Plaza El Barroso, photo credit: Michel Nohra.

In Cabimas, my hometown and Venezuela’s main oil port,  there’s a monument to  Barroso II, an oil well that exploded in 1922,  hurling a million barrels of oil into the air until it was brought under control nine days later. This event put Venezuela on the map as an important exporter of petroleum. 

In 1980, President Luis Herrera Campins inaugurated the Monument to Barroso, a plaza commemorating Venezuela oil wealth.  Just a few years later, the plaza lay in neglect. And it remained that way for a long time.  Its deterioration reflected the crisis in the oil industry, a Venezuelan source of wealth that Barroso had helped bring to light.  An industry that seems bit-by-bit to be replaced by new forms of energy. An industry that was relegated by socialist policy that used its control of the state oil company PDVSA to finance its social projects, leading the oil company to ruin. 

This monument represants the decadence of a country that, for now, lives by its memories. 

Desiré Soto, a girl in my school who was about 13 or 14 at the time,  arrived one morning in her new classroom. She had just come from the modern capital of Venezuela: Caracas. “My father told me that here in Cabimas, the oil runs in the streets so I ought to be careful not to get dirty.” Her remark caused laughter, and some of her classnates looked at her funny. “Listen, here in Cabimas, you don’t see oil like that; it’s in the ground,” I told her. But time proved  Desiré right.

Main Cabimas Spill: The entire coast of Cabimas Boulevard has been stained by the constant oil spills in the area. Garbage also abounds in these places, once a tourist and recreation center. (Photo / Rafael Sulbarán).

Towards the end of the 19th century, oil fever was raging in the United States and the search for the new treasure led several oil companies, among them Standard Oil Company, the relentless business of John Rockefeller, to the Venezuelan subsoil. But it was the Venezuelan Oil Concessions Ltd. (VOC), a Shell Oil subsidary, that had the privilege of bathing in Cabima’s black gold. 

The firm had begun oil exploitation in Táchira State in a rudimentary fashion at the beginning of the 20th century, opening the way for the creation of small companies.  In 1914, production began on a large scale with the operation of Zumaque 1, an oilfield in the municipality of Baralt in Zulia State, where Cabimas is located. This led to a geological study of the entire eastern coast of the Maracaibo Lake, the most extensive body of water in South America with 5, 127 square miles.

El Barroso

The foreign geologists set themselves up near the shore of the lake in Cabimas, discovering a series of oilfields, among them Barrosos II (o Barroso), which took its name from the ranch where the oil was discovered. Fighting the heat, mosquitos carrying malaria and with a lack of knowledge about how to operate,  VOC continued to work these fields with few results. 

El Barroso operated for a while, but in July 1922, operations ceased when a drill wire broke. Five months went by before it could be repaired.  

Finally, on December 14, 1922, help arrived from Europe. During all this time, the top of the drill functioned like a plug, creating pressure on the well. The well was 1,640 feet deep, that is, not very deep considering that some go down more than a kilometer.  “On one side, the pressure was escaping a bit.  In those days, the operation was carried out in a very rudimentary fashion since the industry was so new, and the operators didn’t have much experience.  Gases were escaping through a small hole, but the tecnicians were not capable of controlling what was happening there,” explained Onelio Sulbarán, a resident of Cabimas, (to be transparent, he happens to be my father), former PDVSA employee and a petroleum engineer with expertise in perforation and oilfields. 

Onelio explains that what happened could be compared to what goes on with a bottle of soda when it’s shaken: “Imagine that you shake a bottle of soda hard and twist the top a little, letting the gas escape; that’s what was occuring with the oil well, the accumulated gas with the cover containing the crude oil like the bottle top.” 

Spill on the beach: Fishermen have seen their production affected. “The fish are stained and the boats are damaged by the oil,” they say. (Photo / Rafael Sulbarán).

The work to repair the machine began again, but didn’t last long. The ground began to creak. Witnesses to the event described it like a tremendous roar, like the sound of surging water. The pression that had been maintained for several months blew off the top of the drill, which released a spectacular spout of oil that reached more than 130 feet in the air, a black monster with gas that showed all the world that oil wealth abounded in the Venezuelan subsoil.    

For nine solid days, El Barroso propelled its liquid into the air. Estimates indicate that more than 900,000 barrels of oil were spread over 740 acres. It took workers more than six months to clean up the zone.  

This was a clear message from inside the bowels of earth to the entire world that the Venezuelan subsoil held abundant quantities of this mineral resource.  And, of course, life transformed in Cabimas; several companies arrived to tear up the ground and search for oil, supported by concessions granted by President Juan Vicente Gómez, a military man who installed himself in power in 1908.

In the 1950s, Venezuela became the main exporter of oil in the world, a title that it held for many years. This income permitted the construction of the grand avenues of Caracas, the bridge over the Lake of Maracaibo and the Guri Dam. 

The country progressed, but Cabimas stayed behind, just having oil removed from its soil. In spite of the fact that it was the origin of the country’s wealth and its principal port, development only dribbled in and no one remembered El Barroso. The town indeed grew a bit, but it stagnated. 

“Virgen del Rosario, Cabimas is desperate, there’s hunger everywhere, our situation is precarious. Pray for us from your sanctuary in the petroleum zone,” prays the chorus of a gaita folk music tune from Zulia, performed by the group “The Cabimas Workers’ Neighborhood,” launched in 1965 to protest Cabima’s state of abandonment.   

