I'm t T and I'm Zakiah, and this is Dope Labs. Welcome to Dope Labs, a weekly podcast that mixes hardcore science with pop culture and a healthy dose of friendship. Should we say Happy New Year? I don't know? Is it too late? I feel like, what's the rules? I saw something to say that after the eighth you're not supposed to. Oh, well, I've been messing up relate. Okay, Well I won't say Happy New Year. I'm just gonna say it's a new year. It's January. It's January, and
our calendar year has changed. It has That's right.
And listen, we've been away for a while, been getting some reruns that I think are important to hear in a new year. But we're back with a grab bag, and today's grab back has ranged.
Yes, honey, we going over it all, everything that you've been like. I wonder if teen's the key you're going to talk about this? Yes, it is here, Yes, today, Yes, today, Let's start with Venezuela first. Yes, Oh my goodness. So we know that the US government went into Venezuela, captured their current president and brought him back here.
It's given homeland it's given political thriller, but also it's giving history book, and so.
We've talked about this TT.
I think what this is revealed for me is just how weak my like geopolitical knowledge is.
Absolutely because I was like, why what's going on? I don't understand. That was like the first questions that popped into my head, like why are we doing this? Why are we doing this now? If he was a problem, hasn't he always been a problem? And we have like there was just so many questions and not enough answers.
And I think we had to do the digging. So now you don't have to. Let's just give folks a fast timeline, I think, so they have some context now. A lot of people start the clock in nineteen fourteen because that was when Venezuela had its first big oil weal, but there's history before that. In Venezuela. The indigenous peoples there used oil and asphalts, so from like natural places or what they call like seeps where you can get
access to it without drilling. They were using that for purposes like waterproofing fuel, and it was also thought that there were medicinal purposes, and so they were using it in medicinal ways, and that was adopted by colonizers that later came to Venezuela in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. So oil has been around and has been known about and used in Venezuela since the sixteenth and seventeenth century and before then.
So it's a part of their culture and a part of their national history and story. Yes, in nineteen twenty eight, Venezuela became the world's top oil exporter. Yeah, so now there are foreign he's involved. And around nineteen forty three, the Venezuelan government claimed fifty percent of the profits. I don't blame them, right, because there's a lot of money there. Okay. If you fast forward to nineteen fifty eight, there was more state share and no new concessions to outside oil companies.
So when I was reading about this, I was like, Hey, if I'm Venezuela, I'm not gonna let y'all milk all the profits off of my land, exactly. And so by nineteen seventy five to nineteen seventy six, Venezuela said, hey, y'all get on out of here. We we're gonna take over. And so like they had their own kind of company. It's the PDVSA, and it's like petrol to Venezuela. You know my Spanish, you know, none of my stuff is right there, but you speak Japanese.
She do, y'all?
She do so shady. I don't care if people know. I was a president of the Japanese club in high school. Now my Japanese has fallen off since then, but I still claim it. So nineteen seventy five, Venezuela takes and they're like, hey, we can do this on our own. But by the nineties they're reaching out to private partners for heavy oil.
So crude oil is the raw material, and it is a naturally occurring yellowish black liquid found underground in reservoir. So again that is unprocessed and raw material. What petroleum is. It is a broad category that encompasses crude oil. And so you have crude oil, the unprocessed form that is petroleum. You have natural gas, which is often found in crude oil. Then you have petroleum products, so that's refined crude oil that gives you gasoline, jet fuel, diesel, heating oil, asphault,
and plastics. And so we call all of these fossil fuels because they're from the ground and they're actually made from fossilized materials, so fossilized plants and animals, and that's where we get that oil from. So even within crude oils, there's heavy crude oil and then there's light crude oil. Heavy crude oil is more viscous, so it's thicker. The higher the viscosity, the thicker the liquid. Light crude oil
is thinner, so it has a lower viscosity. And refineries run on a mix of crude oils to run efficiently and have maximum output. And the statistics says that nearly seventy percent of US refining capacity runs most efficiently on heavier crude oil. And that's why ninety percent of crude oil imports into the United States are heavier than US produced SHLLE crude, and we get most of that from Venezuela and Canada. Yes, exactly, and that's the reason why it is such a big deal. Heavy oil requires a
lot for you to get it out. If somebody just takes over an oil well, there's still a lot of technology that has to be invested in keeping those kind of that drilling up. There's a lot of safety measurements you need a lot of maintenance. You need skilled laborers, you need all that. So Venezuela said, hey, we took over all this. Actually we want to move into these other areas of the nation. We need help from outside
investors to do that. And so they opened it back up to private partners, right, and then we enter into the Hugo Chavez era in nineteen ninety eight, and he uses the PDVSA, you know what Takia was talking about. That took over and he uses that money to fund social programs. And what that does is that it creates a lot of tension and tension spike. And in two
thousand and two there was a massive strike. All production stalled and Hugo Chavez, the president of the time, fired eighteen thousand workers and packed the PDVSA with his loyalists. He said, you have an objection, get out of here. Right, I'm gonna just bring in all my friends. They're gonna do what I say. Hmm.
