The pumps that brought prosperity from deep in the Earth’s crust are now mostly rusted relics of a storied past.
The buildings that housed a prideful labor force are vandalized, colonized by squatters or boarded up.
The schools, clinics, the manicured golf course — onetime amenities from an industry awash in petrodollars — gone or overgrown with weeds.
«Our biggest problem is depression and anxiety,» says Manuel Polanco, 74, a former petroleum engineer whose recollections of the good times only highlight a dystopian present. «We barely survive. We have just enough to feed ourselves, to get by.»
This is the dismal tableau today in Venezuela’s Maracaibo Basin, which, for much of the last century, was one of the globe’s leading sources of petroleum.
Monument to the oil workers in Cabimas, Venezuela.
A monument to oil workers stands in a square in Cabimas, a once-thriving oil town in Venezuela. (Marcelo Pérez del Carpio/For The Times)
Since the U.S. attack last month and arrest of President Nicolás Maduro and his wife, President Trump has vowed to rebuild the country’s moribund oil sector — while also providing resources and cash for the United States. East of Maracaibo lies the Orinoco Belt, home to the world’s largest proven deposits, estimated at more than 300 billion barrels.
But a recent swing through the Maracaibo region in northwestern Venezuela dramatized the many obstacles. Greeting visitors is a dire panorama of nonfunctioning wells, battered pipelines and empty storage tanks, among other markers of decline.
The U.S. plans have generated considerable skepticism in a place not accustomed to good news. But some oil-field veterans envision a return to the glory days.
«I see myself flourishing again,» said José Celestino García Petro, 66 and a father of eight, who said he never found steady work after his well-servicing firm was expropriated by the government years ago. «Rising from the ashes!»