Hugo! (59 page)

But now Chávez was threatening to undo it all. He wanted to seize
control of
PDVSA, divert the company's profits to the majority poor, shut
down the chalets in the Andes, sell off the fleet of jets, end the plans for
privatization, and bring in his own people to run the oil giant. If that
happened, the elites' access to the hen with the golden eggs would be
over.

Chávez was not about to surrender easily to the strikers. The government
analyzed three possible scenarios stemming from the walkout.
They could negotiate with the opposition for early elections — a possibility
the government rejected. They might also face another coup
— something Chávez was far more alert to now than in April. A final
scenario was letting the strike simply wear itself out like the protest
in the Plaza Altamira by the military rebels. Chávez thought that was
the best strategy. "Let's fight them," he said at one high-level meeting.
"We've got the support of the people, of the
armed forces and of the
workers" at PDVSA.

The "strike" at pdvsa was really more of a
management lockout,
since many mid- and low-level employees ignored the walkout and
reported to work. The strikers and their supporters tried to stop them,
surrounding installations and intimidating them as they arrived. The
protestors also
sabotaged the industry, destroying electrical lines, paralyzing
refineries, dumping water into the ships' fuel tanks, and hacking
into PDVSA's computer system to create havoc.

Chávez moved quickly to try to regain control of the installations.
He dispatched
troops to secure service stations, oil wells, refineries, and
gasoline distribution centers. Then, on December 13, he called on his
supporters to surround key oil installations. They would form human
chains to protect them.

The
situation was desperate. Gasoline supplies were dwindling, and
service stations were closed. So Chávez did something else previously
unthinkable in a nation with some of the world's largest oil reserves — he
imported gasoline. He contacted Brazil,
Trinidad and Tobago, Mexico,
Russia, and other countries to ask them to send what they could. When
basic foods grew scarce, he cobbled together another informal
supply
network, persuading Colombia, the Dominican Republic, and others to
send rice, flour, milk, meat, and other products.

With PDVSA, he took a hard line. On December 12 he fired four
executives — including Juan Fernández — who were leading the strike.
Chávez had dismissed them and several others in April just before the
coup, but reinstated them after the revolt to ease tensions. Now he
decided to clean out the company wholesale. Day by day he dismissed
more striking executives
and managers, until some three hundred were
gone by early January. Thousands more followed. Industry experts and
dissident PDVSA executives predicted the government would be unable
to restart the company or get it back to its normal
production levels
without the fired employees' expertise.

During much of December, it seemed like they were right. PDVSA
had suffered a devastating blow. Production plummeted to as little as
150,000 barrels a day, compared with normal output of 3 million a day.
Exports typically averaging 2.5 million barrels a day dropped to next
to nothing. The Supreme Court ordered striking PDVSA managers and
executives back to work, but they simply ignored the order.
Oil production,
the lifeline of the economy, slowed to a trickle. The country was
gasping for breath.

The government believed the critical period for defeating the strike
and ending the sabotage was December 16-21. If they could not make
progress by then, they would be in serious trouble. They came up with
a strategy they called
Plan 1621.

Chávez desperately needed gasoline. The
Pilín León
was sitting
in Lake Maracaibo with nearly twelve million gallons of it. So he
ordered soldiers to take over the ship and arrest the captain. Navy
troops scaled up the side of the tanker with ropes and held the crew at
gunpoint. But the sailors refused to leave, saying they were protecting
the ship and would not hand it over to an unqualified crew. Chávez
was having trouble finding a replacement team. Ultimately the government
convinced a number of retired seamen including Captain
Carlos López to assume the mission.

López and the others climbed aboard the vessel on December 19,
protected by soldiers as opposition supporters circled the tanker in boats.
They spent two days working nonstop to prepare to restart the
Pilín
León
. It was a dangerous mission. The tanker was a gigantic floating
bomb. If something went wrong — an engine overheated, a spark
flashed in a gas tank — it could set off a cataclysmic explosion. The
ship also had to navigate underneath the massive Maracaibo Bridge to
reach port. If it went off course, it could smash into the pillars and tear
down the bridge, the longest in Latin America. Complicating their
efforts, the departing crew had sabotaged the ship, leaving behind
hard-to-notice traps in the computer system and elsewhere that could
set off an explosion.

The media was full of reports that Chávez had brought in Cubans
or other unqualified foreigners to run the tanker. The reports merely
infuriated López and the others, shoring up their resolve to take on the
risky mission.

Most of the nation was glued to their television sets around noon
on December 21 as López and the others attempted to restart the
Pilín
León
. If something went wrong, Chávez could be blamed for irresponsibly
sending an unprepared crew on a suicide mission to serve his political
needs. The president was in Miraflores, nervously watching along
with the rest of the country. He knew the fate of the strike and perhaps
his presidency was on the line.

Suddenly a puff of smoke came out of the ship's chimney. The
monster was running again. López ordered the ship to move ahead, but
as it did the engines started overheating dangerously. He sent the ship
in a circle to avoid heading to the bridge while engineers tried to bring
the temperature under control. They did, and the tanker headed for
Maracaibo. When it was three hundred yards from the bridge, the crew
let out a cheer. Even if something went wrong, the ship had too much
momentum now to change course before passing under the bridge
safely. It was going to make it. Soldiers guarding the bridge pumped
their fists into their palms while holding their arms over their heads in
a gesture made famous by Chávez. In Miraflores the elated president
shouted with joy. "There goes the
Pilín León
!" he said and, in a soccer
reference, added, "Gooooal!"

The ship's return to port was a major and daring victory for Chávez.
With gasoline supplies drying up, creating the specter of food shortages,
he had taken control of the central symbol of the strike. That night he
flew to Maracaibo to congratulate the crew.
Alejandro Gómez — who'd
helped organize the
Pilín León
mission and was in the cabin with the
captain as it restarted and passed under the bridge — later became head
of the oil company's marine division.

