How a Venezuelan steel plant's decline is helping Brazil treat COVID-19 patients

But Maduro left out the reason Sidor had oxygen to spare: steel production, which uses the oxygen as an input, has all but halted at the Puerto Ordaz plant following years of steady output declines since the company was nationalized in 2008 by the late former President Hugo Chavez, Maduro's predecessor and mentor. "If the steelworks were in full production, there would not be capacity to dispatch oxygen," said Jose Luis Alcocer, a Sidor worker with 34 years of experience.

When Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro last week announced a second shipment of oxygen to help neighboring Brazil treat COVID-19 patients, he credited the "Venezuelan working class" at the state-owned Sidor steel plant for the gesture of solidarity.

Maduro has used the dispatches to Brazil's northern Amazonas state - where hospitals last month ran out of oxygen due to a severe outbreak - to contrast what he calls the benefits of Venezuela's socialist model with the track record of Brazil's far-right President Jair Bolsonaro, a fierce Maduro critic. But Maduro left out the reason Sidor had oxygen to spare: steel production, which uses the oxygen as an input, has all but halted at the Puerto Ordaz plant following years of steady output declines since the company was nationalized in 2008 by the late former President Hugo Chavez, Maduro's predecessor and mentor.

"If the steelworks were in full production, there would not be capacity to dispatch oxygen," said Jose Luis Alcocer, a Sidor worker with 34 years of experience. Venezuela's information ministry did not reply to a request for comment.

Oxygen furnaces are used to melt iron and alloys into steel, but Sidor's steel facilities are operating only intermittently. The plant produced 17,000 tonnes of liquid steel in 2020, less than 1% of its 5.1 million-tonne capacity, according to company documents seen by Reuters. "Everything is halted," said one steelworker at the plant, who asked to remain anonymous for fear of reprisals. "The only area currently operating is the pellet plant, which uses nitrogen, not oxygen."

Chronic labor disputes and deterioration of the plant's installations due to underinvestment have led to falling production at the plant since the government took it over in 2008 from steel conglomerate Ternium, which is controlled by Argentina's Techint Group. Sidor restarted one of the mill's oxygen-producing plants in April 2020, after it too had been halted for more than 15 months. The company then began supplying oxygen to hospitals in the area near the plant, which is situated in the southern Venezuelan city of Ciudad Guayana on the banks of the Orinoco River.

As a result, the city's two main hospitals have sufficient oxygen supply at the moment, said Hugo Lezama, the secretary of a local doctors' association. Venezuela's healthcare system has deteriorated substantially in recent years amid an economic crisis, leaving hospitals ill-equipped for Covid-19. There are occasional disruptions to oxygen supply at the Ruiz Paez hospital some 100 kilometers (62 miles) to the west in Ciudad Bolivar, according to Camilo Torres of a local nurses' association.

"Sometimes oxygen supply will go out for the morning, or for a shift, or all day, and that affects the attention we can give," Torres said. Venezuela, with a population of some 25 million, has officially reported some 131,096 cases of the novel coronavirus, and some 1,247 deaths, though many opposition politicians and doctors question the figures. Brazil, with a population of some 211 million has reported more than 9.5 million cases and more than 200,000 deaths, the second-highest level in the world after the United States.

Maduro has referred to the crisis in Amazonas as "Bolsonaro's health disaster." Bolsonaro has responded by saying that Venezuela's oxygen is welcome, but that Maduro should focus on caring for Venezuelans.

(This story has not been edited by Devdiscourse staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)