This must be about the oil, right? It’s a presumption that got lots of airtime this weekend, following the dramatic seizure of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and his wife by US forces. The pair now face drug trafficking and narco-terrorism charges in New York, while observers in both countries are scrambling to interpret the sudden action by President Donald Trump, which followed months of escalating tension between Venezuela and the US.

Trump himself seemed to suggest that oil played a major role in his decision to strike now, telling reporters on Saturday that American oil companies will soon “go in, spend billions of dollars [and] fix the badly broken infrastructure” that has hamstrung Venezuela’s oil production for well over a decade. As a justification for invading, though, that actually doesn’t make much sense: America has plenty of oil already, and the type of oil on offer in Venezuela is expensive and difficult to extract, says my colleague Eric Levitz. In other words, oil isn’t the easy explanation that many commentators seem to think it is.

But the US and Venezuela do have a long, tangled, and fascinating history around oil — a history that has undeniably shaped the economy, politics, and culture of Venezuela over the past 100 years. So even if Maduro’s capture isn’t “about the oil,” per se, the boom-and-bust story of US oil interests in Venezuela does very much inform how we got here.

Venezuelan oil was dominant early

Today, Venezuela accounts for only

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