to have and not to have

Part of the machinery of an oil extraction plant during a sunset in Lake Maracaibo.AP

“Tankers are all like cats: if you only hear them screeching in the dark you might think they are fighting to the death.

Actually, they make love."

The phrase, attributed to the great Calouste Gulbenkian (1869-1955), a very sagacious British and Armenian broker, who, at the dawn of the oil industry, was baptized "Mr. Five Percent" by the London, New York and Paris stock markets, often suggested by the disconcerting political events in Venezuela.

Confusing only in appearance because it is enough to mentally plug your ears and abolish the mooing of Diosdado Cabello, the ejaculations of Juan Guaidó and the alter-globalist bravado of Nicolás Maduro so that, just as the waves of the sea can be heard by applying your ear to a conch shell, we listen to In the distance, the tireless noise of the drilling tables, the hissing of the refineries, the maneuver of stowing the crude oil in the tankers.

Much diminished today, it is true, but you can still

the oil.

Many well-investigated specialized press reports have stated for more than five years that Venezuela has ceased to be an oil-producing country.

"Venezuela's days as a petrostate are

over," Risa Grais-Targow, an analyst at Eurasia Group, the political risk consulting firm , told

However, this truth emerges from expert mouths invariably accompanied by caveats, cautious "without embargoes

and many other adversarial forms.

It is true, we are told, that if the energy transition prospers, the trillions of barrels of heavy crude oil that still lie in the Orinoco Belt may well remain there until the end of time.

I speak of trillions of the Royal Academy: of units followed by 18 zeros.

However, it is also true that the war in Ukraine occurs in a world where future values ​​of West Texas crude oil are still realized, with prices rising, quarter after quarter, inevitably.

German industry does not run on solar cells or wind farms.

Beneath the Venezuelan humanitarian tragedy, beneath its starving slums and its prisons packed with political hostages, its luxury restaurants, its Maserati dealerships and its Fito Páez concerts, a great sedimentary basin stretches out that is counted in trillions.

"There are only two lineages in the world - said the grandmother of Sancho Panza -, which are

.

No matter how much the income of the petrostate has really diminished, Nicolás Maduro is

and the other great snake eaters, as the verse of Rafael Cadenas rightly called us, we are nothing but hunters of oil rent.

That explains enough for me the shameful silence of the opposition in the face of the accusations against Maduro himself!

that makes the latest report of the UN International Mission on Human Rights violations.

“Biden and Maduro exchange hostages and drug traffickers.

Chevron has not yet left the country.

The pod is moving;

this can change, pana: leave the anti-politics.

We all want elections.

Why rarefy the dialogue with human rights? ”, She argues with these and many other words a long text message in the chat of great snake eaters to which I belong.

Some of them are former oil super managers.

Gulbenkian is the name, Calouste Gulbenkian.

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