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What is crucial to understand is that events in Venezuela are not taking place in a vacuum. This oil rich country, once a beacon of hope for the continent's poor, indigenous, and oppressed with the coming of Hugo Chavez to power in 1999, is experiencing the particular challenges involved in trying to create an island of socialism surrounded by a sea of US-dominated capitalism.
Its vulnerability to the volatility of oil prices merely confirms the presence of large reserves of oil can distort rather than enhance a nation's economic development, particularly in the Global South where economic diversification bumps up against the reality of the domination of global markets by Western financial institutions and corporations.
In the last analysis, it is capitalism not socialism that has failed the people of Venezuela. However socialism is being made to carry the can.
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