Guns, Drugs, and Oil: How Close is Venezuela to Boiling Over?

ANALYSIS by Austin Lee

Editor’s note: This analysis originally was published on November 9. As Austin asked then: “Could we actually invade? Of course we could.” As it turns out, we did.

Stand on any hill in Caracas at night and you can see the glow of the flares from Lake Maracaibo’s oil fields. Where there are 300 billion barrels of the heaviest, sweetest crude on the planet. That glow is why Washington has never been able to look away, no matter how ugly the politics get in the region.