International Venezuela, The Socialist Dystopia, v2: The region's worst humanitarian crisis in decades
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President Trump welcomes Josh Holt, American held in Venezuela, back to the US
By Clare Foran and Kate Sullivan, CNN | Sat May 26, 2018
By Clare Foran and Kate Sullivan, CNN | Sat May 26, 2018
https://www.cnn.com/2018/05/26/politics/trump-josh-holt-venezuela-freed/index.html
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South American legislators call for sanctions on Venezuela
by Associated Press June 1, 2018
by Associated Press June 1, 2018
CUCUTA, Colombia — Legislators from six South American countries met on Friday to discuss Venezuela’s humanitarian crisis and reject the contested May 20 election of President Nicolas Maduro to a second six-year term.
The group of more than 130 parliamentarians from Colombia, Venezuela, Ecuador, Peru, Uruguay and Argentina issued a four-page statement that said Maduro is leading a “repressive government” that “systematically violates human rights.”
They called on their countries to impose financial sanctions on top Venezuelan officials who are suspected of money laundering and said they would ease entry requirements for the thousands of Venezuelans who are fleeing the country.
At a hotel located just a ten-minute drive away from Colombia’s border with Venezuela, the legislators delivered passionate speeches in which they dismissed Maduro as a dictator and a tyrant who has become a threat to the region.
The joint statement called on Latin American countries to bar Maduro and his closest aides from entering their territories and to treat the opposition-dominated National Assembly as Venezuela’s only legitimate branch of government.
“Let this be the last dictatorship our continent has to experience,” said Delly Fernandez, a Venezuelan legislator who attended the meeting.
Colombia’s migration authorities estimate there are some 700,000 Venezuelans now living in the country, almost twice as many as last year. Many Venezuelans have also moved to Ecuador, Peru, Argentina and Chile.
On Friday, parliamentarians promised to advance legislation that will make it easier for refugees to live and work in the region. One proposal suggested allowing Venezuelans to enter neighboring countries on expired passports because the government has been slow — and some say reluctant — to grant new passports to its citizens.
Efrain Cepeda, the president of Colombia’s senate, said that Venezuela received thousands of Colombian emigrants who once fled conflict and poverty. Now, he said, it was time for Colombia to return the favor and help Venezuela to make a transition to democracy.
“Democracy is alive and well in the Americas,” Cepeda said. “And we will not rest until it is restored in Venezuela.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/worl...b14593acaa6_story.html?utm_term=.a8b1d6d50ba4
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Venezuela just keeps on delivering new economic absurdities.
The country, which has the largest oil reserves in the world, is now considering the idea of importing the stuff.
It's a symptom of socialism.
The state-run oil company, PDVSA, could start refining tens of thousands of barrels of imported oil each day this month, according to a report from Reuters on Wednesday.
It begs the obvious question as to why a country which has more than its fair share of oil reserves would even consider importing it.
The problem is that Venezuela in general, and PDVSA in particular, are blighted by the leftwing policies of the government which is currently headed by president Nicolas Maduro.
The country now produces around 1.5 million barrels of oil a day, down from 2.9 million barrels as recently as early 2014, according to data reported by TradingEconomics.com. That drop is due to a variety of reasons.
- In the first place, the state-run oil enterprise is poorly run with political appointees taking precedence over seasoned petroleum engineers with expertise. In other words, the people in the critical roles often cannot do their jobs.
- Hyperinflation makes it hard for any business to run efficiently. Inflation in the country is now a staggering 34,458%, according to the latest estimate (June 14, 2018) from Steve Hanke, professor of applied economics at the Johns Hopkins University. That's down from more than 37,000% earlier this month. Hanke uses the prices of goods inside the country to estimate the rate of inflation.
- U.S. sanctions mean critical oil extraction equipment is hard to come by in the country. Drill bits and metal pipes quickly get worn out in the oil business because the oil itself is highly corrosive. Without replacement parts, the wells cannot operate.
That need to fulfill contracts is likely why PDVSA may be considering importing crude oil, a substance of which the country has an abundance. If it can't get the crude out of the ground at home, then it can't refine the stuff. Hence there is a clear need to import oil from abroad.
Anyone who has flirted or is flirting with the idea that socialism offers a reasonable remedy for the drawbacks of capitalism should mull the utter absurdity of Venezuela's current plight.
Considering importing additional oil into a country where it is already more abundant than anywhere else is not just ridiculous but also a reflection of an economic system that doesn't work.
