Everything was going well under Chavez. Unfortunately, Maduro turned out to be incompetent. They had the option of using the oil revenue to diversify their economy. Instead, the government wasted all that money in handouts and subsidies. Had they invested a part of that in education and industrialization, things would have been vastly different now.
To pin this on a single man or organization minimizes the true problem here, that being their culture, the people themselves; they bred and raised and handed power to the men in charge of all this. This is what the Venezuelans wanted: freedom from work and responsibility, the easy way out. They reap what they sow. Greece is no different, they follow the exact same footsteps; instead of honing up to their bad behavior and taking responsibility for their poor actions (e.g. borrowing with no intent of paying back), they continue to take the easy way out, and it's steadily eroding their nation. To say, "Well, if only they had elected someone else," or, "If only the elected people had done things differently," is a red herring; the people will give power to only exactly their own reflection, always; a government will never shape its people positively, it is not a father of the people, it will only shape the public in whatever way keeps it in power; a parent will stop you from eating so many sweets because they don't want you to get diabetes, but a government will let you to eat as many sweets as you want so long as you keep voting for them, heck they'll even spend taxpayer money so you can have all the sweets you want, just keep them in power. This is true in every nation in the world, it's just, some cultures succumb to these sweets easier than others.
The current Venezuelan manifestation is going the way of the dodo, and good riddance; they should adopt a better way of life, but if they're anything like the Greeks I've seen online, they'll be too hard-headed to do anything about it. It works out either way: either they change or they die; we are witnessing evolution at work even in systems of human interaction.