But then by two thousand and seven, the government forces those foreign firms that were there to their stakes. They're like, all right, we got a little help from y'all. Now y'all get out of here. So Conicco Phillips and Exon Mobile. They get out of there, but they know them.
Yeah, we know them. But they also sue because they're like, hey, we had a contract or, we said we were gonna be here investing in this much. We spent a lot of money here and that became a problem. And later they were awarded billions, but I think some of the issues that they weren't able to recoup a lot of those funds. Who is they in that situation? The foreign companies that we know Exxon and Conicco, Phillips. So now
we're in twenty fourteen to twenty seventeen. Moduro, the Maduro that we have now captured and brought back to the United States, became president in twenty thirteen. Twenty thirteen. That's a long time to be president if you're thinking, you know, up to twenty twenty five, and then there's a big crash and global prices tank for oil, and the PDVSA was already cash strapped, and so in twenty seventeen, the US sanctions officials and the PDVSA over repression and Maduro's power graph.
Now, I think this is interesting that the US was sanctioning them because that repression that they're talking about is contested elections, power consolidation, intimidating the media.
Doesn't that sound familiar?
Oh my goodness, Oh my goodness, pattern recognition, So you know, that was interesting. But when we keep going past twenty seventeen and into the early twenty twenties, we see the Venezuelan economy kind of nose diving. They're experiencing hyperinflation, food insecurity, and a health system collapse, and a lot of that is tied to them having historic lows in oil output because a lot of the funds were coming from there, and they're also having power failures and that affects drilling
and oil rigs in its own way. So that's what we see moving into the twenty twenties.
Then we are almost present day. So twenty twenty five, there is a pivot. The Trump administration ramps up military presence in the Caribbean, and this sends a signal that they have an intent to push Moduro out of his presidential seat.
Yeah, and January seventh, after Maduro is captured, US officials basically say, hey, this is our plan to effectively run Venezuela's oil sales. They say outright, like this is about oil, and Trump says that US companies are going to invest billions in Venezuela. They're going to rebuild the infrastructure and make money. Now I think that's interesting because that's easy to say.
And very hard to do. To remove a president, regardless of your feelings about his presidency, to remove a president from a country, we'll send that country into a tailspin. Like there's so much political imbalance. Now, this is all very interesting because it is all about power and these
large displays of power. So like to go in and capture somebody, to capture a president of a country, like when you do that show of power and force and violence, even though they show like okay images of him, like here's proof of life. All you know, there were some people on the internet given and conspiracy theories and they were like, hey, who has three outfit changes? I think there were a lot of plot twists even since then.
So did you see the press conference where I don't know if you used to get caught passing notes in class, but basically somebody passed a note of Trump and he raised his hand and read it out loud. Basically that was the effectively what happened.
And in that same press conference, though, an representative from Exion said that Venezuela is uninvestable. And I think this is really interesting because there's a lot of science behind all of this. Since we've been producing dope labs the thing I have seen even though I knew it, like
when we said it, like there's science everywhere. There's a lot of science to this, And so when they talk about things being when they talk about Venezuela being uninvestable, from Exxon's perspective, they're probably like.
We got burned before.
We spent billions there, and how are you going to make sure you enforce this stuff in the countries that are like the top producers for all you'll find the United States involved in the politics there, you know what I'm saying.
Yeah, And it's a little interesting to me because this current administration ran on quote unquote America first and not being involved in international disputes or being involved internationally really at all, Like we have retreated from a lot of international engagements. But then we are going into another country, yeah, and removing their president. Yes, it's very very contradictory to what he said that he was running on.
I think it's also really interesting. One of the things you brought up is like, how upsetting. And when I say upsetting, I mean yes, emotionally upsetting, but the ripple effects of removing very disrupting, the disruption of this type of removal, removing a president. And it I was like, we can think back to what it looked like. We didn't even see the removal of a president. We didn't see a coup, but we saw the attempt of a coup January sixth, twenty twenty one.
You know, we've seen these big power grabs and how it makes people feel and how it destabilizes, like even the kind of social fabric of a nation. And I think we don't even just to think about things that are upsetting or violations of what we consider to be decorum or social contracts or how we govern. We don't even have to go all the way back to January sixth,
twenty twenty one. We can just go back to January sixth this year, and if we pivot when we stayed stateside, like we saw Minnesota just become the center of one of the biggest immigration enforcements, having ICE there and we're talking like thousands of agents descending on their city. And that led to a fatal shooting of Renee Good exactly.