The common refrain is that capitalism makes what is scarce abundant, whereas socialism makes what is abundant scarce. It seems like that is happening in this case.
The possible importing of oil is of course just the latest laughable move by the South American country.
Other Venezuela government actions that were high on the extra-dumb scale include the following two from recent months :
- The idea of removing zeros from the currency, the Bolivar, in order to combat the country's crippling hyperinflation. It is something that has never worked in the history of mankind. Worse still, it made a mockery of the increasingly dire humanitarian crisis in the country.
- Launching a new oil-backed cryptocurrency named the Petro while providing few details of exactly how the copycat bitcoin-style money would work.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/simonconstable/2018/06/14/venezuelas-latest-desperate-plan/2/#
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Workers Flee and Thieves Loot Venezuela’s Reeling Oil Giant
By William Neuman and Clifford Krauss | June 14, 2018http://www.nytimes.com/by/clifford-krauss
The contents of two tanks with a joint capacity of 10,000 barrels of oil have spilled in El Tigre, Venezuela.
By William Neuman and Clifford Krauss | June 14, 2018http://www.nytimes.com/by/clifford-krauss
The contents of two tanks with a joint capacity of 10,000 barrels of oil have spilled in El Tigre, Venezuela.
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.
Carlos Nava, in green, worked on a drilling crew for Venezuela’s state oil company near El Tigre, but he quit last year because he could not live on what had become starvation wages
A job with Petróleos de Venezuela, known as Pdvsa, used to be a ticket to the Venezuelan Dream.
No more.
Carlos Navas, 37, worked on a drilling crew outside of this oil city, El Tigre. He had a house here, with air-conditioning, and a car. He never imagined he might not make enough money to buy food for his wife and three children.
But he quit his job late last year, he said, because he couldn’t live on what had become starvation wages.
On a recent evening, with the sun slanting low over the plains, Mr. Navas prepared to leave. He was boarding a bus to the malaria-infested gold mines to the east, where he hoped to scrape out enough money to buy food for his family and, eventually, finance an even longer journey: to Ecuador or Peru, where he would follow a stampede of his fellow Venezuelans fleeing the country’s economic cataclysm.
“Before, you worked and you were rich,” Mr. Navas said of his oil company job. “Your salary bought anything you needed. Now you can’t buy anything, not even food.”
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.
The state oil company is not faring much better. Output is at its lowest level in 30 years, and there is no sign that the sustained descent is over.
Buses once used by oil workers at a residential and commercial complex in San Tomé, Venezuela, have been abandoned because of a lack of spare parts.
The company and the Venezuelan government are in default on more than $50 billion in bonds after failing to make interest payments since late last year. China has refused to continue lending Venezuela money in return for future payments in oil.
Venezuela’s oil exports are being interrupted by legal action as well. In recent weeks, courts have ruled that ConocoPhillips, an American oil company, could seize Venezuelan shipments at refineries and export terminals in several Dutch Caribbean islands. The action stemmed from Venezuela’s decision to nationalize foreign oil assets a decade ago.
And at home, Venezuela has had so many troubles with refineries and other oil installations that it has had to import gasoline for the domestic market, spending dollars it can hardly afford.
Mr. Maduro has ordered the arrest of dozens of the state oil company’s managers, including the company’s former president, in what he describes as a corruption crackdown.
But the effort has the hallmarks of a battle for control and access to oil revenue. Last November, Mr. Maduro installed a National Guard general, Manuel Quevedo, with no oil experience to lead the company.
All of that adds up to a company in a free fall.
In a speech last month after his re-election, Mr. Maduro said that oil production this year must increase by one million barrels a day, a seemingly impossible task, suggesting that he might seek more investment from friendly governments like Russia’s and China’s.
“We have to increase by a million barrels!” he shouted. “Who’s going to do it? Maduro?” ” His answer: Pdvsa workers.
Junior Martínez, 28, who has worked in Venezuela’s oil industry for eight years, is now planning to leave the country to find a job.
In the area around El Tigre, many of the operations are run by the state oil company in joint ventures with foreign entities, including Western companies like Chevron and Repsol of Spain, as well as state companies like the China National Petroleum Corporation and Rosneft of Russia.
Oil executives cite the difficulty of working in Venezuela as social conditions decline.
“People are starving,” said Eldar Saetre, chief executive of Equinor, the Norwegian oil giant that works with Pdvsa.
Interviews with more than a dozen current and former oil workers revealed deep anger. The workers, many of whom asked not to be named because they feared retaliation, said that while Venezuela’s oil company had been sliding for years, its deterioration had accelerated.
