As players like Corne and Mobley came back in RuneScape with the appetites and pockets of adulthood, the game's black markets grew. Players reported that there was a presence of Chinese gold miners, but there were others who profited from the revival of RuneScape, including Venezuelans like Marinez.
On the 12th of March the year 2020, Marinez embarked on a journey to enroll in a police academy located in Caracas, the capital of Venezuela and pursue becoming a police officer. The following day when the Venezuelan government released its first two cases of COVID-19.
The government then shut down all schools, shut down the borders between Venezuela and other countries and put six states as well as Caracas on quarantine. Marinez was left stranded on the road and was confined to his uncle's house in a city fifty miles from Caracas' capital.
Within two years, Marinez came back to Maracaibo, "without any money in my pockets," he said. Marinez tried to find work but couldn't find any in the job market, which was devastated due to the pandemic. It also led to a prolonged economic recession.
Ten years earlier, Venezuela, a petrostate under the presidency of Hugo Chavez, witnessed a bust in oil prices. As of 2017, the cost of a barrel plummeted to close to $50 from a high of over $100 in addition, it was the year that U.S. instituted wide-ranging sanctions against the Venezuelan dictatorship.
"When oil prices started to drop in the early 2000s, there was not enough cash to purchase goods from abroad," said Alejandro Velasco, a professor at New York University who specializes in Venezuelan political issues, in an interview on the phone. "As as a result that there was not enough money in the real world to keep the economy going."
Venezuela's coffers were empty after the country spent its largest recent oil profits on social programs like subsidised food, medical services, and literacy programs. Chavez was also known to have removed perceived dissenters from the oil industry following an attempted coup attempt, altering production.
A widespread system of corruption in the government also harmed the economy, as per Paul Angelo, a fellow at the Council for Foreign Relations who specialises on Latin American politics.
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