Diego, Manuel and Miguel fishing in Lake Maracaibo, in Cabimas, Venezuela. The lake has been polluted by oil leaking from damaged pipelines. Gas flares and leaking pipelines from Venezuela’s once-booming oil industry, hobbled by US sanctions and mismanagement, are polluting towns and the major lake. — ©2023 The New York Times Company
EACH morning, José Aguilera inspects the leaves of his banana and coffee plants on his farm in eastern Venezuela and calculates how much he can harvest – almost nothing.
Explosive gas flares from nearby oil wells spew an oily, flammable residue on the plants. The leaves burn, dry up and wither.
“There is no poison that can fight the oil,” he said. “When it falls, everything dries up.”
Venezuela’s oil industry, which helped transform the country’s fortunes, has been decimated by mismanagement and years of US sanctions imposed on the country’s authoritarian government, leaving behind a ravaged economy and a devastated environment.
The state-owned oil company has struggled to maintain minimal production for export to other countries, as well as domestic consumption. But to do so it has sacrificed basic maintenance and relied on increasingly shoddy equipment that has led to a growing environmental toll, activists say.
Aguilera lives in El Tejero, a town nearly 480km east of Caracas, the capital, in an oil-rich region known for towns that never see the darkness of night. Gas flares from oil wells light up at all hours with a roaring thunder, their vibrations causing the walls of rickety houses to crack.
Many residents complain of having respiratory diseases such as asthma, which scientists say can be aggravated by emissions from gas flares. Rain brings down an oily film that corrodes car engines, turns white clothes dark and stains notebooks that children carry to school.
Neighbours playing board games under a sky lit by gas flares near Punta de Mata in eastern Venezuela. — ©2023 The New York Times Company
And yet, paradoxically, widespread fuel shortages in the country with the world’s largest proven oil reserves mean virtually no one in this region has cooking gas at home.
Soon after President Hugo Chávez rose to power in the 1990s with promises to use the country’s oil wealth to lift up the poor, he fired thousands of oil workers, including engineers and geologists, and replaced them with political supporters, took control of foreign-owned oil assets, and neglected safety and environmental standards.
Then, in 2019, the United States accused Chavez’s successor, President Nicolás Maduro, of election fraud and imposed economic sanctions, including a ban on Venezuelan oil imports, to try to force him from power.
The country’s economy collapsed, helping to fuel a mass exodus of Venezuelans who could not afford to feed their families even as Maduro maintained his repressive hold on power.
After grinding nearly to a halt, the oil sector has seen a modest rebound, in part because US President Joe Biden’s administration last year allowed Chevron, the last American company producing oil in Venezuela, to restart operations on a limited basis.
The national oil industry’s travails have been worsened by a corruption investigation into missing oil money that has so far led to dozens of arrests and the resignation of the country’s oil minister.
In eastern Venezuela, rusting refineries burn off methane gases that are part of the fossil fuel industry’s operations and are important drivers of global warming.
Even though Venezuela produces far less oil than it once did, it ranks third in the world in methane emissions per barrel of oil produced, according to the International Energy Agency.
Cabimas, a city about 640km northwest of Caracas on the shores of Lake Maracaibo, is another centre of regional oil production. There, the state oil company, PDVSA, built hospitals and schools, set up summer camps and gave residents Christmas toys.
Now oil seeps from deteriorating underwater pipelines in the lake, coating the shores and turning the water a neon green that can be seen from space. Broken pipes float on the surface, and oil drills are rusting and sinking into the water. Birds coated in oil struggle to fly.
The collapse of the oil industry has left Cabimas, once one of the richest communities in Venezuela, in extreme poverty.
Every day at 5am, the three Méndez brothers – Miguel, 16, Diego, 14 and Manuel, 13 – untangle their fishing nets, clean them and row into the polluted waters of Lake Maracaibo, hoping to catch enough shrimp and fish to feed themselves, their parents and their younger sister.
They use gasoline to wash the oil from their skin.
Children play and bathe in the water, which smells of rotting sea life.
The boys’ father, Nelson Méndez, 58, was once a commercial fisherman, back when the lake was cleaner. He worries about getting sick from eating what his children catch, but he worries more about hunger.
He said he was hired by the state oil company about 10 years ago to help clean a fuel spill in the lake, but the work damaged his vision.
“Everything I worked for in life, I lost because of the oil,” Méndez said.
The poor maintenance of the fuel production machinery in Lake Maracaibo has led to an increase in oil spills, which have contaminated Cabimas and other communities along its shoreline, according to local organisations focusing on the issue.
The gas flares that burn across parts of Venezuela also point to the enfeeblement of the country’s fossil fuel industry: So much gas spews into the atmosphere because there is not enough functioning equipment to convert it into fuel, experts say.
Venezuela ranks among the worst countries in the world in terms of the volume of gas flares produced by its decrepit fuel operations, according to the World Bank.
A government minister, Josué Alejandro Lorca, said in 2021 that oil spills were “not a big deal because, historically, all oil companies have had them.” He added that the government did not have the resources to address the problem.
The state oil company did not respond to requests for comment.
In Cabimas, David Colina, 46, a fisherman, wears oil-stained orange overalls with the distinctive emblem of the state oil company.
Thirty years ago, he said, he could catch more than 90kg of fish. Now he is lucky if he pulls up 10kg in his net before he exchanges them for flour or rice from his neighbours.
When the state oil company was functioning better, Colina said, he would be compensated if an oil spill affected his fishing business. But now, he added, “there is no government here anymore”. — ©2023 The New York Times Company
