The simplicity of spirit leads one to think, for example, that becoming the Venezuelan oil minister solves many problems in the personal sphere.
Even in the case of the oil company of a bankrupt country, and despite the fact that the industry no longer generates 3,200,000 barrels per day as at the end of the last century, one easily imagines that the revolution should do everything necessary so that nothing The comrade Minister of Energy is missing.
From the little that enters the State coffers, the decent well-being of the public servants in charge of the industry that has sustained us for more than a century must come out.
After all, a right-thinking leftist would say, the revolution needs its oil minister who is unconcerned about the lack of liquidity at the end of the month and other ordinary concerns.
He needs him mentally clear for the fight, empowered and without personal financial alarms, focused full time on raising production levels to take advantage of rising prices, much more so now that harsh economic sanctions from Yankee imperialism are weighing on Venezuela.
However, the wave of arrests and the resignation of the oil minister in Venezuela show, once again, that everything proven to be bad about populism is worse in a petrostate.
Even worse in a dictatorship.
Micro-trafficking jargon calls “tumbe” the interception of payment for merchandise made by an intermediary to the detriment of the gang-mother.
When the gang is leafy and robust and controls a vast territory we call it a cartel.
The inescapable consequence of the
tumbe
is usually the plot pivot of the narcocorridos.
Former Minister Tareck El Aissami and a network of intermediaries had been "knocking down" Nicolás Maduro from the proceeds of oil sold at great discounts under the lee of sanctions.
This brings to mind the sanctions imposed on Iraq in the 1990s, and how they showed that circumventing them provided a powerful incentive for corruption, without detracting from Saddam Hussein's dictatorship.
The shortfall of the discord —the overthrow of Petróleos de Venezuela— is estimated at 21,000 million dollars, only in the course of the last three years, precisely those that El Aissami had been in office.
According to a Reuters report, 84% of crude oil shipments made in that period have stopped entering the state's coffers.
Accountably speaking, many tankers cast off without paying, but it will be difficult to know precisely whose hands the money advanced to dozens of phantom intermediaries has ended up, not all of them under the umbrella of El Aissami.
Consider that the corruption perception index prepared by Transparency International, the accredited global network of observers, places Venezuela in position number 177 among 180 countries considered, just between South Sudan and Yemen.
We are talking, then, of 21,000 million dollars poured into the sinkhole.
It is impossible not to despair of the future of Venezuela in the face of the cruel humanitarian situation that the majority of its resident citizens are experiencing in exchange for the million trillion dollars that have been proven to vanish in a quarter of a century.
Many observers see the wave of midnight arrests and the resignation of the one-time super minister as the start of a
Stalinist
purge , a deadly infighting between allegedly irreconcilable factions.
I do not envy that kind of perspicacity: to think of it that way is to attribute an undue ideological and political rank to the madurista satrapy.
We have witnessed other tumbes among thugs long before Chávez disappeared.
What happened to El Aissami could well be just something in the nature of organized crime gangs: an exposed
tomb
, followed by a reckoning.
The opposition will continue, to all this, gawking in Mexico and deviously plotting the way to win the pantomime of a primary election.
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