For decades Venezuela was the envy of Latin America. Now the second "Bolivarian Revolution" has left the economy in tatters. Over 9 million Venezuelans have fled a country where infrastructure, basic services and opportunities lie in ruins. The country continues to suffer under the Maduro regime claimed victory in the most recent election, one that has been deemed fraudulent by most observers.

Violent protests rocked the streets of Caracas and border areas near Colombia throughout 2019, one of the country's most tumultuous years. In the capital families laid loved ones, killed by police and military forces, to rest following the clashes. Illegal mining ravages the southern jungles where people desperate to make money in a collapsed economy hope to find gold.

To the west, in Maracaibo, once a symbol of the OPEC member's prosperity based on petroleum, neighborhoods lie abandoned. The residents, millions of them, have left to other nations in the Americas or Europe. Malnutrition and infant mortality lurk on every street of a city that once boasted non-stop flights to European capitals and the Middle Eastern oil centers. Now, the city can barely keep the lights on. The infrastructure that made the city a petroleum powerhouse is disintegrating, leaving Lake Maracaibo, South America's largest, a polluted mess.

The fishing communities living on the shoreline have to exist in a perpetual soup of water and oil, bubbling up from broken pipes and wells. A fishermen exiting the lake on an inner tube, when asked about what he had caught that day, replied "solo petroleo." Only petroleum.