Venezuela’s extractive constitutionalism: between a nationalised and privatised petro-state

This article provides a critique of Venezuela’s extractivism with an emphasis on its constitutional and regulatory foundations in historical perspective. Venezuela’s extractive legislative framework guided the country’s wealth redistribution based on oil rents, as a mechanism to enhance regime legitimacy and safeguard the interests of the ruling elites. We highlight the regulation of the oil industry throughout the two-party democratic period (1958–1998) and the Chavista ‘Bolivarian Revolution’ era (1999–present), under the ‘extractive legal framework’ deployed under the 1961 and 1999 constitutions, respectively. While Venezuela relies on an economic model rooted in an extractive logic, new dynamics emerged in the past decade that changed its traditional operation. These changes reversed a longstanding trend of reliance on formal regulation of extractive industries, coupled with dwindling state capacity, to extract rents. In a context of ongoing crisis, Nicolás Maduro’s government relied on unconstitutional and illegal measures, such as relinquishing control of oil operation to private actors – together with corrupt operations, and the development of informal arrangements to bolster the country’s flagging industry and extract rents. The government expanded extraction to informal and illegal gold mining, and established partnerships with actors in the oil sector, countering the constitutional principle of state-majority ownership.