CABIMAS, Venezuela — 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.
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!”
Deteriorated oil rigs and gas flow stations are seen on Lake Maracaibo, near the city of Cabimas.
At its peak in the 1970s, Venezuela was daily pumping some 3.5 million barrels. A charter member of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries, the nation exuded affluence and excess — though the wealth was mostly channeled to domestic elites and foreign oil companies, not the impoverished majority.
But slumping crude prices, government mismanagement and U.S. sanctions have left Venezuela’s industry a hollowed-out shell of its former, grandiose self.
Last year, Venezuela managed to pump about 1 million barrels a day, less than 1% of global production. Even so, petroleum was still a lifeline for a nation mired in more than a decade of economic, political and social tumult marked by mass emigration, hyperinflation and a near-ubiquitous sense of despair.
U.S. Secretary of Energy Chris Wright, left, and Venezuelan interim President Delcy Rodriguez hold a news conference after their meeting at the Miraflores Presidential Palace in Caracas on Feb. 11.
(Julio Urribarri / Anadolu via Getty Images)
U.S. Energy Secretary Chris Wright visited Venezuela last week, met with the country’s interim president, Delcy Rodríguez, and even toured some oil fields. He boasted of “enormous progress” in reviving a business that is now effectively under U.S. management.
Dimming the upbeat declarations is a harsh reality: It will likely take at least a decade — and perhaps $200 billion or more — to restore the country’s decrepit hydrocarbon infrastructure, experts say.
A lot depends on Big Oil, but some executives are wary. At a White House meeting last month, ExxonMobil CEO Darren Woods labeled Venezuela “uninvestable.”
Along the oil-streaked shores of Lake Maracaibo — actually a massive coastal lagoon, fed by both freshwater rivers and the Caribbean — the vestiges of a once-thriving enterprise stand out like totems from a past civilization.
Dotting the shoreline is a bleak expanse of detritus: timeworn pumps, tottering derricks, wayward cranes and aging pipelines. Gobs of oil mar the coast. Pollution has ravaged once-abundant stocks of fish and crab.
“I pray to God every day that things will change for the better,” said Joel José León Santo, 53, who on a recent morning was preparing his fishing boat with three colleagues. “But so far we haven’t seen any improvements. Food is more expensive. Tomorrow’s meal depends on today’s catch.”
1. Much of Venezuela’s oil industry is in disrepair, like this broken oil pipeline over Lake Maracaibo. 2. The General Rafael Urdaneta Bridge spans an outlet of Lake Maracaibo and links the region with the rest of Venezuela.
There is no official number, but industry observers estimate that fewer than 2,000 wells are functioning in a region that is home to some 12,000.
“Everything here is bad, at a standstill,” said Mari Camacho, 45, who, with her family, is among those squatting in a series of abandoned homes in the town of El Güere, flanked by mangroves along the eastern shores of Lake Maracaibo.
A brick factory that once served oil producers shuttered long ago. Her four sons left for Colombia, part of the country’s historic exodus.
Her home sits atop a sea of oil, but Camacho says there has been no electricity for six years, since a transformer blew out. No one fixed it. Alarming her and neighbors are rumors that the legal owners of their homes plan to claim their property.
“I don’t know where I would go,” she said.
About 10 miles south is the sweltering city of Cabimas, an iconic venue in Venezuela’s petroleum narrative. It is now a ramshackle, seemingly lost-in-time metropolis where residents sit on porches observing the unsteady progress of cars navigating pothole-ridden streets.
People stand near a sign reading “Maracaibo” at a park on the shore of Lake Maracaibo.
“All the great companies that used to exist were connected to the petroleum industry,” said Hollister Quintero, 32, a Cabimas native whose grandparents worked for foreign oil firms during the industry’s heady days. “Now, there is just desolation.”
Quintero, who lacked the funds to finish college, struggles as a freelance audiovisual producer. He also cares for his aging parents, whose public pensions amount to the equivalent of $2 a month.
