It's amusing to see the steady, predictable progress of Chavez along long-discredited lines of socialist economic practice. Venezuela had a fairly diverse economy before Chavez came along. His plan, like every socialist before him, is to steal what can be stolen and milk what can be milked. Oil can be milked for a very long time, but that limits Venezuela's economic development to that of an extraction economy.
There are advantages to this from a socialist point of view - an extraction economy is easy to control and to direct its surpluses toward Party goals. The disadvantage is that if oil fails the country has no recourse and instantly becomes an economic basket case. What happens next after that is what has happened with the failure of agriculture in Zimbabwe - dwindling surpluses will be expropriated by the state and doled out to fewer and fewer people. The rest will do without.
Yup. Life, Liberty, and Property.