After a wave of oil and gas sector privatizations in the 1980s, Argentina, Bolivia, Ecuador and Venezuela reversed course in the early 2000s. We analyze the political and legal developments which led to increased government control of their natural resource extraction industries and discuss at which point in time legislation violated property rights of foreign investors. We use synthetic control methods (SCM) to quantify the effect expropriations have had on the net inflow of FDI in subsequent years. Strongly negative and statistically significant effects are found for Bolivia and Venezuela, with similar, but less conclusive evidence for Ecuador. We argue that SCM approaches which focus on structural characteristics and put little or no weight on pre-treatment outcomes are better equipped to detect the true “treatment” date than canonical SCMs. This is particularly apparent for Argentina where our analysis suggest that the 2012 nationalization of Repsol S. A. has had little effect on FDI, but that FDI was still suppressed from the reputational damage inflicted by Argentina’s 2001 sovereign default.