At least 41,000 retirees are asking for a peaceful old age and for PDVSA to pay them the interest generated by the pension fund that, in 2015, accumulated 2,347 million dollars in its assets. According to this amount, they should receive 660 dollars a month, but they only get paid four petros, which is around 100 dollars.
Orlando Rodríguez spent 11 days in the middle of Lake Maracaibo, without food or water, in December 2002. He was not a castaway. He was an oil worker who refused to join the strike for which 21,000 members of the industry left Petróleos de Venezuela (PDVSA).
Two decades later, he is among the retirees of a company that does not meet any of the requests of those who helped build a country. Orlando, like 41,000 PDVSA retirees, sees the hope of a peaceful old age floating like an oil stain in the water of the lake.
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20 years ago he was recognized as a hero. He today he lives from day to day. He buys daily what his wife, his disabled son and he eat at his house. As he can, he distributes what he receives. “Everything I expected from PDVSA has vanished into lies and unfulfilled promises,” says the man who also endures the absence of two migrant daughters.
Rodríguez should be one of the 41,000 oil retirees to receive 660 dollars a month, which would place this veteran among the best paid in a country where the minimum wage is around 10 dollars.
But it is not like that, although they are told. Those 660 dollars that Orlando never receives should be the interest to be charged if the company to which he dedicated years of service complied with the commitment to cancel the money that he accumulated in the pension fund.
PDVSA’s debt
Among the oil retirees are workers, administrative personnel, teachers, doctors, nurses, technicians in different areas, engineers, lawyers and financial experts, among many others. Despite the difference in professions, position in the industry organization chart and even age, they face the same problem. PDVSA’s debt.
Unofficially, since there is no other way to calculate it due to the lack of information, those affected estimate that it owes them 2,347 million dollars, about 57,243 dollars per capita.
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