I have read this post with great interest, because I think it is very valuable that people, perhaps very distant geographically from Venezuela, show their solidarity and opinion with such lucidity about the crisis we live in my country and its causes and complications. Thank you @dedicatedguy and also @adsactly.
Indeed, I agree with the criterion that places the origin of this crisis in previous periods of our history. Populism has been an unhealthy inheritance, even from the time of independence; of course, through the various dictatorships and dictatorships, up to the installation of democracy.
The so-called oil rentismo (which also affects other countries) became the "blessing" of the economy and, at the same time, the curse of Venezuelan society. Prominent Venezuelan intellectuals such as Salvador de la Plaza, Uslar Pietri and Pérez Alfonzo warned of this.
The prosperity lived in times of prosperity accentuated populism and rentismo, and when it entered a crisis (which included bipartisanship, a state with institutions that were not very solid democratically), it generated a population that longed for a strong solution. The ideologization effectively managed by the sectors of a backward and resentful left, represented by Chávez and others, had its stellar moment here. The rest has been a repetition of some previous features, plus the performance of the components of that historically failed ideology (statism, concentration of power, authoritarianism, totalitarianism, bureaucratism, economic inefficiency, denial of freedoms, etc.).
Although we have reached a very worrying level -characterized by anomie, social demoralization, the climate of basic survival, mass emigration-, I do not abandon the possibility that the change takes place with the conscious exercise of the social majority against this regime by democratic and peaceful means, with a renewal of the alternative democratic forces and an efficient and determined international pressure.
Thank you for your patience in reading this long comment.