Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez calls himself a revolutionary, but his principal achievement has solely been to tear things down. In a technical sense, I suppose that means he’s making a difference but its not quite the difference most people would like to see. Chavez has wrecked the political infrastructure of the country, the civil institutions, the courts, the bureaucracy, and the security and turned them into zombie institutions that exist solely for his own aggrandisement, his own perpetration in power. Everything in Venezuela is politicized now.

But there’s no need to stop at political things. He’s also wrecked the roads, the bridges, the schools – most every physical embodiment of the country, making Caracas look like a crumbling, Havana-style ruin. Caracas does not look like the same city it was when Chavez first took power in 1998.

All of this conceptual and physical destruction is Chavez’s idea of “change.” But there’s not one thing he’s destroyed worse than the nation’s oil industry, which he managed to seize for his own purposes. Instead of allowing the oil industry to be a national trust fund to keep the country out of debt and to build infrastructure to develop the private sector, or even using it as a jobs-and-industry creation device, Chavez is using its earnings as a crony feeding trough and a welfare-handout mechanism.

All of that is taking away from the crucial needed investment to keep the production levels of Venezuelan oil at their current level. The oil industry requires constant levels of new investment, because once you get all the oil out of one well, you’ve got to drill another – that’s what we mean by investment. Well, Venezuela was supposed to spend $8 billion in investment to keep its production levels at current pace and he’s not doing it. He’s using that $8 billion to buy votes in El Salvador and dish out soup-kitchen ladlings, while those critical oil fields go wanting. Chavez is literally eating his seed corn for production.

The U.S. Southern Command has noticed this trend and come out with a good report that Andres Oppenheimer cites in his excellent Miami Herald column here.

Gustavo Coronel, at Venezuela Today came out with a brilliant, deep-knowledge report on the ongoing matter – and no one has more carefully watched this over the long term than him – in this terrific essay here.