The Devil's Excrement

For months we have been hearing about how the country was producing over 3 million barrels of oil a day under the revolutionary PDVSA and how those 18,000 fired workers were not needed and how international reserves were recovering. Any doubters were always criticized as sore losers who did not know better. Whenever any international agency suggested Venezuela or PDVSA were producing less than the 3 million barrel figure, the Vice-President or the Minister of Energy or the President of PDVSA would give a press conference and say that there was obviously a political motivation in the announcements and that Venezuela had indeed been producing 3.2 million barrels of oil a day ever since late March of this year. The former workers of PDVSA under their umbrella organization “Gente del Petroleo” have been saying all along that this was not true. But then, peculiar things began happening, the Central Bank said it could not publish numbers until PDVSA gave it numbers, that the numbers did not add up, then Chavez said that the country was producing 2.3 million barrels of oil in a Freudian slip or excess talking by him. Finally, the Wall Street Journal wrote an article confirming that production indeed was at best 2.5 millions barrels of oil a day.

To put things in perspective, before the December strike, the country was producing roughly 2.8 million barrels of oil a day. Now here in this link you will find the smoking gun of the big lie by the Chavez administration, the presentation by PDVSA Western Manager Felix Rodriguez to the Board of Directors of the company on the real status of production in the west. Among other pearls it says:

-A continuous decline in crude oil production due to the absence of generation/rehabilitation of wells/optimization and maintenance of the installations (loss of 560 million barrels of oil a day). Now, let’s stop right here. If the country was producing 2.8 million and your remove 560 million barrels it will be difficult to produce 3 million barrels of oil a day, no? What liars!

-The process of extracting LNG continuous to be limited due to the unstable operation of 2 of the six plants….

-The volume and quality of gas to the internal market remains limited to the lack of gas (50%)

-The Olefin II plant continues to operate at between 50-60% of its capacity since there is no ethane.

Wow! This is the “Revolutionary PDVSA” that was working normally according to all the big liars!!! This is a revolution? This is the destruction of PDVSA for the pseudo revolution’s sake. What a shame!

The rest of the presentation simply quantifies the first slide, until, you get to the last slide where it says that 2 of the 23 drills are down, but 21 of the 22 subsurface machines were not working.

The question is: Should we then believe the fiscal numbers?

For months we have been hearing about how the country was producing over 3 million barrels of oil a day under the revolutionary PDVSA and how those 18,000 fired workers were not needed and how international reserves were recovering. Any doubters were always criticized as sore losers who did not know better. Whenever any international agency suggested Venezuela or PDVSA were producing less than the 3 million barrel figure, the Vice-President or the Minister of Energy or the President of PDVSA would give a press conference and say that there was obviously a political motivation in the announcements and that Venezuela had indeed been producing 3.2 million barrels of oil a day ever since late March of this year. The former workers of PDVSA under their umbrella organization “Gente del Petroleo” have been saying all along that this was not true. But then, peculiar things began happening, the Central Bank said it could not publish numbers until PDVSA gave it numbers, that the numbers did not add up, then Chavez said that the country was producing 2.3 million barrels of oil in a Freudian slip or excess talking by him. Finally, the Wall Street Journal wrote an article confirming that production indeed was at best 2.5 millions barrels of oil a day.

To put things in perspective, before the December strike, the country was producing roughly 2.8 million barrels of oil a day. Now here in this link you will find the smoking gun of the big lie by the Chavez administration, the presentation by PDVSA Western Manager Felix Rodriguez to the Board of Directors of the company on the real status of production in the west. Among other pearls it says:

-A continuous decline in crude oil production due to the absence of generation/rehabilitation of wells/optimization and maintenance of the installations (loss of 560 million barrels of oil a day). Now, let’s stop right here. If the country was producing 2.8 million and your remove 560 million barrels it will be difficult to produce 3 million barrels of oil a day, no? What liars!

-The process of extracting LNG continuous to be limited due to the unstable operation of 2 of the six plants….

-The volume and quality of gas to the internal market remains limited to the lack of gas (50%)

-The Olefin II plant continues to operate at between 50-60% of its capacity since there is no ethane.

Wow! This is the “Revolutionary PDVSA” that was working normally according to all the big liars!!! This is a revolution? This is the destruction of PDVSA for the pseudo revolution’s sake. What a shame!

The rest of the presentation simply quantifies the first slide, until, you get to the last slide where it says that 2 of the 23 drills are down, but 21 of the 22 subsurface machines were not working.

The question is: Should we then believe the fiscal numbers?

Hugo Chavez can’t run a country, but he has usually been pretty shrewd about politics and political strategy. Thus, it was somewhat of a surprise when on Saturday he announced that he had already chosen his candidates for Governors in the 2004 regional elections. It appears as if Chavez simply improvised, thinking that third would be a good strategy to distract attention away from the recall referendum. But the strategy or improvisation appears to have backfired. To begin with Chavez proposed the Mayor of Maracaibo Martino, to run against current Governor Rosales. However, Martino declined the next day, saying that he was happy where he was. The truth is that while Rosales’ popularity has been soaring and is currently at a 69% approval rating, Martino’s has declined mainly due to his association with Chavez. Chavez MVR even had to send a delegation to Maracaibo to talk to Martino and Chavez said on TV that Martino had changed his mind at the same time Martino himself was reiterating, once again, that he was not interested in being Governor. But perhaps it was worse in other regions. Chavez announced the candidacies of some of his closest associates in some cases to the Governorships of states that they are not even from. This has actually created a feeling of uncertainty in the regions, where others who have been loyal to Chavez had been planning to run next year. Meanwhile, Chavez thought that the opposition would pick up the ball and start talking elections, but it is clear that the opposition has realized that it gains nothing by replying to everything Chavez says. Thus, Chavez issue has become a non-issue in a scant three days. A different take is that of Tal Cual Editor Teodoro Petkoff, who focuses more on the fact that, once again, Chavez has forgotten about the promises and beliefs that took him to the Presidency and made him so popular. This is Petkoff’s take:

Participatory Democracy by Simon Bocanegra a.k.a Teodoro Petkoff

It is not even worth wondering about those candidacies that Chavez launched at his rally on Saturday. It is just bullshit, directed at artificially creating an electoral climate, different from the recall referendum

But this mini-reporter is going to look at it form a different point of  view. That of the singular “democratic” criteria of the President. In none of the states for which Chavez announced candidacies was the opinion of the members of MVR even polled, nor that of the allied parties. He even said it “This is MY cock”, “This is MY candidate”. This is called “participative democracy”.

I participate that I do what I want. In MVR there is no group of insiders, what there is, is the will of a single person that imposes, without any discussion, without even the fiction of a democratic debate, over a submissive collective (and perhaps a collective ashamed of the role it is playing) which everyone expects will obey. However, if in the National Directorate of MVR the majority are robots; we only have to wait a little bit to see the reaction of the militants in the regional states. That those candidates that Chavez proposed are accepted just like that will be more difficult that climbing a palm tree on your back,
 

You will see the messy fights they will have.