The well was sealed up in 1932 and just left there. A few neighborhoods with very little planning were constructed in the spot where the oil fields lay inactive. This meant that the exact location of the famous well was not able to be easily identified. But in the 1970s, a professor from the University of Zulia, Orlando Méndez, managed to calculate its location. It turned out that it was hidden where the bathroom of a local house now stood. This fact led many to reflect and to decide to memorialize a place that changed the industrial and cultural life of Venezuela forever. 

Black Friday

As someone from Cabimas, I’d always heard the story of the oil explosion, a story one lives with all one’s life. I always knew that Barroso had a special site, but that it was abandoned.  

Three years after the inauguration of the monument to Barroso, corruption and bad management of finances set off a crisis that provoked the devaluation of the bolívar, the Venezuelan currency.  The collapse of the bolívar is known as Black Friday, a reference to Friday, February 18, 1983, the date that set off the downfall of one of the strongest economies in the region. 

In the following years, an attempt was made to cover up the errors committed, but just like El Barroso, the country was on the verge of exploding, as capital flight was wrecking the economy. In 1999, Hugo Chávez was elected president and uncovered the well. The crisis accelerated and Venezuela went into a freefall, a useless spill like the crude oil running through the streets of  Cabimas—just as Desiré had anticipated.

According to the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), Venezuelan oil production in 1999 was around  3,329,000 barrels and in 2020, only 393, 000.  “That is to say we have had a decline throughout these years of  2, 936, 000 barrels, a situation that can be characterized as a great disaster and irreversible damage to the country,” said Elías Matta, a deputy in the National Assembly led by Juan Guaidó, cited during the presentation of the Country Energy Plan, which aims to recuperate Venezuela’s oil industry. 

In the Lake of Maracaibo, there are about 5,000 wells and in the rest of the Zulia region, between 15,000 and 17,000 wells, the majority of which are not operative. “Almost everything is stopped, I believe between 60 or 70 percent. You can work up an estimate. In blue PDVSA, we were producing, just in the western part of the country, a million [barrels] daily,” explains Onelio. 

Cabimas oil spill 6: PDVSA is unable to control the thousands of outbreaks that are active both on land and in the lake. (Photo / Rafael Sulbarán).

The phrase “blue PDVSA” refers to the period in which Chávez did not dominate the industry, which passed into his absolute control after the national strike in 2002-2003. Right around that time, the calculations of Pdvsa pointed toward disaster.   In 2001, the western region extracted an average of 1,500,000 barrels per day; in 2008, 890,000 barrels were registered; in 2018, the figure fell to 324,000 and the report presented in January 2021, shows only  83,000 barrels—without a doubt a colossal setback.

In spite of the setback, oil income was sufficient to maintain a country. Between 2004 and 2008, oil prices doubled in relation to the previous decade; there was also a spike between  2011 and 2014 topping off at US$130 a barrel, which left profits of  US$630,000,000, but this money was frittered away; it disappeared like the  boom of Barroso: it exploded, it was witnessed, it declined and was left behind in disuse and forgetting. 

“There is no doubt that they handled the greatest fortune ever to come into the country and wasted it barrel by barrel through corruptiion, ineptness and an ideology that only generates poverty,” adds Matta.  “This poverty is reflected in abandoned camps, unusable installations.” 

But petroleum abounds. Venezuela is considered to be the country with the greatest oil reserves in the world. “We have crude oil for 200 years, this gives us encouragement, a push to believe that everything will get better,” says Onelio.

This combination of oil in abundance, in addition to ability and experience, could offer Venezuela a path to recuperation. “It is enough that the oil we have sprouts from the ground by itself,” adds the engineer. 

It is precisely because of lack of maintainance and the inability of the industry to contain the oil that petroleum emerges from the ground and has flooded the streets and lake shore of Cabimas and the entire coast. The history of Barroso repeats itself. 

More than 113,000 fishermen in the region have been affected by the oil spills. “How can we work like this,” asks Elías Hernández, a fisherman from the Cabimas Civic Center. Hernández estimates that his work day has been reduced by 70 percent.  “The boats can’t operate because of the thick layer of oil, and the few fish one can catch are stained with oil,” adds the fisherman. 

The oil has damaged the engines and the structure of the fishing boats that work on the eastern shore of Lake Maracaibo. (Photo / Rafael Sulbarán)

In the streets, one can see the black stains from oil, just as Desiré said that long ago day at school. 

“Since the oil can’t be extracted, it comes out by itself and stagnates in the streets,” says Onelio. In 2020, several oil spills were recorded. A black pool of oil covered the downtown area.  “The PDVSA oil through the streets of Cabimas [is the result of] incapacity and laziness. The lack of maintainance will do away with our industy and our city. Misery and abandonment….Pollution and ecological damage,” sums up a Cabimas resident in a video aired on social media.  

“I am sure someday people are going to get stained with oil, walking through the streets of Cabimas,”predicted Desiré and her prediction has come true.

Historic photo of El Barroso from website Entorno Inteligente.

Today, Barroso’s plaza is pretty—it was restored a few years back. It has pleasant lights, a fountain and flowers. But there, this prosperous, joyous country of bonanza that this city helped forge from the beginning is present only in memories. The legacy of Barroso—embodied in its monument— is a reflection of what oil has meant to Venezuela: wealth and progress on the outside;  laziness, stain, hope and longing inside.