Most young people leave town, Quintero said, while those who stay find jobs in the informal sector. A common, albeit not very lucrative, option: delivering food orders on bicycles or motorcycles.
“There just aren’t many opportunities,” he said.
A mural in Maracaibo celebrates Venezuela’s oil industry.
For centuries, Lake Maracaibo’s environs were known for natural seepage of oil rising to the surface from sedimentary rock, a phenomenon also seen in sites like Los Angeles’ La Brea Tar Pits. Indigenous people and Spanish settlers utilized the viscous goo for medicinal purposes and waterproofing boats.
But the dawn of the oil age in the mid-19th and early 20th centuries and the allure of black gold attracted a new crowd: wildcatters and fortune-hunters from the United States and Europe, drawn to a backwater heretofore known for coffee, cacao and cattle.
It was here in Cabimas where, more than a century ago, a well-named Barroso II jump-started a boom.
On Dec. 14, 1922, the ground shook in Cabimas, but it wasn’t an earthquake. Barroso II, managed by Royal Dutch Shell, began spitting skyward some 100,000 barrels daily.
“Suddenly, with a roar, oil erupted from the well in a spout that towered 200 feet above the derrick and fanned out in the air like a titan’s umbrella,” Orlando Méndez, a Venezuelan oil historian, wrote in a 2022 article for the American Assn. of Petroleum Geologists, marking the blowout’s centennial.
“The villagers poured out of their houses,” Méndez wrote. “Oil sprayed them in a torrent of black raindrops. … Only the bravest walked hesitantly toward the well. They held out their hands and the dark, sticky fluid splattered [on] their palms. ‘¡Petróleo!’ they all shouted.”
The gusher didn’t relent for nine days.
The runaway well ushered in a bonanza. Little attention was paid to the environmental catastrophe for Lake Maracaibo, destination of much of the escaping crude.
The Petróleos de Venezuela Bajo Grande Refinery on the shore of Lake Maracaibo.
Explorers scouring the lakeside soon discovered other, even more productive fields. By the end of the 1920s, Venezuela had become the world’s largest oil exporter.
“Maracaibo was alive with eager strangers as every boat that landed there disgorged an army of oil workers,” Méndez wrote.
In subsequent decades, Venezuela rode a boom-and-bust cycle, but by the late-1990s returned to producing near-record levels of 3 million barrels a day.
With revenues soaring, the late President Hugo Chávez, a left-wing populist, lavished cash on Venezuelan masses long excluded from the petroleum windfall. An opposition-backed general strike in 2002-03 prompted Chávez to fire almost 20,000 employees of the state oil firm.
Years later, Chávez nationalized dozens of oil companies, including some U.S. firms. The expropriations, along with the firings, consolidated state control of the oil sector and, experts say, drained the country of expertise and investment, inflicting lasting damage.
Chávez died in 2013. International oil prices soon cratered — bad news for his chosen successor, Maduro. U.S. sanctions enacted during Trump’s first term exacerbated the crisis. Most fired oil workers never got their jobs back.
“We were stigmatized, our benefits were taken away, and we were denied the opportunity to work in Venezuela,” said Polanco, the petroleum engineer.
An anti-U.S. mural in Maracaibo declares, “Venezuela is not a menace, Venezuela is hope.”
After his dismissal, Polanco said he found employment in Colombia, Ecuador and Mexico, but later returned to Cabimas. He has one son in the United States, another in Mexico.
He and other former oil workers expressed guarded optimism for Trump’s ambitious revival blueprint.
“I would love to return to the oil industry and have it be the same as it was 22 years ago,” said Michelle Bello, 51, a father of five who said he and four siblings were forced out from the state oil company during the purge. “Take politics out of it.”
Quintero, the young entrepreneur, also welcomes the notion that his hometown may return to its renowned era of affluence. But he is skeptical.
“Of course I hope that Cabimas could be reborn anew as a petroleum center,” said Quintero. “This is a place with a lot of history and culture. But the sad fact is this: We are now a ghost town.”
Special correspondent Mogollón reported from Cabimas and Times staff writer McDonnell from Mexico City.
