The decline of Petróleos de Venezuela SA (PDVSA), the country's state crude oil company, has run parallel to that of the country in recent years. The story of Tareck El Aissami, oil minister and trusted man of Nicolás Maduro who has just been arrested by the prosecution for the diversion of billions of dollars, is not an exception, rather it is a rule. Four directors of the company during Chavismo have been accused of corruption. Two of them have been sentenced, one is in exile and another died in prison. The main source of Venezuelan financing led to a plot of greed and dishonesty.
Rafael Ramírez, president of PDVSA from 2004 to 2013, Hugo Chávez's energy czar in his political prime and one of the traditional references in the revolutionary power structures, is now in exile, facing accusations of corruption made by his former colleagues. . Ramírez and his entourage have been accused of embezzling, along with those close to him, several million dollars in gigantic irregular operations, capital diversions, secret accounts, bribes and money laundering—he denies this. Previously, in 2016, opposition deputies had made very similar statements to him.
Ramírez was replaced in 2014 by Eulogio del Pino. On September 4, 2017, state security agencies knocked on the door of his house at dawn and took him to prison, accused of fraudulent embezzlement (embezzlement of public funds), hoarding and overpricing in million-dollar transactions. to the detriment of the national interest. The anti-Chavistas always suspected Ramírez and denounced his corruption, until the ruling party acted against him.
Del Pino was replaced by Nelson Martínez, arrested for corruption the following year, the time when the country's streets were crackling with anger at hyperinflation and shortages of medicine and food. Martínez died in prison that same year, due to chronic heart conditions aggravated by his personal situation. His relatives reported that he had been detained for a year without trial.
The administrations of Manuel Quevedo and Asdrúbal Chávez passed, apparently without scandals in sight, but they managed an internationally sanctioned company, in need of maintenance, with its qualified personnel emigrating and decapitalized at an enormous speed thanks to the exchange anchorage that the Government of Nicolás Maduro he refused to repeal. National oil production reached a free fall of 400,000 barrels per day, when ten years ago it produced 2.5 million. The last link in this story is written by El Aissami himself, the most important head of a new anti-corruption purge, in one case, PDVSA-Crypto, which included a drain of money estimated at 21 billion dollars. And after a few months of relief from oil sanctions, Washington will once again impose restrictions on international sales this Thursday if Maduro does not agree to hold elections with guarantees on July 28.
The historic watershed between the
new
PDVSA, from the times of Chavismo, and the old Petróleos de Venezuela, founded in democracy, took place 22 years ago, on April 11, 2002. Then, Hugo Chávez faced a conspiracy to depose him from of a massive citizen movement that took to the streets to ask for his resignation after a stormy period of stridency and unilateral state decisions.
That was the first time that PDVSA entered the hurricane of a passionate public debate: Hugo Chávez—aware that he had the company's management against him—carried out a campaign to colonize the organization's leadership with his political objectives. In a moment of anger, very shortly before the coup that attempted to depose him, he fired all the executives at the national radio and television network, with a helmet on and a whistle in his mouth.
The Chavista militancy argued at that time that, if PDVSA “was fine,” well, “the country was not.” The Government wanted to use the company's enormous income to direct it towards social investment, which the managers of the state company were stubbornly opposed to. Chávez developed a strategy to corner PDVSA's senior management (scornfully stigmatized as "meritocracy"), accusing them of deliberately increasing production costs, charging excessive salaries, acting for the interests of transnational companies and constituting an elite. privileged in a society full of needs.
Founded by the social democrat Carlos Andrés Pérez in 1976, after having nationalized oil, PDVSA—one of the great organizational achievements of democratic Venezuela—was for decades a surplus state company, oblivious to the passions of political debate, clean in its processes. and with rather isolated cases of corruption. His professional muscle and managerial commands were national pride. Its first president, Rafael Alfonzo Ravard, is remembered as one of the models of public management in the country.
The prestige of PDVSA managers was so high that in 2002 many people believed that Hugo Chávez in power would not resist a confrontation with the company that pulled the strings of the national economy, and that became, on its own, one of the major exporters of crude oil, gas and derived fuels around the world.
During the famous Oil Strike, orchestrated by the anti-Chavista society as an additional effort to remove him from power (December 2002, March 2003), Chávez ended up winning the fight against the company's Senior Management (headed then by engineer Juan Fernández) , definitively conquering its structures, as well as those of the Armed Forces starting in 2004. By defeating the oil strike against him, Chávez fired several thousand workers who had previously been unknown to him. The “red, red” PDVSA then emerged, as Rafael Ramírez baptized it, and the “national, popular and revolutionary” vision of energy management was consolidated.
“For me, the decline of the industry has to do with the decline in oil and gas production. The key year is 2005,” recalls Rafael Quiróz, oil economist and professor at the Central University of Venezuela. Then the country fell below the threshold of three million barrels per day, never to recover.
Quiróz gives a brief summary of the Chavista management operation that destroyed the oil business in the country: “having merged the position of president of PDVSA with that of the Ministry of Energy and Petroleum; assigning the company responsibilities that have nothing to do with the industry (building houses, importing food, distributing goods, all sources of corruption); and having placed it at the service of a political project, whether revolutionary or not.” The consequence of these three elements, adds Quiróz, brought a fourth, a consequence of the previous ones: disinvestment. And, embraced by all that, corruption.
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