Under the direction of Luis Giusti in the 1994?"98 period, PDVSA's production soared. This trend changed in 1999, when Hugo Chavez became Venezuela's president and introduced Chavismo as the country's guiding economic doctrine. Venezuela's oil output began to stagnate, a situation that worsened further after the coup attempt of April 2002. Chavez responded with mass purges of PDVSA's employees, replacing them with "reliable" hands ?" those loyal to Chavez's socialist regime.