A Case Study In Economic Descent

Venezuela has enormous deposits of oil and natural gas. They want and need to extract those resources. Venezuela used to enjoy the willing cooperation of the global energy services industry that would happily supply the latest technology in the effort to tap the country's resources. Then Hugo Chavez started stealing (expropriating is the more polite term) the industry's property. So leading companies stopped working in Venezuela or at least they stopped bringing their most prized, modern technological assets to Venezuela. Thus you have the situation where valuable offshore deposits are being worked by aged and obsolete equipment, which tends to not work out so well. The Aban Pearl rig that sank was built in 1977 and had a bad history.