Aiken In Check by Michael Frost Beckner

Author:Michael Frost Beckner
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Montrose Station Press LLC
Published: 2022-05-15T00:00:00+00:00

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THE MATERIAL PLANNING AND LOGISTICS SUPERVISOR for the Ford Motor Company Valencia Assembly left her state-housing tower in the Barrio Andres Bello, state of Carabobo, Venezuela, at 4 a.m., Tuesday, January 15, 2002. Rather than drive in her company-supplied Ford Focus, she set out on foot along the Rio Cabriales past the concrete Hipódromo de Valencia horse track—built in 1971 and looking every day its age, gray and crumbling—for the Caracas bus stop. A taxi would have taken only eight minutes, but she did not want to be noticed or remembered.

The cab ride would have been infinitely more comfortable. Barely a month into summer, the sky still dark with night and the temperature a balmy 73°F, Carmen Briceño, aged thirty-three, was seven months into the first pregnancy out of five to carry past three months without miscarriage. Regardless of what her OBGYN assured her, she intuitively knew that by walking the five miles, she risked her baby’s life. The material planning and logistics supervisor for the Ford Motor Company Valencia Assembly had come to believe she did not carry life well. But the risk not to walk, not to make this trip, was greater than both mother and child. The risk was to the life of her country.

Carmen was already sweating hot, bone-sore, and exhausted by 4:58 a.m. when she reached the Servicios Especiales del Centro bus station and paid the dollar for her ticket and waited. Her bra straps, loosened far as they would go, did not go far enough anymore. They cut into her shoulders. She offset the pain by telling herself she would find a maternity shop after her meeting that morning in the capital. The shopping would provide extra cover for the trip if it were ever questioned.

The thought of questioning frightened Carmen. Her whole involvement, born of something she believed in but was entirely uninvolved with, frightened her by her lack of any kind of control over what her meeting would set into motion. Her meeting, innocent and perfectly legal by both Venezuelan and US law, would set in motion a chain reaction that was deeply criminal. But her conscience was clear. The real crime was living in the country with the most oil reserves on the planet where she and her husband, formerly a two-car family, were unable to afford gasoline for the one car they now shared.

The state-run oil monopoly called Petróleos de Venezuela was not good enough for President Chávez. In a move against their board of directors that was blatantly outside his constitutional authority, he mandated new energy laws to triple the royalties foreign petroleum outfits paid the government. Collapsing and seizing their businesses whenever he could, he prevented those foreign firms from anything other than minority stakes in their partnerships with the national company.

A former paratrooper who rose to power as a man of the people, Chávez plundered the oil industry to become one of the wealthiest men in South America. He dined on Kobe steaks off golden plates inside

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