Well of Contention: Oil In The Americas

In the oil-producing countries of Latin America, struggles over oil raise a host of fundamental questions: Who profits? Who bears the costs? Who determines to what uses the profits are put? Who decides where, when and how to explore, drill, pump and sell, and what should be done about communities that resist exploration? To whom does the subsoil—and the land and oceans themselves—belong? This Report explores these questions.

January/February
2001
Volume: 
34
Number: 
4

Taking Note

Debbie Nathan
Lately the Caribbean island Vieques has dominated the news among Puerto Ricans who want to stop the U.S. Navy from playing war games on their homeland. Less publicized than Vieques, meanwhile, is the FBI's recent move to open secret dossiers compiled on Puerto Ricans for over five decades.

Intro

NACLA
"Oil, more than any other commodity," comments Fernando Coronil in his masterful study of Venezuela, The Magical State, "illustrates both the importance and mystification of natural resources in the modern world." There is no doubting oil's importance: "Post-industrial" as the U.S. economy has become, it is perched atop an oil-driven global economy.

Open Forum

Beatrice Edwards
From October 23 to 25 of last year, the High Command of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank met ceremoniously at their splendid headquarters in Washington with the representatives of selected international trade unions. The Joint Chiefs themselves appeared for the initial encounter: Horst Kohler, Managing Director of the IMF, and James Wolfensohn, President of the World Bank.

Updates

Dante Ortiz
In July, Dominicans celebrated guilty verdicts handed down against four confessed murderers of Orlando Martínez, a young journalist killed in 1975 for reporting on human rights abuses and corruption during the Joaquín Balaguer government. The crowd in the courtroom cheered and shouted "Orlando lives!" Martínez, a member of the central committee of the outlawed Dominican Communist Party, was 31 years old when the killers summoned him from his office at the newspaper El Nacional, supposedly to do an interview.
Tim Rogers
At 2:30 p.m. on June 15, 2000—more than ten years after the U.S.-sponsored Contra war officially ended in Nicaragua—a guerrilla unit of rearmed ex-Sandinistas and ex-Contras surrounded the small campesino home of Guadalupe Montenegro in the rural municipality of Siuna.

Report

Chris Jochnick and Paulina Garzón
In the fall of 1997, a tiny indigenous community deep in Ecuador's Amazonian interior was engaged in fierce negotiations with a team of environmentalists posing as oil executives. The "oil men" were eager to sign an agreement that would allow them access to indigenous lands and were willing to offer almost anything the community desired: a short-wave radio, motors for their canoes, solar panels, a health clinic.
Patrick Reinsborough
"We are all children of the Earth, help us to defend her." —Berito KuwarU'wa, spokesperson Traditional U'wa Authority
David Shields
Though Mexico's new, neoliberal President will leave Pemex in state hands, the company will nevertheless take on major features of privatization. In 1992, President Carlos Salinas, in the midst of his drive to privatize the Mexican economy, oversaw the division of the state-owned oil monopoly Petr6leos Mexicanos (Pemex) into four subsidiaries, Pemex-Exploration and Production, Pemex-Refining, Pemex-Gas and Pemex-Petrochemicals.
Sarah Town & Heather Hanson
In rural Tabasco, a swampy state on Mexico's Gulf Coast, a middle-aged farmer named Don Ramón* has spent the past three years organizing his neighbors to protest environmental damage from the oil industry. Don Ramón lives in a farming community near the municipal-ity of Cunduacán.
Michael Tanzer
When we speak about oil in Latin America, there are several new developments we must take into account: first, a wave of mergers and acquisitions among the biggest international oil companies; second, the rise to power of a charismatic nationalist-populist Latin American leader, Venezuela's Hugo Chávez; and finally, the revival of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) and its power to control production and maintain high oil prices.
Michael T. Klare
This past summer, Congress approved a $1.3 billion emergency military aid package destined mainly for Colombia. As a result, that country became the third largest recipient of U.S. assistance (after Israel and Egypt).
Luis E. Lander
Beneath the banks of the Orinoco River in eastern Venezuela lies one of the largest hydrocarbon reserves in the world, a source of oil with enormous potential but with one major complication: All the crude that has been extracted from it is extra heavy, and contains high levels of sulfur and mineral residue.
Andrés Barreda
Several decades ago in the Mexican state of Chiapas and in neighboring Guatemala, geologists discovered deeply buried rock strata of the type that formed oil deposits millions of years ago. Since then, the search has been on for oil in these areas, and in northwestern Chiapas, a good deal has already been discovered and pumped.

Reviews

Daniel Hellinger
A scant quarter century ago, events seemed to portend a global shift in power and wealth toward the Third World. Venezuela advanced this struggle through its leadership in organizing the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC).

In Brief

Weekly News Update on the Americas
Sila María Calderón took office as governor of Puerto Rico on January 2 with calls for greater autonomy and for an end to the U.S. Navy's use of the Puerto Rican island of Vieques for bombing exercises. She stressed in her inaugural address that "[t]he people of Puerto Rico want an immediate halt to the naval exercises.