Events That Lead to Venezuela's Government Collapse

Abstract

Over the past year, it is becoming increasingly more difficult to ignore headlines detailing the Venezuelan economic crisis. Citizens of this once-prosperous nation are now reduced to searching through the trash to find their next meal. Even medical professionals who studied at universities are making no more than $30.00 a day. The fact that a country can go from one of the most prosperous countries in South America to one of the most impoverished is incredibly intriguing to me, and I’m excited at the opportunity to learn more. For my senior project, I decided to take a look into the state of Venezuela. More specifically, my goal is to determine the exact reasons why Venezuela is in its current state, both historically and analytically. By comparing historical events from other countries and applying it to Venezuela, in addition to taking a data-heavy approach to its own past styles of governing and revolutions, the reasons for the decline soon became more evident than originally expected. The mistakes made by the Venezuelan government were common pitfalls among developing nations all through the 20th and early 21st century, and isolated cases of the same situation can be observed with many of the same causes to be listed. Naturally, this paper will also serve to illustrate ways in which the Venezuelan government, and thereby governments of developing countries around the world can both fix the issues outlined below, as well as preventing future declines by changing core aspects of how their governments are run.