large inventories of black-and-white sets, he refused to allow color TV sets until far into his administration, although one could buy them on the free-port island of Margarita and could see color TV in Caracas, where transmissions of color broadcasts had already started. Pérez also delayed the construction of the Caracas metropolitan underground, presumably because it had been initiated by Caldera. Crime in the streets was another by-product of the Venezuelan oil economy, although this could only partially be blamed on the new riches — obviously, with so much spending going on, thugs had easy marks anywhere — but mainly on the thousands of guns that had been put into circulation during the leftist insurgency that Pérez battled. But the government did nothing effective to address the problem, which still plagues Venezuela. Pérez simply ignored it. The vulgarity and rot that was eating into Venezuelan society is difficult to describe in terms that would seem comprehensible, although foreign academics went on talking about Venezuelan society as if it were normal and not in the grasp of a collective frenzy. Yet Pérez's credentials as a nationalist leader were not soiled. In fact, for many they were enhanced because in 1975 he nationalized the iron industry, and in 1976 he jumped further and nationalized the oil industry. Since by that time Venezuela was equipped to manage it, not much harm was done by that in itself, but with all the new collaterals that the government could offer, Pérez, after having gone through the "surplus" for investments, started taking out international loans and not small ones but sizable ones. Pérez "statized" the Venezuelan economy to such a degree that the load of paperwork to open a business was so heavy that a service branch was created called "permisologia" (approximately, the "science" of permits), to which businessmen had to recur as a matter of course if they wanted to get the necessary bureaucratic approval. Permisologia was not meant to deter foreigners, and it was more burdensome on Venezuelan small entrepreneurs than on any other economic sector. Leftists were in a dazzled quandary because, on one hand, they disliked Pérez, but, on the other, they couldn’t complain about the state's interference because that was part of their own social and economic agenda. Labor unions, which in Venezuela were corrupt and pervasive and AD-managed, stood solidly behind Pérez. One thing that can be credited to Pérez