Venezuela's Petro-Diplomacy : Hugo Chavez's Foreign Policy

Since coming to power in 1999, President Hugo Chavez has used the windfall of high oil prices to remake Venezuela internally along the model of twenty-first-century socialism and, even more audaciously, to rewrite global relations by directly challenging U.S. hegemony. The dramatic ascendency of the country in hemispheric and global international relations over the past decade is the subject of Venezuela's Petro-Diplomacy.