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The Chevron Man

2022-12-06T11:12:08.847Z


For the oil company, the years that have elapsed until today have been described by analysts as a barely profitable nightmare that was aggravated by the sanctions that Washington


Tareck El Aissami, Minister in charge of Oil in Venezuela, during a conference in which there was an agreement with Chevron.LEONARDO FERNANDEZ VILORIA (REUTERS)

“It will always be cheaper to stay and

put up with the fight

than to leave and re-enter,” I heard a senior Chevron executive say in Caracas at the beginning of 2008.

I've been thinking about it a lot in the last few weeks.

Although the mother tongue of that expatriate executive was not the Spanish we speak in Venezuela, his phenotype was Hindustani and he had so astonishingly assimilated the idioms of Creole speech that right off the bat I took him for a black compatriot, perhaps a Guyanese from El Callao or Guasipati.

But he wasn't: he was a thoroughbred Chevron Oil Corp. headquartered in San Ramon, California.

The Chevron man spoke with authority, by then he had seen a lot of the oil world, Venezuela was not his first destination.

The year before, 15 years ago, praise God!, Hugo Chávez had nationalized the oil industry for the second time.

This second debut deserves a few paragraphs.

The first nationalization dated back to 1976 and had been comprehensive, that is, it had completely nationalized all the assets of the old foreign concessionaire companies.

Totally, I mean: every last drill, every offshore rig, the last rocker, and the last catalytic cracking unit.

There was nothing left to nationalize.

It is also appropriate to say that the transfer of the entire hardware store had been duly appraised and all compensation paid.

The creation of Petróleos de Venezuela (PDVSA), was attributed, still in 2007, to the presidency of Carlos Andrés Pérez (1922-2010) who was twice president during the bipartisan period immediately before the Chávez era.

For this very reason, perhaps, the Eternal Commander, meticulous liquidator of all times prior to 21st century socialism, wanted a new nationalization, a measure that he could call his own.

Until those days, contracts, called "strategic partnerships," were based on the notion of shared risk and reward.

Chávez imposed a change in the percentages and achieved that PDVSA was in all cases the majority partner of several mixed companies that exploited heavy crude oil in the so-called Orinoco Belt.

Chevron participated in four of those joint ventures whose names loudly vindicate the memory of the independence heroes.

Exxon Mobil and Conoco Phillips, the other two Americans, resisted this new deal, demanded compensation and went to litigation in international jurisdictions with dissimilar results.

Conoco Phillips, for example, has not yet seen a penny of the 2,040 million dollars in compensation that the International Chamber of Commerce granted him in his lawsuit with Venezuela.

The Italian ENI immediately handed over management of the deposit it operated.

Total French and Norwegian Statoil tried to persevere and, after all, would abandon operations in the Strip as unfeasible.

This second nationalization, which Chávez proclaimed to be the real one, was carried out with the symbolic military occupation of the installations and the overflight of Sukhoi SU 30 fighter squadrons over the drills.

It coincided with the golden age of the looting of PDVSA which, led by the ineffable Rafael Ramírez, accelerated the ruin of the country.

For Chevron, the years to date have been described by analysts as a barely profitable nightmare made worse by the sanctions Washington began imposing around the same time as the 2015 price plunge. Seven biblical years that have ended with the beginning of sanctions relief dictated less than two weeks ago due to the war in Ukraine and Saudi intransigence.

The Venezuelan opposition drags on, in Mexico, an unlikely influence in Washington as the vociferous Maduro conditions his opening to free elections on sanctions being fully lifted.

The only visible winner so far is Chevron.

Although PDVSA still owes him 5,000 million dollars, having known how to

endure the fight

and being today the last man standing after the second nationalization, he will also be the first to arrive at the inexorable opening of Venezuela to the US market.

You don't even have to win the election, if any.

"Venezuela is booty," said our José Ignacio Cabrujas, great satirist of the 20th century and visionary of the 21st.

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Source: elparis

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