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The recently deceased traditional party system of Venezuela functioned as an institutionalized mechanism to distribute rents generated by oil exports. So commonplace is this assertion that rentismo has entered contemporary political discourse as a point of consensus regarding the shortcomings of the Punto Fijo system. Advocates of the oil apertura, generally sharp critics of President Hugo Chávez, accused the president of pursuing a nostalgic, populist oil policy quite in contrast to his repudiation of the era of partidocracia. The president was alleged to have politicized Petróleos de Venezula S. A. (PDVSA), thereby undermining its international bond and risk analysis ratings and thwarting the company’s modernization plans. The plans of the company were perceived as a-political in nature. The president and his allies were accused allowing partisanship to jeopardize the future of the company, whose interests are identified uncritically as identical to those of the nation. The short window of opportunity created by the oil bonanza of 1974 and 1983, which of course included the nationalization of oil in 1976, ushered in a brief era of consensus about the “success ” of oil policy and an assumption that PDVSA was an extraordinarily well managed company. Regarding oil, complacency and optimism replaced a half-century of vigorous debat