Oil workers flee Venezuela’s crisis for a better life

PUNTO FIJO, Venezuela (AP) — Nieves Ribullen, a Venezuelan oil worker sick of struggling to get by as his country falls apart, is betting it all on far-away Iraq’s Kurdish region to give his family a better life.

Over the years he’s watched dozens 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 far-flung places like Kuwait, Angola and Chile.

Now it’s his turn.

Leaving his wife and three children behind, he’ll soon ship out to Iraq’s semi-autonomous northern Kurdish region, where he expects to earn more than $3,500 a month — a fortune compared to the less than $20 he brings home monthly in increasingly unstable Venezuela.

“I only earn enough to buy a kilo (2 pounds) of meat and one chicken each month,” Ribullen said.

“We’re in chaos.”

Opposition leader Juan Guaido has rallied support from distraught Venezuelans and roughly 40 countries that now recognise him as Venezuela’s rightful 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 President 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.

Critics blame corruption and years of mismanagement by the socialist government.

Even worse, production is about to sink even further due to fresh sanctions by the Trump administration targeting PDVSA and its Houston-based subsidiary Citgo with the aim of depriving Maduro of more than $11 billion in exports this year.

Venezuela’s oil workers began flooding out in 2003, shortly after Chavez fired thousands of them — many by name on national television — for launching a strike that paralysed 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 as Venezuela’s economic problems have worsened under Maduro, but from the tar sands of northern Canada to the deserts of Kuwait, Venezuelan roughnecks now live in more than 90 oil-producing countries.

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