prices. (Romero (c))

Until recently, the oil extraction has been around Lake Maracaibo (Please see map). (“Oxford American Dictionary and Thesaurus”) Yet, there is still a large amount of oil in the Orinoco Belt, in southern Venezuela (Please see map), where oil is starting to be extracted more and more. (Wilpert, P. 92) The Orinoco Belt is presently estimated to have a total of 250 billion barrels of oil. (Exxon’s wrathful tiger takes on Hugo Chavez; Oil in Venezuela) These oil resources have given Chávez sufficient assets to support his Bolivarian and socialist ideas, but even with this income, the unprivileged are not benefitting from the wealth.

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