Award-winning theater and television librettist respected by the educated and entertainment public, the powerful essayist Ibsen Martínez was the public intellectual par excellence, the columnist that everyone read every Sunday in Venezuela’s print press between 1995 and 2005. He is now a columnist for EL PAÍS and has been living in Bogotá for several years, where he follows developments in Latin America and Venezuela, giving continuity to an already extensive work in the fields of narrative, essays and theater. Martínez is the author of Through These Streets, a critical soup opera of enormous commercial success that sharply characterized the mores of this society in crisis in the glory days of commercial television from 1992 to 1994. Record on television, was responsible for many for stoking a somewhat disproportionate indignation at the behavior of democracy and its interpretative trail, which has now become the ferment of Chavismo. With Oil Story (Tusquest, Andanzas, 2023), Martínez presents a fascinating police story set in Venezuela in the year immediately before Hugo Chávez came to power.
Questions. He photographed a pivotal moment in the country’s recent history. What do you want to express?
Answer. The small story in the book has fewer heroic deeds. I always thought that so-called writer’s block was a snobbish trick some intellectuals used to justify their low productivity. But no, it exists, it is a difficult disease to understand for those who do not practice this as a profession. It also coincided with my move to Bogotá, something I longed for: to escape the Venezuelan madness and move to a Spanish-speaking city that had a great public library.
Q How did this story come about?
R. In 2010, I wrote a play called “Petroleros Suicidas” about anti-Chavista political oil activism and the role of PDVSA management in the opposition’s attempt to overthrow Hugo Chávez in 2002. Some of them got it wrong. I put a lot into this piece in terms of “plot design.” I forgot about her and came to Colombia. It made me desperate to be full of ideas and topics with anecdotes and to have this block. But once in Cartagena I had a meeting with Juan Forn, a great literary friendship that greatly influenced my work. He realized that this problem had to be solved and that it was necessary to write the book that he carried within him. I seriously intended to include him in the story. Find a lever to tell a novel with a pretext that I knew very well. And there was Suicide Oilers. I decided to write it as a police officer.
Q Aren’t you very harsh in your dealings with the management of Petróleos de Venezuela at the time?
R. I had some reactions after I wrote the text, consulted friends who didn’t like it. In retrospect, it strikes me that this ruling class behaved like a feudal establishment in this crisis, the crisis of the 2002 oil strike that was intended to force Hugo Chávez to resign from the presidency. Some super managers with zombie ideas about politics – the concept comes from Moisés Naim; An idea that is dead. This thing about how man falls when industry stops. They viewed a 19th century leader like Hugo Chávez as a controllable military man. Honestly, I don’t think I’m overdoing it. I thought about it very carefully. I measured and re-read every word.
Q As an author, you have a clear calling for the oil question as a conceptual juncture.
R. As a teenager, I discovered very quickly that the most nutritious part of what was really happening in the oil world, even in Venezuelan, was to be found in the English language, sources alien to the simplicity of certain national sociologists with Marxist biases. What changed my life in the 90s was reading Terry Lyn Karl’s book, The Origin of the Petrostates, which she wrote with Venezuela as her base of operations. The paradox of abundance. I always thought there was a good story there. My father had a career as an administrator, he was a constant assistant to people in oil production in the east of the country. In this area, I was very encouraged to read about these topics that always seemed very natural to me. I needed the decoy, the alibi to portray Venezuela in the late 90s.
Q Why criticize the meritocracy of the old PDVSA? Don’t we miss them? With the ultimate destruction of the company, doesn’t Chavismo culturally express the end of meritocracy?
R. As a concept, that of the civil servant in general, yes. The arrogant meritocracy of this PDVSA before Chávez came to power. If I were pressed and had to point out what caused this debacle to be where we are today, I would say it was the 2002 oil strike, the terrible leadership of that strike that was associated with management and entrenched Chavismo in power.
Q The novel presents a negative assessment of everyday national life at the time. For many people, the decline of democracy in Venezuela has to do with this hypercritical bias.
R. I do not agree. I continue to believe that we as a nation have a serious problem: Venezuela has no tragic significance. The Venezuelan describes himself as a euphoric, a compulsion to be happy. The decline of Venezuelan democracy is made more difficult by the fact that the political class at the time had no understanding of the future. This was a tasty ruling class in a tasty country.
Q Among many Venezuelans there is a denial attitude towards the country in the face of its crisis, a refusal to belong to its sphere. How do you deal with the failure of Venezuela?
R. From a distance I read a lot about my country again, both what I had already read and what was new. For example, here in Colombia, to my surprise, I discovered Teresa de la Parra, a great Venezuelan storyteller. His reflections opened my eyes to many topics, his way of going into exile. In her correspondence one recognizes a very penetrating feminine intelligence about the country in which she was born. A country he loves and hates, as may be the case with me. I can only be Venezuelan.
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