The Bolivarian Brain Drain

No industry has been harder hit by the flight of talent than Venezuela's oil sector. A decade ago, Petroleos de Venezuela (PDVSA) ranked as one of the top five energy companies in the world. Everything changed under Chávez, who named a Marxist university professor with no experience in the industry to head the company. PDVSA's top staff immediately went on strike and paralyzed the country. Chávez responded by firing 22,000 people practically overnight, including the country's leading oil experts. As many as 4,000 of PDVSA's elite staff are now working overseas. "The company is a shambles," says Gustavo Coronel, a former member of the PDVSA board, who now works in the Washington D.C. as an oil consultant. Up until 2003, researchers at the company's Center for Technological research and Development generated 20 to 30 patents a year. Last year it produced none, even though its staff has doubled. PDVSA produced 3.2 million barrels of crude oil a day when Chávez took control. Now it pumps 2.4 milion, according to independent estimates.

The decline has spread across Venezuelan society, heightened by cronyism, corruption and censorship. In May, on the pretext that scientists were pursuing "obscure" research projects such as "whether there is life on Venus," Chávez began to slash budgets at the university science centers, where the country's cutting edge public health research was carried out. Instead he poured petrodollars into official "misiones cientificas" (scientific missions), where the purse strings are controlled by Chávez allies. Now the country's most respected research institutes are falling behind. Earlier this year, Jaime Requena. a Cambridge University trained biologist at the Institute of Advanced Studies, was forced into retirement and stripped of his pension after publishing a paper charging that scientific research in Venezuela was "at a 30-year low." The number of papers published by Venezuelans in international scientific journals fell from 958 to 831, a 15 percent drop in just the last three years. At aged 62, with an aging mother, Requena has few options. "It's not easy to get another job at my age. I would leave Venezuela if I could. My friends and colleagues all have."

An estimated 9,000 Venezuelan scientists are currently living in the U.S. - compared to 6,000 employed in Venezuela. One of the victims is an internationally acclaimed life sciences expert, who quit his job as chief of a major research laboratory in Caracas to try his luck in the U.S. in 2002, but always nursed hopes of returning. "I sent the government a number of proposals and they never got back to me," he says asking not to be named for fear of reprisals against his relatives in Venezuela. "Now it's all about politics. If you are not with Chávez you will never get grants. You will be persecuted. This is a war on merit." Venezuelan medical science, he said, is groping in the dark. "The last epidemiological report Venezuela published was in 2005," he says. "We don't even know what diseases we have and whether they are increasing or decreasing. This is the Cuban model, of keeping people in the dark."

The Bolivarian diaspora seems to be getting worse. Though census data is patchy, Latin American analysts say that outmigration from Venezuela, Bolivia and Ecuador has created sizeable enclaves in the U.S., Spain, Colombia and Central America. Panama City glistens with new buildings built by moneyed Venezuelan expatriates, who number some 15,000, up from a few thousand at the beginning of the decade. So many Venezuelans have flocked to Weston, a suburb of Fort Lauderdale, locals call it Westonzuela. There is hardly a middle class family in Venezuela without a son or daughter abroad," says Fernando Rodríguez, a columnist for the anti Chávez newspaper Tal Cual. In fact, far more people from the Bolivarian countries might be emigrating if it weren't for the global recession and rising hostility to outsiders, Venezuelan emigrants do not qualify as political refugees and enjoy no special advantage in the fierce competition for the 400,000 H1B work visas issued yearly by the U.S. for highly skilled migrants, three quarters of which go to Indians, who have an edge because they can speak English. "One reason we are not seeing more dislocation from these countries is that many people have no place to go," says Alejandro Portes, a sociologist who studies global migration at Princeton University.

Latin America has seen this before. Virtually the entire Cuban middle class fled to the U.S. after Fidel Castro's revolution, turning Miami into a business hub for Latin America while Havana moldered. The Cold War, stagflation, serial debt crises and massive unemployment drove the brain drain through the 1980s, Latin America's lost decade, especially in Chile, Colombia, Argentina, Peru and throughout Central America. By the early 2000s, some of the countries convulsed by dictatorship or guerrilla insurgency, such as Chile and Peru, had managed to reverse course, making their societies prosperous and safe. But other countries have struggled to bring their expatriates home. In the 1980s and 1990s, Colombia had become synonymous with cocaine, violent crime and guerrilla warfare, all of which drove some four million Colombians from their homes. Targeted by kidnappers and political thugs, tens of thousands of middle class professionals left the country. In 2002 Pres. Álvaro Uribe declared war on drugs and crime, and now onetime bandit cities like Cali, Medellin and Bogota are safer than ever and have even become models for the rest of crime-ridden Latin America. Yet the brain drain has not reversed. "Either the [emigrants] have found the American dream or they are not yet convinced that it's safe to return," says Jorge Rojas, of Codhes, a Colombian thinktank that tracks refugees. "It shows how difficult it can be to recover lost talent."

For the nations of the Bolivarian Revolution, this means some dark days are likely to be ahead. Even the wealthiest nations could ill afford to lose their best and brightest, and Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador and Nicaragua have all fallen in the World Economic Forum's competitiveness index. Fitch ratings recently demoted all three countries' debt to junk status, while the World Bank placed the Bolivarian trio of Bolivia, Ecuador and Venezuela in the bottom quarter of its ease of doing business, along with most of the African continent.