“This was a golden cup,” said one worker. “Not silver, gold. Now, it’s a plastic cup.”
Workers said that lifelong health insurance was now worth little, because the state oil company had largely stopped paying private clinics. Field workers complained that lunches sometimes failed to show up because the company did not pay the provider.
Then there is the theft of essential equipment. A tour of oil installations around El Tigre showed a devastating toll.
At several pumping stations and tank facilities, thieves had torn apart electrical installations to strip out the copper cable. At one site, nine electrical transformers had been torn from posts, their copper parts gutted, disabling vital control systems.
Many pump jacks were idle. At one well, the motor had been stolen, shutting it down.
There were gaps in fences and gates left open, leaving facilities unprotected. An employee said that a National Guard unit assigned to patrol the area had been sidelined for months because its vehicle broke down and there were no spare parts to fix it.
Venezuelans waited in line for a day last month outside a supermarket in El Tigre to buy corn meal
The facilities showed deep neglect. Many had oil spills caused by damaged tanks, pipes or valves. At one site, two large tanks were surrounded by a large black lake of crude oil that had seeped out.
Workers said they did not know who was behind the thefts. They said criminal gangs might be to blame, but some acknowledged that dismantling live electrical systems required a knowledge that workers or former workers would possess.
Ali Moshiri, Chevron’s top executive for Latin America until last year, said that theft in Venezuela’s oil fields had been a fact of life for 20 years.
“But the stealing has accelerated,” he said, citing theft as a prime reason that oil production is plummeting. “They’ll steal your car, they’ll steal your wellhead if they can. They will melt it, take parts out of it and sell it.”
“People are so desperate,” Mr. Moshiri added. “They can sell the copper to feed their families.”
Workers and supervisors in El Tigre said that production from existing wells was down and that the drilling of new wells was largely paralyzed by the lack of equipment, chemicals, spare parts and basics, like food for workers.
One supervisor listed the many destinations to which his co-workers had fled: the United States, Argentina, Peru, Ecuador, Brazil, Colombia and Spain.
Many leave without giving notice. Often, they are not replaced. When they are, the new workers frequently have little or no experience.
Excess gas being burned off at a division of the state oil company in Anzoátegui, in northeastern Venezuela
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, with wells sprouting down the block. 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.”
Here 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.
Carlos Antonio Ortega, 31, walked along the line in his red Pdvsa coveralls, selling loose cigarettes. He said he had been a maintenance worker for the oil company but quit eight months ago.
“I couldn’t buy anything with what I was making,” he said. “You have to make the food stretch.”
One Pdvsa worker with more than 30 years experience, who recently retired from her job arranging oil exports and shipments, said that when she started she made the equivalent of about $1,750 a month. The company even paid for her to study abroad and receive graduate degrees.
When she retired, she said, her monthly salary couldn’t buy two cartons of eggs.
“You want to go into a corner and cry,” she said. “It’s a time bomb. I would sit in meetings and think to myself: Ticktock, ticktock.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/14/world/americas/venezuela-oil-economy.html
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The Socialists United of Venezuela and its president Nicolas Maduro continue to run this once relatively prosperous South American oil nation into the ground. People are still starving. Hospitals are short staffed. People of means have moved to Madrid or Miami. People of no means are hightailing it to Colombia and Brazil. If this unfolding disaster were taking place in Washington., one would probably blame the Russians. But this is Caracas, so it must be the CIA’s fault.
At this point, the country of Venezuela is being held together with duct tape and God’s will.
Oil production is still dismal at best, collapsing at worse. Wall Street bond lords have been waiting for at least a year now for the economy to get so bad that PSUV leaders kick Maduro to the curve. But so what? If they did, who would lead? Surely there is scant evidence that the party of Hugo Chavez can save Venezuela from itself.
The latest cabinet reshuffle was just noise as Maduro simply realigned his power base to insulate himself against a palace coup from within the ranks. Oil prices are higher than they have been in years, but Venezuela keeps getting worse. Its economy is producing quadruple-digit inflation. Its central bank is useless against it. The currency, the Bolivar, is utterly worthless. Nobody wants it.
“It’s all about petrodollars and whether there are sufficient (funds) for rental and corruption income to leverage military support,” says Sioben Morden, the managing director in charge of monitoring Venezuela’s life-support systems over at Nomura Securities in Manhattan.
The top-tier military still has power at oil firm PdVSA, but it’s going to be increasingly difficult to trickle down funds to the midlevel officers and public workers.
