Only a handful of service stations out of the entity’s 198 stations serve the prioritized sectors.
By:
Priselen Martínez
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In the middle of week 22 of the “radical and strict quarantine” due to the COVID-19 epidemic in Venezuela, Zulia opens in its first seven days of “monitored flexibility” at its worst with a crisis of lack of fuel in tow .
The million and a half barrels of fuel that the Venezuelan government managed to trade with its Iranian counterpart, the only one that dared to circumvent the obstacles and sanctions of the United States, last May, disappeared at the beginning of July, now the country depends on what the Amuay and Cardón refineries, in Falcón, and El Palito, in Carabobo, produce in order to maintain the mobility of the vehicle fleet.
For this reason, of the 198 service stations in the region activated under the modality of sale at a subsidized and international price, as stipulated by PDVSA, some 40 have been operating for a month, most of them destined to serve prioritized sectors such as: food, health, safety and telecommunications.
This week, after several questions; The regional government with the Military High Command, headed by Governor Omar Prieto, stressed that attention continues to be directed towards those priority areas, while access to consumers continues in the pumps whose payment is calculated in foreign currency, without specifying which ones. They are the ones authorized to open but luckily as a ‘carambola’ to the Zulians who reside in the metropolitan area of Maracaibo and San Francisco, they have to guess where they can supply so as not to fall into the hands of the black market that is still present in every corner of the area west of Maracaibo with the abundant presence of “the pimpineros”, who offer a liter at 2 dollars, according to the livestock sector after the meeting held with the authorities.
Added to this is the “business” of the sale of quotas by unscrupulous people in the areas close to the bombs and the repeated complaints by users against police and military officials designated for custody for some irregularities, but this has not been an impediment to daily seeing long queues waiting to run with the luck of being dispatched.
Some security forces, despite the accusations, have managed to dismantle gangs dedicated to the extraction of fuel.
In social networks, Zulianos have also been expressing their discontent for not being able to fill the tank of their vehicles. Lucas Del Moral through @lgdmrey, on Twitter, “there are 17 of the 21 municipalities in Zulia that are without gasoline. Almost impossible to mobilize banana production from the South of the Lake to the consumption centers in Zulia, Lara and Falcón. Less to central states. A banana in 3 weeks will cost a million sovereigns, “he wrote.
@ ElizabethChaco8 also made a call to the authorities. “Gentlemen @OmarPrietoGob @willy_casanova put order in the I / O of Zulia because it is impossible for us citizens to have access to gasoline. The cops and the GNB took them over and are doing their thing. Enough of so much abuse #lasCundos #LagoPista ”, he denounced.
The situation even worsened compared to the months of March, April and the end of May, when the fuel supply to the general public was completely restricted to further control gasoline dispatch and vehicle mobility.
And it is that the situation has reached the extreme that due to lack of transport, two pregnant women have had to give birth in the middle of the street because they could not get to a health center on time.
In this context of the fuel crisis, on Tuesday 11-A it was known, in a note published by the Reuters agency, that PDVSA restarted the Cardón catalytic cracking unit, which is key for the production of hydrocarbon, in June, but the stopped again in July due to a failure in its own distillation unit, leaving the catalytic cracker without raw material.
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