While Chávez struggled to get the ships moving again, he was also trying
to revive oil production. Executives and managers hadn't just walked off
the job when they left, according to Chávez and other government officials.
They'd also sabotaged the company to make restarting it difficult
and dangerous. They'd damaged pipes, stolen files, and, most seriously,
taken with them elements
of PDVSA's automated system. That allowed
them to use remote computers to block reactivation. For months the
company had to operate completely or partly manually as it tried to
resume normal production. In a speech in January 2003, Chávez
explained one method of sabotage:

You know that all these systems — all the industry — are computerized
and systemized . . . The sabotage consisted in changing
the adjustment points in the control systems. A variable has been
introduced into the computers of the control systems so that the
temperature in the boilers does not rise above six hundred degrees,
which is the temperature ceiling. Above six hundred degrees, the
plant reaches a dangerous level.

Well, these gentlemen not only abandoned their posts but
changed the adjustment points before leaving. That is, they
raised the ceiling from six hundred degrees to eight hundred
degrees centigrade. What would have happened if our patriotic
and well-trained technicians had not checked these control systems
and adjustment points well? What would have happened
if they had started the systems and valves and all the operating
system? When the temperature had gone above six hundred
degrees and reached eight hundred, there would have been a
disaster — an explosion.

To try to regain control of PDVSA's computer system, Chávez's government
had to bring in its own "hackers" to combat the striking PDVSA
technicians who were hacking in from the outside. Amid the strike
Chávez told reporters:

I didn't know anything about that. I'm learning a lot now. I was in
an office with the minister, it's an electronic bombardment on the
computers, the system goes crazy, it goes crazy, by remote control.
So a young guy arrived, a hacker, with an apparatus, and I joked,
"Are you a witch doctor?" Because he arrived with this apparatus.
He said, "There's an electronic war going on." So it was hackers
against hackers, some shooting here, others shooting there. It was
an impressive thing. I had studied war tactics during a number
of years, but I never imagined it was going to come down to this
electronic war.

Complicating Chávez's efforts to regain electronic control of PDVSA
— and raising suspicions in the government of covert United States
involvement — was a contract the oil giant had signed with a US-based
technology services
company named Intesa, and its associated company
SAIC (
Science Applications International Corporation). SAIC's
roster of high-ranking officials included former US military officers and
CIA officials. Among them were General Wayne Downing, appointed
by President George W. Bush to head the White House Office for
Combating Terrorism; General Jasper Welch, a former coordinator for
the National Security Council; and Admiral Bobby Ray Inman, former
director of the NSA and deputy director of the CIA. Eventually PDVSA
cut its ties with SAIC.

Just as Chávez had to hunt for hackers and for new teams to staff
the tankers, he also had to find people to operate PDVSA since he was in
the process of firing thousands of employees. He looked to
mid- and
lower-level workers to take over operations previously run by higher-level
supervisors and managers, or brought in retired employees like the
captain who steered the
Pilín León
to port. Like Venezuelan society in
general, PDVSA was polarized between a well-heeled elite who despised
Chávez and lower-paid workers who supported him or at least did not
want to use PDVSA as a political weapon.

The
Puerto La Cruz refinery was a typical example and became
a showcase for the government's efforts to
restart the industry. Almost
all the plant's high-level executives walked off the job, but fewer than
20 percent of the operators, mechanics, and technicians did. Using
skeleton crews working extensive overtime, they brought the plant back
to life. "We are prouder now than ever," one seventeen-year veteran
stated. "We have shown our supervisors we can run the plant without
them." By late December, the plant was producing sixty thousand barrels
of gasoline a day. That was about 70 percent of its capacity and
one-seventh of the nation's normal daily consumption of four hundred
thousand barrels.

PDVSA president Ali Rodríguez himself acknowledged that the company
faced enormous obstacles in regaining its previous production.
The institutional knowledge and expertise the fired employees took with
them was considerable. As part of the government's plan to revive PDVSA,
it decided to
split the company into two regional entities based in the east
and west of the country where the oil actually lay. It gutted the central
headquarters in
Caracas, where many of the striking executives worked.

By late December, Rodríguez claimed production was up to seven
hundred thousand barrels a day — a figure dissident PDVSA executives
disputed. But Chávez was keeping the country afloat — barely. On
December 28 the first foreign shipment of
gasoline arrived: Brazil sent
525,000 barrels. It was another shocking milestone. One of the world's
largest petroleum producers was importing gasoline.

Still, the Brazilian gasoline was a drop in the bucket for Venezuela.
Most service stations remained closed. When one opened people waited
in line for up to two days to slowly make their way to the pump. Some
organized shifts, arranging for friends, neighbors, and relatives to take
turns sitting with their cars. In preparation for long trips, Venezuelans
spent weeks stockpiling plastic jugs of gasoline at home. They could not
count on finding a station open along the way.

Propane cooking gas also became scarce. On December 26 about
three hundred people blocked a highway in Caracas for two hours to
demand more of it. Some said they had been using charcoal and kerosene
to cook for two weeks. Others in the city were burning their furniture. On
street corners a surreal sight appeared — people selling wood.

The protest was one of the first signs of
unrest, although in the barrios
most of it was aimed at the opposition leaders who organized the
strike. Other isolated demonstrations broke out at empty service stations.
The situation was critical. Store shelves were increasingly bare,
especially of drinks like milk, bottled water, and beer. People trying
to carry on with their lives by holding events such as a girl's fifteenth
"coming out" birthday party had to spend days scouring their cities or
towns to round up enough soda.