The years of higher oil revenues in Venezuela due to the rise in the price of a barrel in the times of Hugo Chávez have unleashed the greatest corruption that the country has experienced.
Now, when the production of the Venezuelan industry has reached its minimum, political mismanagement continues to squander the little money that enters the oil country.
The state company PDVSA is undergoing a new purge process with the arrests of senior officials and the resignation, this Monday, of Tareck El Aissami as minister of the area after an investigation into corruption in the bowels of the Venezuelan state oil company.
Chavismo has had to face what for years was the goose that laid the golden eggs of Venezuela and became the petty cash of a huge elite that grew in the years of Chavismo.
The state company began its operations in January 1976, after the nationalization of oil, and during the last decades of the 20th century it was a rare bird in the midst of the traditionally corrupt and dysfunctional Latin American public administration.
A year before Hugo Chávez came to power, PDVSA produced 3.2 million barrels a day and brought together a conglomerate of merged foreign companies from which it inherited the operating processes, balance and control systems, standards and practices that They made it work like the big oil transnationals.
The culture of the so-called meritocracy turned its payroll into a highly capable workforce, against which Chavismo was in 2003 after the strike that the oil workers joined due to the turn that the Government was taking.
It was one of the first political crises of the Bolivarian revolution.
From those years is the remembered scene of Chávez on television, blowing a whistle while he declares the “
off side
” to a PDVSA management group, which was followed by a list of more than 18,000 workers who were fired for participating in the strike, published in the official press.
This model of a public company that worked with the efficiency of a private one, the idea that its highly qualified personnel and competitive salaries were a kind of privileged class collided with Chávez's Bolivarian socialism.
From that purge that led to de-professionalization comes the sludge from this collapse of a highly technical industry.
For more than a decade, Rafael Ramírez, one of Chávez's great bishops, governed PDVSA, and the shadow under which large amounts of resources were also lost in different corruption schemes.
He then turned it into the “red, red” PDVSA, a political arm of Chavismo that wove an international support network with the so-called petrodiplomacy, that is, sales at discounts to ideological allies.
However, PDVSA's main client continued to be the United States, with the sale of 500,000 barrels per day until 2019, with the entry into force of the sanctions imposed by Donald Trump.
Ramírez left the company with Nicolás Maduro, after Chávez's death, and became an opponent of his government.
Maduro deepened the ditch into which the company had fallen.
The departure of Ramírez brought arrests of managers and the entry of new power groups in the management of the government cash register.
The Venezuelan president appointed, for the first time, a military officer in charge, who a couple of years later declared an emergency in the oil industry.
The now ousted El Aissami was in charge of resolving a scenario in which Venezuelan oil was already banned by sectoral sanctions from the United States.
The siege that Washington erected forced Venezuela to depend on a complex and opaque network of intermediaries to be able to offer its oil.
It was left with India, China and Russia as the main buyers with significant discounts that have reduced revenues.
Venezuela sells more oil than it ends up collecting, money that is lost between intermediaries, which it cannot control, and the corruption that orbits a business that moves more underground.
Russia's exit from the game due to the sanctions imposed after the war against Ukraine made these networks much darker.
Under the administration of El Aissami, a structure based on the use of cryptocurrencies was created to be able to support the collection of sales income, of which the 3,000 million dollars that have unleashed this new scandal in the oil company were lost.
The government's erratic fiscal policy is built on this uncertainty, which has an impact on the entire economy.
Some economists calculate that between 2020 and 2022, PDVSA's losses due to all these circumstances represent around 34% of the income received.
In a 2022 report, Transparencia Venezuela revealed that during the last 20 years that Chavismo has ruled, some 127 corruption files have been opened in 16 countries related to PDVSA, which translate into irregularities that compromised more than 42,000 million of Venezuelan public assets. .
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