That's not the point.
The point that's being made there is that Venezuela has always had this problem ever since the discovery of oil. What was originally rural poverty became urban poverty once cities like Caracas began to grow and Gómez (later Pérez Jiménez) moved the oil industry towards directions favorable to him. It's not a matter of ascribing simple explanations to things until you dig deeper into what's really going on. The structural problems leading to that could have been addressed at the earliest possible opportunity in the early 20th century
if Gómez's regime is avoided at all costs, while taking advantage of the prevailing moods of the era. Tackle the problems with the agricultural sector and build up Venezuela's industrial capacity first,
then handle the oil issue separately and responsibly. That would significantly reduce a good portion of the problems associated with poverty in Venezuela, and in tandem with modernizing the state à la Uruguay and Costa Rica.
It's a more complex/complication response to the AHC, but it can work. In this case, the prevailing ideology would be positivism - and
not just any sort of positivism, either with political applications. We view it today through regimes like Porfirio Díaz in Mexico (and especially through the work of the
científicos) or Brazil's Old Republic or Cuba under the de facto US protectorate (and, yes, Juan Vicente Gómez), but there were other applications of it that point towards a different direction, and that's where I could see Venezuela if Gómez is removed. Administrations like Benito Juárez's in Mexico or José Batlle y Ordóñez in Uruguay provide reasonably good reference frameworks for what to do. Even Costa Rica (ignoring
Tinoco for a moment, whose's very much an exception) could work as a possible example even then, despite the huge differences between it and Venezuela. Taking the other route Comtean positivism allows could work in this case.