The economic collapse had nothing to do with the CIA. It was a watershed moment. Oil is 95% of Venezuelan exports and makes up 25% of the Venezuelan GDP. What that means is that 95% of the "hard cash" i.e dollars, yen, and Euros, the things people will actually accept in trade, is oil money. Venezuela was a socialist paradise for a long time because oil prices were massively inflated, and they used literally all of that hard cash to import things to make the lives of their average citizen better. Also, gasoline was HEAVILY subsidized. The average cost of gas in Venezuela was the equivalent of $0.03-$0.05/US gal. Because of the sky high oil prices, US companies decided to research cheaper and more efficient extraction processes, which made oil cheaper to pull out of the ground, and allowed US companies to revisit previously sealed wells to extract billions of barrels of previously unobtainable oil. The US was (and still is) on track to become energy independent within a decade, which spooked OPEC countries in the Middle East. In response, OPEC, specifically Kuwait, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia, decided to out compete the emerging US energy companies with this fancy new technology, by pushing their 100 year old rigs to the absolute limit. Now, American technology is extremely impressive, but unfortunately, the capital required to build these new rigs with this new tech is absurd, and in order for startups to be profitable in the US, oil has to be above roughly $55/bbl, whereas the Saudis are turning a profit at anything above $14/bbl. Now, because of the immense amount of fiscal reliance Venezuela was putting on their oil industry, they NEEDED oil to be above about $70/bbl, otherwise they wouldn't be able to subsidize gasoline, import consumer goods, or pay the salaries of their bloated public sector. So, when the Saudis started selling oil at $20/bbl, oil dropped like a rock, from $111/bbl in June 2014 to $51/bbl in January of 2015. It continued to collapse until it totally bottomed out at $35/bbl in January of 2016. In response the US and Canadian governments heavily subsidized new fracking and shale oil ventures, which prevented many North American companies from closing shop. Basically, we had an oil price war with the Middle East members of OPEC for almost 3 years, in which the US and Canadian governments spent absurd amounts of money to support startup operations. The reason this matters is because the entire time this was going on, Venezuela was essentially selling oil at a loss, but refused to cut back on their socialist programs based on faith that one side would win out and the oil market would rebound, after all, they had stockpiled billions of dollars and euros. Fast forward 2 years and there are absolutely no more dollars or euros in Venezuela, and not a single motherfucker on Earth wants their Bolivars. They cannot find a single creditor on the planet to lend them enough money to support their programs, so they all get axed. No more consumer goods, no more wheat, no more beef, no more corn, no more gas. Now, as proof God exists and has a sense of humor, one of the massive public works projects Chavez was responsible for, was one of the largest hydro plants in the world. Hydro power accounts for ~64% of electricity in Venezuela, Venezuela produces ~2% of the global total of hydro power. Well, right in the middle of the fucking crisis, Venezuela is hit with one of the worst droughts in their history, and it lasts for years. In order to preserve drinking and irrigation water in their reservoirs, Maduro orders the dams shut down. For years Venezuela is rocked by rolling brownouts across the entire country. Some major population centers get power maybe 6 hours a day, if they're lucky. Major oil refineries don't have the power to process crude, so gas goes from being expensive to impossible to find, which paralyzes both national transportation and logistics, as well as one of the only ways for the government to get any cash flow.
Fast forward to today, and you have a country on the brink of literal anarchy.
