There is a line of three men, two of them in wheelchairs, hooked up to an IV. They are in a corner in the shadow of the Central University of Venezuela. Others lie clothed on mats with pillowcases. They are crossing the age and ninth day of their hunger strike, surrounded by groups of young students who are also lying on the ground, laughing, talking and looking indifferently at what is happening a few meters away from them. Young people certainly kill free time between classes; The older men are retirees from PDVSA, Venezuela’s largest company, which has gobbled up the money they had saved for years for their retirement. “This is the maintenance area,” jokes Daniel Bucko, still with a needle in his arm that he uses to hydrate himself to keep hypoglycemia and high blood pressure at bay after days without eating.
A group of oil company pensioners have been on hunger strike since September 26th. They mobilized from different regions to Caracas to exert pressure after years of protests and complaints about the lack of agreements with the authorities on the disbursement of money from the state pension fund, created with contributions from workers and the company, to secure your income in retirement. This is the second attempt. In early September, they also staged a similar protest at the company’s headquarters and announced a meeting date where they were told they did not have the money to pay them. They continued the strike from a safer location, fearing a violent evacuation of the entrance to the company’s headquarters.
Two pensioners on hunger strike are treated by a doctor in Caracas, Venezuela, on October 4th. Miguel Zambrano
Days and days go by and this weekend still no authority has come to listen to them. However, the company sent the doctors to support them during the strike “because it is not comfortable for them to die,” says Joel Lenoy, 62, who traveled 500 kilometers from Paraguaná to join the protest, but in Had to retire a few days ago with the diagnosis of high blood pressure. “I have dedicated 26 years of my life to PDVSA and look how they treat us,” he complains. “I have a sister who has cancer and all the money I saved could now be used to help her,” he says, frustrated. He worked in industry and oversaw the installation of the scaffolding that was regularly erected in factories to allow people to climb up to manipulate valves and keys. “When the oil strike (between 2002 and 2003 was one of the first points of tension between Chavismo and the opposition), we pushed everything forward and that’s how they paid us.”
In 2016, before the sanctions, the company stopped paying interest earned by the pension fund and accounting for its use, as well as income generated from the usufruct exploitation of real estate acquired as assets with workers’ funds. The retirees estimate that PDVSA owes the fund alone at least $2.3 billion in interest because the company claimed ownership of the retirees’ assets following a reform of the charter that governs the fund. According to their calculations, they should receive $660 a month to pay off these debts for the rest of their lives, but they only receive $180, which is not enough to live in an inflation-stricken country. They also demand that the bag of groceries that they stopped receiving four months ago be paid for in dollars and that the quality of health services that the company provided through insurance be restored, since, according to them, retired colleagues die every week without having received medical help.
This is another debt facing the oil company, which in recent years has been mired in corruption, international litigation over expropriations and defaulted bonds, as well as bad debts from bogus intermediaries. Poor management that has led to low production levels at a time when international sanctions against the government of Nicolás Maduro have made it difficult to market Venezuelan crude.
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Two men measure each other’s blood pressure.Miguel Zambrano
The situation of the 37,000 oil retirees is precarious, but that of other sectors is no better. In general, public administration has the worst salaries in Venezuela and has led many institutions into decline. The salary is not enough to go to work every day. The minimum wage has not been increased in more than a year and is less than $3 a month. Most retirees notice this. Labor demands are one of the reasons Venezuelans protest the most, and union leaders are jailed for leading these demonstrations. There are no social security guarantees in Venezuela. Last week, the International Labor Organization was expected to meet with the government on the fourth day of the so-called social dialogue being promoted to resolve the country’s gigantic labor dispute, but the meetings were suspended.
The wound of unemployment
Daniel Bucko dedicated 31 years to marine maintenance in the oil industry; half of his life. He optimized the equipment of barges and ships for transporting crude oil. He comes from Cabimas, on the shores of Lake Maracaibo in the west of the country, near where the first jet of tar appeared more than 100 years ago, turning Venezuela into an oil country. After many interviews and tests, he joined PDVSA at the age of 24. “PDVSA was successful,” he recalls. Throughout his service, he donated part of his salary to the pension fund founded in 1992 to enable employees to live a decent old age. What you should perceive now is not what belongs to you. It is not enough for him to support a house where he lives with two of his daughters and four grandchildren, which has damaged the air conditioning systems that people in Zulia rely on to sleep in temperatures approaching 40 degrees.
The retired oil worker also bears the wound of the 2002 strike, which also marked a rift in the country’s recent history. He was one of those who continued to work and was accused of being a traitor by his colleagues, who decided to submit to the measure promoted at the time by Hugo Chávez’s opposition leaders. “I told them that we had to work, that this worst politician had nothing to do with us,” he remembers with anger. “I have lost comrades and comrades because of this problem. “They took away my speech.” Despite the support he gave to the company’s operations at this critical moment, when the government finally managed to gain political control of the state-owned company, today it became a large part of what he believed to be his what he had saved for retirement was taken away.
During this pause, the government fired 18,000 workers for joining the strike, and the era of the “paratroopers,” as Bucko calls them, began. “After the strike, Chávez gave the green light to Raimundo and everyone, from CD sellers to horse auctioneers, who had the right to work but were not qualified. It was the hand-picked bosses, paratroopers above us who were thrown into the trash. They gave me a boy who was a computer technician as my supervisor, and I was already a foreman in naval maintenance. “It made me cry,” he says today about that hunger strike.
Julio Blanco, who until recently was a tugboat captain, with his company badge. Miguel Zambrano
Juan Pablo Chacón was a heavy equipment operator at PDVSA. He remembers the transport of asphalt trucks from the center of the country to the plains. Also extinguishing fires in crude oil tanks. “We are old people with only a few years left to live and we owe ourselves some money. “It’s as if they wanted us to die so they could keep what they took from us every week,” says the 66-year-old, who walks with a cane and, like Bucko, also raises grandchildren of children who are searching After they emigrated, there are opportunities given the ongoing crisis in Venezuela.
On September 26, eight pensioners began the strike and three have already left, beaten by days without food. “We have a lot to thank you for,” Pedro Tellechea told a pensioners’ representative group in January this year, when he had just been appointed president of the PDVSA by Nicolás Maduro. “Last year at an event they called us heroes because we rebuilt the company after the oil strike. Those of us who built the industry are now retiring and being treated like garbage,” claims Julio Blanco, who until recently worked as a tugboat captain.
In Venezuela, hunger strikes are extreme measures of protest, but are often repeated due to the government’s lack of response. “We did everything possible, talked, sent letters, protested, we closed the streets and we didn’t achieve anything, that’s why we’re stuck in here,” says Blanco with his old worker ID card around his neck. He hopes that Tellechea will keep his word or at least send a high-level commission with which they can negotiate payment of their debts.
Juan Pablo Chacón is transported in a wheelchair by a PDVSA doctor to inject him with serum. Miguel Zambrano
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