Fired Venezuela Oil Strikers Jobless but Defiant

asia.reuters.com Thu March 20, 2003 12:11 PM ET By Pascal Fletcher

CARACAS, Venezuela (Reuters) - Four months ago, Migdalia Salazar and Cecilia Hernandez had cushy office jobs at Venezuela's state oil firm Petroleos de Venezuela (PDVSA), one of the giants of the oil world.

Today, jobless and struggling to keep their family budgets afloat, they are selling homemade cakes and pastries at a makeshift stall outside their old office in east Caracas.

Fired with 16,000 other PDVSA employees for joining a recent two-month opposition strike against leftist President Hugo Chavez, the two are fighting to come to terms with their new status among the ranks of Venezuela's unemployed.

"I can't say that we're feeling happy. This is tough for all of us," said Hernandez, 45, as she waved away flies from a cloth-covered table offering potato omelets and cakes.

As a bilingual secretary of 23 years service in PDVSA's operations department, she and other fired colleagues enjoyed some of the best-paid and most coveted state jobs in the poverty-plagued nation, the world's No. 5 oil exporter.

But their lives as members of the country's envied professional elite were turned upside down in early December after they joined an opposition walkout seeking to force populist Chavez to resign and hold early elections. His foes accuse him of trying to install Cuban-style communism.

The tenacious former paratrooper, who survived a coup last year, refused to budge and ordered the strikers fired in their thousands, vilifying them as "traitors" and "terrorists" trying to topple him. The fired workers represent more than 40 percent of the original PDVSA work force.

Chavez, who makes a point of emphasizing his own humble background, displays little sympathy for the fired strikers. While they held their jobs, their average living standard was far above the destitution experienced by the impoverished majority of Venezuela's population.

Invoking the social and economic fault lines that bisect Venezuela's society, Chavez portrays the PDVSA rebels as a snobbish, insensitive "mafia" whom he accuses of plundering the country's oil wealth while turning their backs on the poor.

COME DOWN IN THE WORLD

Most found out about their dismissals through daily newspapers, where the government published long lists of the executives and employees being removed from their posts.

"I was fired twice, in two lists," said Maria Gabriela Gil, who used to work for PDVSA's technology and information department but now staffs the strikers' cake stall.

The fired oil employees are now rallying together to survive, setting up a solidarity fund to help out the most needy of their out-of-work colleagues and organizing raffles, bingo games, dances, markets and cake sales to raise money.

Salazar, a 56-year-old mother of three who worked for PDVSA for 34 years and speaks English and French, is unrepentant.

"This is all about resistance. We're not moving an inch," said the veteran oil company staffer, who before the strike served in PDVSA's external relations department attending foreign oil delegations and helping to organize conferences.

But some of the fired workers, who range from highly paid executives and engineers to secretaries and field workers such as welders and divers, are already feeling the pinch from not having received a paycheck for several months.

"I think the majority of us are already living off our savings," said Mirna Santella, who had worked as a supervisor at the PDVSA petrochemicals affiliate Pequiven.

The strikers have set up a meeting place outside PDVSA offices in east Caracas, a hotbed of opposition to Chavez. They gather daily around the building to plan their next protests against the government, organize solidarity campaigns or simply to offer each other advice, sympathy and support.

"There is a sense of family that is being maintained ... It's as if the company is existing on the street," said Rafael Porras, a former advisor for strategic planning in PDVSA's exploration and production department.

HOPING TO RETURN, BUT WHEN?

Porras said private companies and individuals were supporting the solidarity fund with donations. Associations of doctors and psychologists, insurance firms and even landlords' groups were also offering services, facilities, credits and discounts to make life easier for the fired workers.

But Porras said the strikers were so far avoiding holding mass public collections in the streets because they are aware that even without jobs they are still better off for the moment than the vast majority of unemployed Venezuelans.

The strikers maintain the hope that, sooner or later, they will be going back to the company. "We're doing this with the conviction that we are going to return," said Gil.

But the question is when. Chavez says most of the recent PDVSA strikers actively backed the short-lived coup against him in April 2002 and vows they will not be given another chance to cause mischief in the country's most strategic industry.

"There will be no forgiveness for anyone. Traitors are traitors. They can't come back and they won't come back," the president said earlier this month as he swore in a new, firmly pro-government management of PDVSA.

This means that the former PDVSA employees are banking on Chavez being pressured or voted out of office well before he completes his current term due to end in early 2007.

The president has resisted opposition calls for early elections. But his government says it accepts the idea of a binding recall referendum which under the constitution can be held after August 19, half-way through Chavez's current term.

"He's going, before August," said Hernandez optimistically.

Opposition leaders struggling to negotiate a deal on elections with the government have promised the fired PDVSA workers their reinstatement will be a condition of any political agreement. Government negotiators have dismissed this demand as a non-starter but the strikers see it as a lifeline.

SABOTAGE DENIED

But the PDVSA rebels insist they will not go back while the company remains under Chavez loyalists, such as the current president, former left-wing guerrilla Ali Rodriguez. He served as secretary general of the oil exporters' cartel OPEC before he took over as PDVSA president last year following the coup.

Chavez has called for the arrest of the oil industry strikers, accusing them of seriously damaging the national economy and sabotaging the installations they abandoned.

State prosecutors issued arrest orders for seven leading PDVSA strikers, forcing them into hiding, but an appeals court later quashed the orders, alleging legal flaws.

The strikers deny any sabotage and say the faults, fires and oil spills that have occurred at refineries and fields in the last few months were caused by inexperienced personnel and troops brought in by the government to replace them.

Nevertheless, the government says it is gradually restoring the country's oil operations to normal. The strikers dispute this, saying the company will never recover its former output and export levels unless the fired workers are reinstated.