VIENNA/CARACAS -- In the 1970s, an adviser to Venezuela's leftist guerrillas proposed that oilfields, not arms, were the key to bringing revolution to the OPEC nation.
Thirty years later, Bernard Mommer has become the top energy strategist in President Hugo Chavez's effort to seize back oilfields from foreign energy giants and use the revenues to finance a Cuba-inspired socialist revolution.
"When I came (to Venezuela) I bumped into the oil question, I was always fascinated by that," said Mommer, a French-born mathematician of German descent who emigrated to Venezuela in 1970. Mommer was speaking to Reuters in a rare interview during a visit to Vienna last month.
Now, as Chavez rallies supporters with his high-profile showdown with foreign oil giants such as Exxon Mobil, it is Mommer, as deputy energy minister, who is quietly steering Venezuela's push to take over oilfield assets.
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His Marxist-influenced ideas on state control of natural resources, shunned for decades by the technocracy of state oil company PDVSA, are now the ideological backbone of Chavez's crusade to boost the state's cut of energy profits.
Mommer, who maintains a low profile even in public, has also become a point man for putting these theories into practice, heading negotiations with oil companies over nationalization of their assets.
He is leading talks with oil companies including ConocoPhillips and Chevron, which have been given a June 26 deadline to reach a deal on their continued involvement in four multibillion dollar oil projects.
Mommer's critics say his ideology is helping to push out private investment and driving down Venezuela's total oil production, which market watchers say is 30 percent less than the official figures of around 3 million barrels per day.
OIL AND REVOLUTION
Mommer was born in Southern France in 1943. He is the son of a German Marxist activist who was arrested in Nazi Germany and then laid low in the Pyrenees during the Second World War.
Drawn to Venezuela in 1970 by the nation's oil boom, Mommer found work teaching mathematics.
He became a senior adviser to the Party of the Venezuelan Revolution, a Communist party splinter and the political wing of the country's main guerrilla group, which later drew in Chavez himself as a military conspirator.
According to historian Alberto Garrido, Mommer was the principal author of the party's "Oil Notebooks," three volumes that analyze the relationship between Venezuelan governments and powerful oil companies.
When Venezuela nationalized oilfields in 1976, Mommer proposed that the guerrillas lay down their arms and instead find other ways to control oil resources, Garrido said, based on an interview with former guerrilla commander Douglas Bravo.
The rebels continued to fight and Mommer went to work for the emerging state oil company PDVSA in 1989. He quit five years later because he thought the company was hiding income from the state rather than generating revenue for social development.
PEOPLE'S PETROLEUM
When Venezuela brought foreign companies back in the 1990s, Mommer — then working with the Oxford Institute for Energy Studies — responded with highly technical criticisms of how the deals were stacked in favor of foreign companies.
"I realized that PDVSA was going totally wrong in 1993," Mommer said.
He also lashed out at Venezuela's acceptance that foreign companies could take disputes to international courts, a privilege Chavez has stripped from all future oilfield deals.
Chavez regained control of PDVSA in 2003 after sacking technocrats who had walked off the job to try to force him from office.
He then began investing PDVSA's windfall profits in a social development campaign that has boosted support for him among the poor and helped him win a landslide re-election in 2006.
Venezuela took over the last of the remaining oilfields held by private companies in May, and this month plans to hammer out accords to take over four oil projects worth an estimated $30 billion from foreign multinationals.
Just as in decades past, Mommer said that providing analytical expertise on oil is his contribution to leftist politics, which are increasingly influential in Latin America.
"I am an expert, I am not a politician," he said. "My contribution to the recovery of Venezuela by the program of President Chavez and his revolution is (as) an expert."
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