One oil rig was idle for weeks because a single piece of equipment was missing. Another was attacked by armed gangs who made off with all they could carry. Many oil workers say they are paid so little that they barely eat and have to keep watch over one another in case they faint while high up on the rigs.
Venezuela’s petroleum industry, whose vast revenues once furled the country’s Socialist-inspired revolution, underwriting everything from housing to education, is spiralling into disarray.
To add insult to injury, the Venezuelan government has been forced to turn to its nemesis, the United States, for help.
“You call them the empire,” said Luis Centeno, a union leader for the oil workers, referring to what government officials call the United States, “and yet you’re buying their oil”.
The declining oil industry is perhaps the most urgent chapter of Venezuela’s economic crisis. Oil accounts for half of the Venezuelan government’s revenues, what former President Hugo Chávez once called an “instrument of national development”. The state oil company poured its profits, more than $250 billion in all from 2001 to 2015, into the country’s social programs, including food imports.
But those profits have evaporated with mismanagement and the drop in global oil prices over the past two years. Now, even Venezuela’s subsidised oil shipments to its vital ally Cuba are slowly being phased out, oil executives with operations in Venezuela contend, forcing Havana to look to Russia for cheap oil. The United States has always been a huge market for Venezuela’s oil. But with Venezuela’s state oil company hobbling along, it was actually forced to start importing oil from the United States.
Early this year, the United States began shipping more than 50,000 barrels a day of the light crude that Venezuela needs to prepare its own oil for export, joining a handful of suppliers that have become vital to keeping the country’s oil industry afloat.
Even that lifeline is tenuous. Venezuela’s state oil company, PDVSA, is struggling to pay for the foreign oil. Some tankers wait in port for as long as two weeks to be paid, and sometimes they leave because of a lack of payment, said an oil executive. — New York Times News Service
