Venezuela’s chaos driving oil workers abroad
Exodus seen hampering efforts to revive industry
PUNTO FIJO, Venezuela —
Nieves Ribullen, a Venezuelan oil worker sick of struggling to get by as his country falls apart, is betting it all on Iraq’s faraway Kurdish region to give his family a better life.
Overtheyearshe’swatcheddozens of co-workers abandon poverty wages and dangerous working conditions at the rundown complex of refineries in Punto Fijo on Venezuela’s Caribbean coast for jobs in places like Kuwait, Angola and Chile.
“I only earn enough to buy a kilo of meat and one chicken each month,” Ribullen said. “We’re in chaos.”
Juan Guaido has rallied support from distraught Venezuelans and roughly 40 countries that now recognize him as Venezuela’s president.
But the accelerating exodus of oil workers means that Venezuela’s crude production — already at a seven-decade low — is unlikely to rebound anytime soon, even if recently imposed U.S. sanctions are lifted and a business-friendly government replaces the increasingly wobbly regime of Nicolas Maduro.
Venezuela was once one of the world’s top five oil exporters, pumping 3.5 million barrels a day in 1998 when President Hugo Chavez was elected and launched Venezuela’s Bolivarian revolution. Today, the state-run oil company PDVSA produces less than a third of that.
Even worse, production is about to sink even further due to fresh sanctions by the Trump administration targeting PDVSA that have essentially cut off Venezuela from its Houston-based cash-cow, Citgo.
Despite the short-term pain they will bring Venezuela, Guaido said the sanctions are a critical part of stopping Maduro from consolidating power.
Venezuela’s oil workers began flooding out in 2003, shortly after Chavez fired thousands of them for launching a strike that paralyzed output. The oil workers accused Chavez of riding roughshod over the nation’s democratic institutions, while Chavez said the picketers were plotting a coup.
Tomas Paez, a professor at Central University of Venezuela who studies the Venezuelan exile community, estimates that 30,000 oil workers fled in the initial wave, many banned from working in the country’s oil industry.he said it’s difficult to gauge how many more have left, but from the tar sands of northern Canada to the deserts of Kuwait, Venezuelan roughnecks now live in more than 90 oil-producing countries.
“Let’s say, where there is oil, there is a Venezuelan,” Paez said.
With each new departure, fewer remain behind with the know-how to pump the world’s most abundant oil reserves.
“We are losing man-hours, hours of training, millions and millions of hours that we can’t calculate,” said union leader Ivan Freites, secretary of the Federation of Professionals and Technicians of Oil Workers of Venezuela. “It’s impossible to recover our trained personnel working abroad.”