Imagine you have all of these ICE agents coming to your city, some of them in unmarked vehicles, they're wearing their gear, their sirens, and there's so much more enforcement than you are used to. And so during one of these ICE operations, a thirty seven year old US citizen, Renee Good, was shot and killed by an ICE officer. And there's a bunch of videos that capture the moments before and after, who was doing, what, what was said, and now the evidence is under federal control and the
state investigators say that complicates their work a lot. Yeah, I'll watch a lot of political thrillers and crime like. I know that's fiction, but a lot of times it mimics the truth.
And it's just like, who has jurisdiction over this? And if it's in federal hands and we're saying, hey, this was a federal operation that maybe went wrong, there feels like a comp ventrist, you know what I mean.
And you already have the federal government saying the ICE agent did nothing wrong and that this is just what happens when you are defiant, and it's like, but you're supposed to do an investigation How are you already coming to a conclusion without an investigation that doesn't make sense, that is unprecedented, that doesn't follow the methods that we
say we uphold for sure. And so now you're having some suits from the state, from the city of Minneapolis and Saint Paul, and they're saying this is like a federal invasion basically causing this disruption. And so then they.
Had protests, spreading agents were deployed, tear gas, and so now this makes us consider like, where are the constitutional lines, what is a tactic that is okay? How do we even address accountability when we have officers that are masked. All I can think about is like, how does this feel on the ground?
Right?
I hear a lot of people saying, like, I'm watching the news in this upsetting, which I totally get. But can you imagine if this is outside your door? I could not imagine.
And it feels like so much bad happens in Minneapolis. The amount of anxiety that you would have moving around that city, I would imagine is just so exponentially high. Yeah.
I was watching some of the interviews right after Renee Good was shot and killed, and there was a person saying this feels like George Floyd in twenty twenty, you know, all over again. But I'm like just thinking biologically, like the cortisol that must be coursing through your veins, the fight or flight always going off because you don't know who's who or what's beyond this next traffic, Like, like, what are going to be the lingering effects of that?
You know, thinking about the loss of your loved ones, people in your community, your neighbors, people being taken just taken off the streets, out of their homes, like that feels really scary.
Again, We've talked about ripple effects. The ripple effects from this will be felt for a very very long time. It is so seeds of distrust of our government. It's so seeds of distrust of law enforcement and will feel it across this country in our interactions with law enforcement and our interactions with the government. And I really I feel like we would be remiss if we did not talk about Keith Porter, a black man who was killed by an off duty ice officer on New Year's Eve.
He hasn't made a lot of headlines, but I really just want to say his name and make sure that Keith Porter we talk about getting justice for him. He was outside on New Year's Eve and his community one of the traditions is to shoot rounds into the sky and celebration. An off duty ice officer sees him with
a gun and kills him right there. It just doesn't seem right because all of the people of that community was saying, this is a normal thing that we do every single year for decades, and so it was just really really heart wrenching. This happened in la and I think this just also speaks to understanding community and context.
Exactly what we're seeing is people are being deployed to communities that they are not a part of, where you lack context, where you lack an understanding of what is typical, and so you're responding to something and the atypical thing is you. You are the variable, you know.
And then we have a person having their life taken because of an action that you weren't even on duty, wasn't even necessary, you know. And so I'm glad you did bring that up. And I think it also just this feels like the same thing we just talked about when we see people in the media being targeted, when we see organizations not sharing their perspective for fear of retribution or for fear of retaliation, but who's getting ready
to sanction us for repression? Because this feels like the same things that made the US sanction Venezuela years ago. I think, yes, there's some science behind all of this, but also there's a lot of humanity there that and so we're keeping our eyes on it. We hope you're keeping your eyes on it too, and we're trying to be hopeful.
And yes, yes, and part of being hopeful is being informed. Yes, I know I fall victim to this too sometimes where it's just I just can't watch the news, I can't take this anymore. But we have to remain informed, know what's going on, understand what that means for our personal rights and what that means for us as global citizens and how we move through this world. We have to fight back. We have to keep talking about it, because that's what they hope is that we will get so
frustrated that we will stop talking. And we can't let that happen. Yeah, for sure. You can find us on x and Instagram at Dope Labs podcast. You can find me ct on X threads and Instagram at dr Underscore t Sho and you can find Zakiya at Ze said so. Dope Labs is a production of Lemonada Media. Our supervising producer is Keegan Zemma. Dope Labs is sound designed, edited, and mixed by James Sparber. Lemonada's Senior Vice President of Content and Production is Jackie Danziger.
Executive producer from iHeart Podcast is Katrina Norvil.
Marketing lead is Alison Kanter. Original music composed and produced by Taka Yasuzawa and Alex suki Ura, with additional music by Elijah Harvey. Dope Labs is executive produced by us T T Show Dia and Zakiah Wattley.