Trickle of Oil Starts Flowing in Venezuela
By GINGER THOMPSON
PUERTO LA CRUZ, Venezuela, Dec. 28 - Nearly a month into Venezuela's devastating national strike, all systems were back up and running close to normal this week at the refinery here that supplies gasoline to the eastern half of this country. Night shift workers were bursting with the pride of war heroes.
Félix Deliso, who has worked at Petróleos de Venezuela, the state-owned oil company, for 12 years, stood watch over a console with so many blinking buttons and computer screens that it looked like the bridge of a spaceship. Mr. Deliso monitors 3,000 machines and processes that turn crude oil into gasoline. Though he has a high school education, he has been trained to be a specialist here, and he considers his job as delicate as disarming a live bomb.
Politics made his job even more explosive four weeks ago in this country, which is the world's fifth-largest oil producer. Most of the refinery's supervisors abandoned Petróleos de Venezuela, which pumps the lifeblood of the nation's economy, to join the strike that is aimed at forcing the ouster of President Hugo Chávez.
Operations at the company, a chief supplier of oil to the United States, ground to a halt. With support for Mr. Chávez strongest among the country's poorer residents, rank-and-file workers like Mr. Deliso weighed their options.
"We decided to stay on the job," he said, "Some of us are Chavistas. Some are anti-Chavistas. But here, there are no politics."
"Basically we are Venezuelans," added Cipriano Hernández, who also has worked at the company for 12 years. "We love our country and we do not want to see it fall."
With skeleton crews working lots of overtime, Mr. Chávez is getting gasoline trickling back into Venezuela's pumps. Officials here said that since the beginning of last week, this refinery had produced 60,000 barrels of gasoline a day, about 70 percent its normal capacity and almost a fourth of the 225,000 barrels normally consumed by this country each day.
Still, with domestic shortages mounting over the last month, the gasoline produced here is only a drop in the bucket of Venezuela's needs. The country remains far from recovering its export capabilities, which provide up to 80 percent of its foreign currency. Economic aftershocks are expected through the first few months of next year....
"They thought they could impose their illegitimate will on this country, but they were wrong," said Alí Rodríguez, president of Petróleos de Venezuela, referring to the strike leaders. Then he heaped praise on the workers standing before him. "Because of loyal workers like you, the enemy is being defeated."
After suspending at least 90 striking executives, Mr. Chávez assigned new management teams to take over crucial oil installations. In raucous meetings with oil workers in recent days, Mr. Rodríguez called the executives "traitors to the nation," and said the government would press criminal charges.
The refineries at El Palito, just east of here, are expected to be operating at 70 percent of capacity within a week.
The government also regained control of several Venezuelan tankers anchored off the coast by striking crews. In the region that gave birth to this country's oil industry around Lake Maracaibo, 22 million gallons of gasoline were unloaded from the tanker Pilín León, which had been stranded for nearly three weeks.
"We have made a situation that seemed impossible, possible," said Edgar Ortiz, 46, the leader of a union representing gas truck drivers in the Lake Maracaibo region. "The crisis has not ended. But the government is finding solutions."
The refinery here at balmy Puerto La Cruz has become a showcase of the government's comeback. Almost all high-level executives at the plant joined the strike. But officials said fewer than 20 percent of the operators, mechanics and technicians walked off the job.
"We are prouder now than ever," said Wilfredo Bastardo, a 17-year oil veteran. "We have shown our supervisors that we can run this plant without them."
International oil analysts, however, are describing Mr. Chávez's gains in gasoline production as a quick fix that delays progress on more fundamental long-term challenges. Most of the nation's oil wells remain closed, as does its largest refining complex, at Paraguaná, which can refine one million barrels of crude oil a day. Analysts report that in the four weeks since the start of the strike, oil exports from Venezuela dropped from 2.5 million barrels a day to less than 2 million barrels last month, sending oil prices rising above $32 a barrel.
Fareed Mohamedi, an economist with PFC Energy, a consulting firm in Washington, said that in the wake of this political crisis, Venezuelan oil customers might decide to take their business elsewhere.
Still, political analysts said, it appears that Mr. Chávez remains determined to ride out the storm. Winning the support of oil workers is a crucial part of his strategy. In a ceremony on Friday, he gave out medals to about 60 oil workers and said that strikers are traitors.
"They wanted to stab the heart of Venezuela," he said. "But thousands of workers have come to save the country from their premeditated attack."...
After a meeting with Mr. Chávez last week, the American ambassador to Venezuela, Charles Shapiro, said the risk of violence was rising daily. Meanwhile, the night crew at Puerto La Cruz downed espresso and tried to make light of the tension. The maintenance chief, with 32 years on the job, joked that he was one of the "inexperienced workers" whom foes of Mr. Chávez called a threat to the company's security. Other workers faked Cuban accents to poke fun at charges by opponents that Mr. Chávez had allowed Communist workers to infiltrate oil installations. Then they talked about their colleagues who had joined the strike.
"To me, this is a political fight," said Willians Arevalo, operations manager at Puerto La Cruz. "I have participated in many strikes, to demand better pay or better conditions. But I don't think I should use my job to try to force out the president."
<http://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/29/international/americas/29VENE.html> -- Yoshie
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