CARACAS, Venezuela — Three years after President Hugo Chavez purged 20,000 employees from state-owned Petroleos de Venezuela, the oil giant's production still hasn't recovered, but many who became part of a global diaspora of Venezuelan talent slowly are putting their lives and careers back together.
Take oil engineer Lino Carrillo, who was general manager of new business development at Petroleos de Venezuela, known as PDVSA, when Chavez sacked half of the energy giant's employees. For two years Carrillo had little success finding work in Caracas, and he burned through his savings. Now, the native of Maracaibo on Venezuela's coast is playing a significant role in Suncor Energy Inc.'s project to extract crude from the frigid oil sands of northern Alberta, Canada.
"It's a change. It's much colder here, like 25 below zero," Carrillo said in a telephone interview from Fort McMurray in Alberta, where he and his family have relocated. "But the Canadians have been very welcoming."
An estimated 1,000 former PDVSA workers, many of them with graduate degrees from U.S. and European universities, have left Venezuela for Mexico, the United States, Russia, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia -- wherever oil is being sought, produced or refined.
"Things are expanding here with a lot of projects on the drawing board," said Ciro Izarra, a former PDVSA facilities planning specialist who is now working for an oil company in Dharhan on Saudi Arabia's Persian Gulf coast. He chose not to name the company for fear of political reprisals back home. "It's been professionally and economically interesting, an agreeable surprise."
PDVSA's recovery from the devastating loss of personnel seems to have stalled. The mass firings -- which included 75% of the company's engineers, 70% of research scientists and 50% of its refinery employees -- are an important factor in its failure to regain production levels of late 2002. That's when a series of strikes began in response to Chavez's efforts to bend the previously independent company to his political will, culminating in the mass layoffs in early 2003 and the decline of daily output to as low as 700,000 barrels.
Although the Chavez government claims that production has largely recovered and is averaging 3.2 million barrels of crude a day, industry experts contend that the level is closer to 2.6 million barrels, a 25% drop from the 3.5 million that Venezuela was producing before chaos enveloped the state company.
