Chavez achieved that welfare increase by taking the huge amounts of oil profits from the early 2000s price boom and pumping them into welfare programs and corruption. Venezuelans used to take their subsidized gas across the border into Columbia to arbitrage the government. When the prices came down there wasn't a diversified economy like in other oil producers like Norway, Saudi Arabia, Russia. The welfare state imploded because the government put all their cards in oil and had been looting the rest of the country in the name of socialism, not sanctions or privitization. It was all Chavez and Maduro and their slavish adherance to a failed policy program.