the Bolivariana Revolution sponsored person by president Hugo Chavez depends on a single product: petroleum; and of the state company extracts that it and exports: Petroleums of Venezuela (PDVSA) On the manna of dollars that reported black gold to him were going to be constructed to the Socialism of the 21st century and the America of the DAWN that ended the Yankee hegemony in Hispano-America.
In the end, the terrible governmental management of the company, the fall of the world-wide demand of petroleum and the null confidence that a country as Venezuela inspires by the investors have taken to once the powerful PDVSA to the same edge of the bankruptcy.
Less income more expenses
The numbers do not give foot to many interpretations. The income have collapsed a 52% in the first semester of 2009 due to the contraction of the demand, especially the North American, and to the increase of expenses that it has had to face the oil one after the nationalization in May of 60 companies of oil services, whose 8,000 employees have happened to thicken the PDVSA list.
Chávez, that to expropriate these companies in which it denominated a “historical act of sovereignty”, already owns the control of the practical totality of the Venezuelan oil industry, from the extraction to the commercialization happening through the transport and the maintenance. A mamotreto similar and managed by the men of the president, good subjects but bad industralists, has finished leaking and supposedly eating substantial and the inexhaustible yields of petroleum.
The bank has had to put on the table 2,000 million dollars to pay lists that, more likely, will not recover. The non-payments are the dominant tonic in PDVSA. One is pleased to the contractors, neither to the suppliers nor, naturally, to the banks. Little that is being of company deprived in Venezuela it fears to the president and his expropiating avidity.
In the Palace of Miraflores they do not seem to have understood the terminal crisis which they face and they continue spending lavishly and giving the money. Only in Venezuela imports it spends 40,000 million annual dollars, that today are almost the oil income of the country. It would be necessary to add the interests of the debt and the riotous cost to him in maintaining from bottoms the friendly Governments of Bolivia, Ecuador and Cuba well assorted.
PDVSA has destined about 30,000 million dollars to the countries clients and prochavistas organizations worldwide. And that to only buy wills in the outside. Within Venezuela the economy is acquiring the landlords of inefficiency and corruption of the socialist economies.
Social wastes grow, but not it production of the country, more and more estatalizada and put under the whims of the bolivariano caudillo. Only in Defense the cost has increased a 30%, that serves well to feed the official paranoia on the imminent war against Colombia and the United States. The Central bank of Venezuela has calculated the increase of public cost it has based and it in an increase of 837% between 1999 and 2007. During the good years that cost could be cushioned by riada of petrodollars that flooded the country, now, with the skinny cows, the system is in danger to colapsar.
The investors distrust
The investors have given the back him to the regime because they do not entrust themselves in him. Because to make businesses in Venezuela he constitutes a considerable risk, others because the dictator does not pay or for behind schedule, badly and never. The reserves of the Strip of the Orinoco, that were the great hope of Chávez to overcome the flight, do not finish putting themselves to work. Two agreements have been only signed, with the Chinese CNPC and Indian ONGC. The rest of permissions follows slopes, tangled in the laberíntica and arbitrary Venezuelan bureaucracy.
The United States, main client of Venezuelan petroleum from always, has looked for alternative. They have reduced the imports of crude Venezuelan to half. The World Bank has made public that only a 9.6% of the petroleum concerned by the USA come from Venezuela, when 10 years ago he was 17%.
The Yankee vilipendiados ones have found suppliers more reliable, like Brazilian Petrobra’s or Mexican PEMEX. But, paradoxicalally, Venezuela is more and more employee of the American market, however, the percentage of the Venezuelan production that is sold in the United States is of 74%, the highest level in the last years.
The economy of Venezuela, as it is conceived, is untenable in the short term. If petroleum stays below the 100 dollars/Chávez barrel it has it very difficult to square ruinous accounts that every time are looked more like those of the Great Captain. And the bankruptcy of the oil model would bring prepared, inevitably, the collapse of its bolivariana revolution.