“The companies should just destroy their equipment and shut them down.”
Don’t even have to destroy equipment. As any former maintenance guy knows, you just leave a lot of big equipment missing an on-off relay or fuse or something simple and say it is permanently broken. When Chavez dies of an unfortunate case of lead poisoning, you are back in bidness.
The problem with that idea is that Putin and Co (Lukoil) is helping Venezuela’s domestic oil production.