The regime change theory thatMorden and other hedge funds holding PdVSA have been war-gaming for over a year is dependent on the assumption that Maduro fails when the petrodollars are tapped out. He needs them to keep PdVSA oil workers, the guys with the red hats and the red shirts that can always be counted on to shout, sing and wave Venezuela flags during Maduro rallies citing foreigners for his country’s woes.
Investors should no longer assume that negative headlines will eventually spell the end of PSUV. They have hunkered down. Didn’t you know? Venezuela is basically a dictatorship now.
PdVSA has defaulted on its bonds.
HIV patients are unable to get medication to keep them alive.
People are selling garbage to make ends meet.
This is a shame.
This is all on PSUV.
Latest oil industry data from May reaffirmed the roughly 50,000 barrels per day decline in oil production. PdVSA produced around 1.4 million barrels per day in May.
The Baker Hughes rig count declined to 28 in May. It’s seen years of mismanagement and underinvestment, says Morden, but the recent production drops reflect a total lack of maintenance, no spare parts from the import markets, weak refining capacity and technical personnel—many of whom have fled the coop to Miami-Dade County or Bogota.
Moreover, there are financing constraints on the Venezuelan government by the U.S. Maduro will say that this is why his economy is getting worse. But these sanctions are less than two years old and Venezuela’s economy has been in a free fall now for at least three years.
ConocoPhillips’ May 13 seizure of PdVSA assets on the tiny island of Curacao may exacerbate the decline for June production now. Argus media is suggesting production of somwhere between 1 and 1.2 million bpd—so another fall in oil.
Meanwhile, the threat of lawsuits from bondholders is still on hold—lucky for Venezuelans—as investors assess the prospects for new management and whether recovery value is a function of debt restructuring or either offloading or acquiring equity in offshore assets, be it oil fields, ships or refineries.
Wall Street bond lords are likely to sue PdVSA if World Bank investment settlement claimants are more aggressive on pursuing Venezuela’s offshore oil assets. If this keeps up, Venezuela’s crisis would have forced them to do the thing they fear doing the most—giving the family jewels over to big, bad Yankee capitalists. They put themselves in this spot. Their investors did not force them there.
“It’s going to be increasingly difficult for PdVSA to continue to operate under these legal threats,” says Morden.
Those threats may be a more serious problem for PSUV’s rulers than its declining collection of petrodollars.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/unicef...to-know-about-rohingya-refugees/#573ed23716f0
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My girlfriend's family go out last week and arrived here safely. Her nephews that just got here seemed shell shocked and have such bad social skills. For the last 2 years, they mostly just been in their family's house, avoiding the dangers. Feel so bad for them, to not have proper socialization. I worry about them being in public schools here, and potential bullies.
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My ex girlfriend was from Venezuela, but she was a rich girl so her family got out like 15 years ago. She was crazy too.
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My girlfriend's family was pretty well off. Her brother and his wife have been in America about 15 years. The problem is unlike a lot of well off Venezuelan's, they didn't invest over seas. A lot of wealthy ones invested in a ton of real estate here. My first two landlords here were Venezuelan, and most of the small businesses around me are owned by Venezuelans as well.
Her family unfortunately invested in places in Venezuela. They still have a bunch of property there, but it is worth next to nothing of course. Thankfully they did still have enough to buy a house here, about 2 years ago, in anticipation of things getting even worse.
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Just send some money to a friend in Venezuela, he tells me he was going to bail but his family is sick and there is no medicine, i tried to convince him to tell me how much he needed to get out, and he told me around USD $800.
Few times in my life have i felt the need to have more money, that day was one of them.
Few times in my life have i felt the need to have more money, that day was one of them.
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A key part of being a communist successor, whether Maduro, Kruschev, Deng, is admitting that mistakes were made. This glosses over amazingly destructive economic policies, the impoverishment and often starvation of the masses, genocide, widescale political oppression, massive government corruption, you name it. They were all simply mistakes you see. It has the added benefit of allowing poly-sci students in western Europe and the US to point out that since mistakes were made, it obviously wasn't true communism.
It's a tragedy that what should be one of the leading countries in South America has destroyed itself.
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Also, speaking of communism, leaders in the US Democrat-Socialist think communism is a good idea.
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You don’t have 800 to spare and you’ve never felt you needed more money? My nine year old has more than that. Yup just checked, 1109 In her savings.
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Are you sending your money down there to help like he does?
No?
Then your pointless post is simply wasting bandwidth, for it contributed absolutely nothing to the subject of discussion.
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