[AMERICANTHINKER] Powerful names in Venezuela's oil industry, people who've been in and out of the picture for years, went down like bowling pins in Venezuela this week. Nelson Martínez, Venezuela's chief of the state oil company, Petroleos de Venezuela S.A. (PDVSA), was one. Eulogio del Pino, the country's oil minister, was another. Whoever was acting director of Venezuela's U.S. refiner and distributor, CITGO, isn't there, either. A blurb from Nov. 29 says Asdrubal Chavez is now running the U.S. operation, and many of the CITGO officials are now detained in Caracas. Chavez is a cousin of Venezuela's late president, Hugo Chavez. Even the press contacts' names are now different.
It's tempting to see this move as a bold measure by the government of Nicolás Maduro to be doing something to improve things, given the parlous state of Venezuela's oil industry, whose inability to pump its OPEC quota has been described as a "gift to OPEC" (most of the other OPEC members cheat and pump more than they are allowed) and whose bonds are in default. Venezuelan oil output has dropped precipitously, falling below the 2-million barrel-a-day mark for the first time in 29 years.
An for sure, it's an oil industry plagued with corruption. But Maduro's men, the people doing the busting, are, if anything, more corrupt than the miscreants under arrest. Maduro's guys are the ones under U.S. sanctions for activities such as drug-dealing. The oil officials, rich and corpulent as they are, haven't been accused of that.
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