Saturday, June 27, 2009 By Mac Margolis
When they first elected him in 1998, Venezuelans hoped that Hugo Chávez would be a healer. Instead what they got was a tyrant who seizes private companies and farms, crushes labor unions, and harasses political opponents. And now after a decade of the so-called Bolivarian revolution, tens of thousands of disillusioned Venezuelan professionals have had enough. Artists, lawyers, physicians, managers, and engineers are leaving the country in droves. An estimated 1 million Venezuelans have moved away since Chávez took power, and a study by the Latin American Economic System, an intergovernmental research institute, reports that the outflow of highly skilled labor from Venezuela to Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development countries rose 216 percent between 1990 and 2007.
The exodus is sabotaging the country’s future, and no industry has been harder hit than Venezuela’s oil sector. A decade ago, Petróleos de Venezuela ranked as one of the top five energy companies in the world. Then Chávez named a Marxist university professor with no experience in the industry to head the company. PDVSA’s top staff immediately went on strike and paralyzed the country. Chávez responded by firing 22,000 people practically overnight, including the country’s leading oil experts. As many as 4,000 of PDVSA’s elite staff are now working overseas, and the talent deficit has crippled the company: PDVSA produced 3.2 million barrels of crude oil a day when Chávez took control, but now pumps only 2.4 million, according to independent estimates.
Similar stories emerge from the media. Venezuela once had a combative and unfettered press, but no longer. In 2007 Chávez canceled the broadcast license for leading station RCTV, and now he’s threatening to shut down the only remaining independent network, Globovisión. The charge? Globovisión dared to break a story on an earthquake in Caracas ahead of the government press. Scientists have fared little better. Early on, Chávez diverted money from university science centers to official projects controlled by political allies. Now the country’s most respected research institutes are falling behind—the number of papers published by Venezuelans in international scientific journals has fallen by 15 percent in just the past three years.
It’s much the same elsewhere in the Axis of Hugo, the constellation of states that have followed Chávez on the march toward so-called 21st-century socialism. Leaders in Bolivia, Ecuador, and Nicaragua are rewriting their constitutions, intimidating the media, and stoking class and ethnic conflicts. The result? More flight: a recent study by Vanderbilt University, for example, showed that more than one in three Bolivians under 30 had plans to emigrate, up from 12 percent a decade ago. Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador, and Nicaragua have all fallen in the World Economic Forum’s competitiveness index. Fitch Ratings, which analyzes credit risk, recently demoted the debt of Venezuela, Bolivia, and Ecuador to junk status. These states may be commodity-rich, but their biggest export is no longer minerals or oil. It’s the one resource best kept at home: talent.
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