The idea of a PDVSA reduced to the personal jug of the president is what made it possible to finance all kinds of failed projects such as the socialist areperas and the gift of food in exchange for votes.
Humberto Gonzalez Briceno
Control over PDVSA and the oil industry always gave extraordinary tax advantages to the party state that existed before Hugo Chávez came to power. At that time, there was a discussion about the relevance of maintaining an industry, considered strategic, under the control of the State (of parties) or, on the contrary, privatizing it with a structured tax regime that would transfer resources to the State.
Despite the fact that at the time of the Party State, the Venezuelan public administration in all its sectors and levels was vulgarly and rudely outraged by party clienteles, there seemed to be a certain consensus around the idea that PDVSA was something like a island in the orgy of corruption. In fact, its management cadre was accused of becoming a kind of technocratic oligarchy that, for the sake of efficiency, turned its back on the people. In reality, the presidents in the stage of the party state had the prudence and wisdom to resist the temptations and pressures of their own clienteles to prostitute PDVSA.
With all the mistakes that PDVSA may have made, which there were, its management seemed efficient and solid, even more so than that of the governments it served.
That PDVSA died the day Hugo Chávez came to power and was formally buried the day Rafael Ramírez assumed the presidency of the state company. Ramírez has the indisputable merit of having materialized Hugo Chávez’s dream: converting PDVSA into the petty cash box, or better said, the jug, of the president to dispose of billions of dollars at his discretion to loot for his benefit and pay the loyalties of their own clienteles. All this at the price of dismantling the operational and investment capacity of the company.
PDVSA died the day Hugo Chávez came to power and was formally buried the day Rafael Ramírez assumes the presidency of the state company.
What the once infamous governments of Acción Democrática, Copei and Rafael Caldera II did not dare to do with PDVSA, Hugo Chávez did with ease and spontaneity. Thus, PDVSA’s faucets opened like unstoppable streams of dollars to never, ever close and would only stop working on the day that, given the collapse of the oil platforms, it was practically impossible to continue expelling rivers of petrodollars.
The idea of a PDVSA reduced to the personal jug of the president is what made it possible to finance all kinds of failed projects such as the socialist areperas and the gift of food in exchange for votes, a program whose names have changed over time but not their names. purpose. Billions of dollars came out of PDVSA’s coffers, without the need to render accounts, to finance the PSUV and enrich the regime’s political and military operators.
Chávez’s vision regarding the pirate and improvised management of PDVSA materialized by Rafael Ramírez has already acquired, over time, the rank of State policy. This means that for the Chavista state, regardless of who its president is, there is no other way to operate than through the systematic and permanent looting of PDVSA or what is left of it.
…the jug is running empty”
That is why Rafael Ramírez, faithful operator of Chávez, is succeeded by Tareck El Aissami, at that time efficient operator of Nicolás Maduro and head of his own clan within the regime. Chávez had already inaugurated the ultra-corrupt practice of combining several positions in the same person to avoid uncomfortable controls and facilitate tax fraud mechanisms.
In the same way that Rafael Ramírez was president of PDVSA, minister and oil czar, Tareck El Aissami played the same role within the Chavista state. Today, when we witness the merciless ouster of El Aissami, he is in turn replaced under similar conditions by his former right-hand man Pedro Rafael Tellechea, who in turn has the double status of PDVSA president and oil minister. It is up to Tellechea to continue with systemic corruption in a sector that, despite the crisis that Venezuela is experiencing, continues to pay dividends for the regime. Enough to temporarily calm his thirsty clients and his impatient military operators, now more concerned than before about the decrease and delay in payments, evidence that the jug is running empty.
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