T E X T
EL TIGRE, Venezuela — Thousands of
workers are fleeing Venezuela’s state-owned oil
company, abandoning once-coveted jobs made
worthless by the worst inflation in the world. And
now the hemorrhaging is threatening the nation’s
chances of overcoming its long economic collapse.
Desperate oil workers and criminals are also
stripping the oil company of vital equipment,
vehicles, pumps and copper wiring, carrying off
whatever they can to make money. The double
drain — of people and hardware — is further
crippling a company that has been teetering for
years yet remains the country’s most important
source of income.
The timing could not be worse for
Venezuela’s increasingly authoritarian president,
Nicolás Maduro, who was re-elected last month in a
vote that has been widely condemned by leaders
across the hemisphere. Prominent opposition
politicians were either barred from competing in the
election, imprisoned or in exile.
But while Mr. Maduro has firm control over
the country, Venezuela is on its knees economically,
buckled by hyperinflation and a history of
mismanagement. Widespread hunger, political
strife, devastating shortages of medicine and an
exodus of well over a million people in recent years
have turned this country, once the economic envy
of many of its neighbors, into a crisis that is spilling
over international borders.
If Mr. Maduro is going to find a way out of
the mess, the key will be oil: virtually the only
source of hard currency for a nation with the world’s
largest estimated petroleum reserves. But each
month Venezuela produces less of it. Offices at the
state oil company are emptying out, crews in the
field are at half strength, pickup trucks are stolen
and vital materials vanish. All of this is adding to
the severe problems at the company that were
already acute because of corruption, poor
maintenance, crippling debts, the loss of
professionals and even a lack of spare parts.
Now workers at all levels are walking away
in large numbers, sometimes literally taking pieces of the company with them, union leaders, oil
executives and workers say.
A job with Petróleos de Venezuela, known
as Pdvsa, used to be a ticket to the Venezuelan
Dream. No more.
Inflation in Venezuela is projected to reach
an astounding 13,000 percent this year, according
to the International Monetary Fund. When The New
York Times interviewed Mr. Navas in May, the
monthly salary for a worker like him was barely
enough to buy a whole chicken or two pounds of
beef. But with prices going up so quickly, it buys
even less now.
Junior Martínez, 28, who has worked in the
oil industry for eight years, is assembling papers,
including his diploma as a chemical engineer. His
wife and her daughter left three months ago to earn
money in Brazil. “I get 1,400,000 bolívars a week
and it isn’t even enough to buy a carton of eggs or
a tube of toothpaste,”Mr. Martínez said of his
salary in bolívars, Venezuela’s currency.
Mr. Martínez’s father, Ovidio Martínez, 55,
recalled growing up here when the oil boom began.
He cried as he spoke of his son’s determination to
leave the country. “You watch your children leave
and you can’t stop them,” the elder Mr. Martínez
said, fighting back tears. “In this country, they don’t
have a future.”
In El Tigre, hundreds of people stood in line
one recent morning outside a supermarket, many
waiting since the evening before to buy whatever
food they could.
From: www.nytimes.com/June 14, 2018. Adapted.
Ovidio Martinez statement when commenting
on his son’s decision to leave the country, as his wife
and her daughter have already done, reveals the
