He was serious and very formal in his treatment. He received in his office without the military uniform, despite holding the rank of colonel. Others make a show of showing maximum loyalty to the revolution, he didn’t need it, it was presupposed from origin. He had become abstemious and took care of his diet, he did not like seeing himself with extra kilos. If expansive men like Hugo Chávez, Diosdado Cabello or Nicolás Maduro himself have triumphed in Chavismo, Pedro Tellechea was restrained, shy, of few words. A new generation of Chavistas who deny the tracksuit. At 48 years old, he had earned a reputation for being efficient, orderly, and an executor: the qualities of a good manager. Maduro recognized it in public and his friends – and even his enemies – in private. No one better to read metrics, organize, clean up, plug budget holes, monitor high-ranking officials, but also the lady at the door and the maintenance man.
During his time at the head of PDVSA, a company in ruins, he paid debts, increased barrel production and gained the trust of oil companies such as Exon, Repsol or ENI, which began operating due to the lifting of sanctions by the White House. The general feeling is that, after several disastrous presidents, who had never seen a derrick in their lives, Tellechea had done a good job, although he was given another assignment only a year later. However, this has not allowed him to avoid the fatal fate of previous PDVSA presidents, such as jail, public humiliation, and discredit in the eyes of others.
Techellea has gone, in a matter of hours, from belonging to the first circle of power, the one that surrounds Maduro, to being a pest for Chavismo. On Friday, the president dismissed him as Minister of Industry and, two days later, Venezuelan officials went to his house to arrest him. At the same time, they took a dozen of his collaborators, a number that may rise to 20 in the coming days. From early Monday morning until the morning, when the Prosecutor’s Office made his arrest official, Wechat, Chavismo’s messaging service, was abuzz with messages, most of them of disbelief. More so upon learning of the accusation: leaking information from PDVSA, from its operations command, to a company controlled “by the United States intelligence services.” No one knows for sure if this is true, if there is any truth to it, or if it is simply a conspiracy by his enemies to get him out of the way. What is certain is that, in a universe as conspiratorial as the Chavista one, a stain of this type is indelible.
Pedro Rafael Tellechea Ruiz, almost neckless, of medium height, with a square face and thin glasses, began an ascending career 15 years ago. The suits, tailored. Perfume. In the military world he learned discipline, self-control and discretion, the latter a quality that is valued in the Miraflores Palace, the seat of Government and the presidential couple, Maduro and Cilia Flores, known as the first combatant. Tellechea also had the favor of Vice President Delcy Rodríguez, who has a reputation for surrounding herself with competent people, unlike other Chavista leaders who prioritize loyalty over any other virtue. In any case, Tellechea was not given anything, he earned it. He emerged well-regarded from public management at the Methanol de Oriente Mixed Company, Metor SA; and the presidencies of the Venezuelan Aluminum industry and Pequiven, Venezuela’s petrochemical industry. Some respondents criticize his management, but the general feeling is that he more than delivered, which would serve as a springboard to reach PDVSA, the jewel in the crown.
“He had earned a certain professional and technical aura, very necessary at PDVSA. The experts and the private industry valued him, they saw in him someone who could talk to each other and he helped solve, at least a little, a disastrous management,” explains a direct source familiar with the secrets of the oil company. Tellechea paid debts to companies – the company continues to owe hundreds of millions to third parties -, approached the private sector and increased production. When he came to office, 700,000 barrels were produced per day and the day he left through the door there were 940,000, almost a million. It was helped by the licenses that the United States granted to Chevron, and the letters of conformity that the Spanish Repsol and the Italian Eni received.
Two presidencies before, a general of the National Guard, Manuel Quevedo, took care of all this, who only delved into the lack of professionalism that the company that in its day, at the end of 1994, was the second most important oil company in the world, according to a report that year from Petroleum Intelligence Weekly (PIW). PDVSA far surpassed giants like ExxonMobil or BP, it was only behind the Saudi company Aramco. They saw years of lack of investment, protests, massive layoffs, legal uncertainty, violation of safety and environmental regulations, and pure and simple corruption. The chaos. General Quevedo followed that line of incompetence and mediocrity, according to sector experts. Quevedo was in uniform and proudly wore his medals on his chest. She was replaced by Asdrúbal Chávez, who stopped the misgovernment, but it was not until the arrival of Tellechea that order began to be established. PDVSA did not even come close to its golden years, impossible in the current context, but at least it stopped its plummet.
His arrest and imprisonment, right now, remain a mystery. The Chavista hierarchs are silent. The accusations from the Attorney General’s Office, led by a regime man, Tarek William Saab, are vague. The prosecutor himself acknowledges in a statement that the investigation was carried out “with the full cooperation of the head of state (Maduro)”, which delves into the idea of those who think that the Bolivarian revolution has supraconstitutional powers. “It may be that you are paying some kind of bill,” they say in the oil sector. “That it does not belong to the internal tendencies that favor or weaken you within the ruling party. A director sometimes touches on unorthodox interests and has to take him out of the game,” they speculate. Techellea was in charge, among other things, of investigating and making numbers to estimate the hole left in PDVSA by the corruption plot led by Tareck El Aissami, known as “the traitor” in the Miraflores Palace, at 23 billion. El Aissami, who became vice president, fell from grace suddenly, and went from sitting at the table with the president and his family, nights at the Humboldt hotel, expensive restaurants and luxuries to a life of a recluse in overalls. blue.
It is not known if Tellechea will be thrown into the abyss in such a brutal way. The matter is not looking good. You don’t have to go far to know what Maduro thought of him, just two months ago, when he appointed him Minister of Industry. Maduro, sitting in front of a microphone, behind a painting of Simón Bolívar, says feverishly, as if announcing a revealed truth: “I appoint the engineer Pedro Tellechea to bring his managerial capacity and his professional capacity to the recovery of the entire industry, public, mixed and private in the country. Tellechea!” He listened, bewildered, in the middle of the room, a little embarrassed because all eyes were on him, in addition to the President’s praise. It seemed like a new impulse, the second, in a race towards the highest Chavista management. Actually, it was the end.
