Oil sector retirees on hunger strike in front of one of the headquarters of Petroleos de Venezuela (PDVSA) in Caracas on September 13, 2023 (AFP/Miguel Zambrano)
To survive, Marlon Bermudez, 59, is going to sell his house, the result of 30 years of work in Venezuela’s largest refinery. Like many retirees from the once thriving oil sector, he does not have enough to live on.
He is one of the former employees of the public giant Petroleos de Venezuela (PDVSA) who began a hunger strike this week in Caracas to demand dividends from the pension fund to which they contributed in view of their old age.
Like 37,000 other PDVSA retirees, he paid 3% of his monthly income for decades to ensure a “dignified old age”… Part of which was wasted.
Each retiree was supposed to receive around 660 dollars per month, today they only receive 180.
“This money is ours, we are not a burden, our payment has nothing to do with oil production, it is money that we have saved,” explains Marlon Bermudez, for whom he is acts as a due and not as a handout.
A life at odds with what they knew at the time when the country was prosperous, driven by the locomotive of the oil industry.
PDVSA employees were then a kind of nobility of the country with high salaries, top-notch health insurance and golden pensions.
Venezuelan retirees assure that their pension fund was “looted”, September 13, 2023 (AFP/Miguel Zambrano)
However, production has fallen from three million barrels per day a decade ago to around 700,000 barrels per day today, mainly due to mismanagement of the sector and widespread corruption.
Julio Blanco, a former oil tanker captain, assures that PDVSA leaders had promised to meet the protesters after a first 36-hour hunger strike on September 12. But the movement resumed on the 25th, the leaders having told them they could not honor the payments.
– Anti-corruption “crusade” –
“They tell us there is no money but where did (Tareck) El Aissami steal so much money? It is difficult to hear that there is no money when (…) there are people in prison because they stole money”, he protests, referring to the PDVSA scandal.
Former oil minister Tareck El Aissami resigned in March as several senior officials, including an MP, were arrested as part of an anti-corruption “crusade” that resulted in more than 50 arrests.
Since 2017, Venezuelan justice has launched countless investigations into the sector with more than 200 arrests in total, including former Oil Ministers Eulogio del Pino and Nelson Martinez, the latter having died in custody.
The retirement fund of Marlon Bermudez and his colleagues has not escaped this widespread corruption. “It was looted, it was stolen, in 2014,” assures Ivan Freites, an oil unionist in exile.
Wilfredo Molina, 65, retired since 2018 after 28 years in the sector, traveled more than 600 kilometers from Lagunillas (west), to reach the capital and the hunger strike movement for the second time.
“We live badly,” he said, sitting in a corridor of the Central University of Venezuela, where the strikers were based. They had started the protest at the administrative headquarters of PDVSA but since then they have been prohibited from entering.
A sign with photos of Venezuelan retirees who died without having received their pension funds, in Caracas, September 13, 2023 (AFP/Miguel Zambrano)
Marlon Bermudez is languishing: “I have a beautiful house that I bought with my work and I’m selling it off because I can’t maintain it,” he says.
He estimates that it is worth 40,000 dollars, but he will settle for 15,000 “to buy a smaller house, so that I will have enough money to live on.”
Still calling himself an admirer of President Hugo Chavez, spiritual father of President Nicolas Maduro, Marlon Bermudez hopes for a solution: “We are not traitors to the country, we are not terrorists or saboteurs, we are a group of retirees of PDVSA who demand that the government give us back what belongs to us.
© 2023 AFP
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