Venezuela has the world's largest proven oil reserves.
And yet the country has completely run out of gasoline.
After nearly two decades of epic mismanagement,
the socialist government no longer has the capacity to extract oil from the ground
or to refine it into usable form.
The shortages have paralyzed the economy.
Travel within the country has become prohibitively expensive.
Farmers can barely afford to bring their crops to the cities.
Meanwhile, price restrictions have given rise to a vibrant black market.
Andrés, a public bus operator in Caracas, is given special access to fill up his tank
because he provides an essential city service, but earning the equivalent of under $200 a month,
he's struggling to make ends meet.
Bus operators in his position often prefer to keep their bus parked
and extract gas from the tank to resell on the black market for about eight dollars per gallon.
To put that into perspective, the average Venezuelan individual
subsists on less than five dollars per day.
The little gas that is still available comes via periodic shipments from Iran,
but the Venezuelan government barely charges for that gasoline.
Instead it rations it through a quota system.
So filling up your tank can mean waiting in line for days.
David used to be a car mechanic, but now he charges clients for the time spent waiting in lines
at subsidized gas stations in order to fill up their tanks with cheaper fuel.
Before 2003, Venezuela state owned oil company, known as Pedevesa, worked closely with foreign multinationals
and was mostly insulated from government interference.
Hugo Chavez became the president of Venezuela in 1999.
And up until his death from cancer in 2013, he would enact the policy agenda that he dubbed
"Socialism for the 21st Century," turning one of the most prosperous countries in Latin America
into the site of a humanitarian crisis.
Chavez rewrote the constitution, clamped down on freedom of the press,
nationalized over a thousand private companies,
and destroyed the national currency through hyperinflation.
When Chavez attempted to seize control of Pedevesa in 2002, the employees staged the massive strike.
So Chavez fired 18,000 state oil workers, including 80% of its top engineers.
In yet another tragic irony of a country ruined by socialism, Chaves' handpicked successor,
Venezuelan dictator Nicholas Maduro, is now working to bring privately run foreign oil companies
back into the country to revive the industry.
Meanwhile, in a tragic reminder that the most valuable commodity isn't a natural resource,
but the human expertise to put it to productive use,
Venezuela the country with the most oil in the world,
is paralyzed because it has run out of gasoline.