Persecution in PDVSA: more political apartheid in Venezuela

This is Wednesday editorial of Tal Cual where Teodoro Petkoff denounces once again that the government of Chavez is purging any public employee that does support 100% Chavez and his "socialism", now revealed as plain all Easter European Cuban Communism. Of course, derivative of the infamous Tascon list are in use (see references on the right side of this page for links to the Tascon list).

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One of the most repugnant characteristics of the totalitarianisms of the last century, from left to right, the Stalino-Communists and the Nazi-Fascists, was the one of the social and political control through employment control.

Equally Stalinists and Nazi-fascists excluded any worker from who the minimum dissident was suspected.

That worker was condemned to eternal unemployment and he only could survive with the aid of those relatives or sufficiently courageous friends that would not leave him in absolute neglect.

In Venezuela, in the State companies, in particular Pdvsa, apply persecution procedures and political repression of a clear Stalinian and Nazi-fascist nature, whose well known instrument is the sinister Tascon List, the “tascometre”, that is alive and well and “not buried”, as hypocritically asked for Chavez. This constitutes a particularly perverse and brutal form of subjection of the popular will to the aims of the regime. It is a cruel mechanism of extortion, of very particular cruel nature because it hides other forms of repression more directly physical. The victim is not a prisoner, is not tortured nor beaten up.

This method, subtler, denies the victim work to live from. It strikes the victim at the heart of its existence: dignity.

In Pdvsa, after the savage dismissal of 20 thousand workers as a result of oil stoppage, an internal regime of terror was created that remains until today.

A regime that reached even the transnational companies that operate in the country, to which was prohibited to hire ex-employees of Pdvsa. The viciousness and the cruelty with which these were treated constitute one of those episodes that Borges would have included in his Universal History of the Infamy.

The recent protest episodes from the workers of the oil drills, in the Eastern Coast of the Zulia state, indeed have their origin in the outbreak of a new repressive big wave, supported, as always, by the Tascon filter. It has sent to the street to 1,500 workers highly specialized because or they are registered in the damn list or the internal espionage has detected some “ideological weaknesses”. The unionists denounce - united in this those from all the labor unions - that hundreds of those workers have been put under “interviews” in which not only they check their opinions on the “socialism of century XXI” but which investigate even the political conduct of their parents and relatives.

The worst in this affair is that these experienced and specialized workers, once outside Pdvsa, are out of all of the oil industry field. In the oil industry they will not work again, that is they will not work anymore because that is the only thing they know how to do. There is no other employer than Pdvsa and, of coruse, to appear in the black list closes the doors of all the oil companies, today nationalized.

These workers are not victims of the decrease of the oil production in the West but of a vile policy. The right to the work, that is like saying the right to the life, is denied to them because “socialist” inquisitors consider them suspects.


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