[taw55]

You’re mixing up debts in foreign currencies and ones in national currency. The former is the issue. As long as the national currency is accepted and traded by the population (which they can effectively enforce upon them through taxation) then the state can simply sign a contract, flip some bits in the national accounting table and proceed that way. The problem here is that Venezuela has a very disfunctional market economy (it is bad enough under the champagne socialists, and the US being involved in geo-economic/imperialist opportunism there isnt helping them) and a large black market which is mostly denominated in US currency and to which the population is increasingly dependent upon. If the economy worsens, that could further undermine the national currency and weaken the central government. The US of course wants that to happen so they can install a puppet government and secure natural resources in the south american hemisphere. It’s really a mixture of corrupt centralized government making all the wrong policy decisions and nefarious outside influences.