Blood and Oil by Michael Klare

Author:Michael Klare
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780141927183
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 1999-02-04T05:00:00+00:00

Extending the Carter Doctrine: Latin America and West Africa

American worries about the security of oil supplies from the Andean region of Latin America and the west coast of Africa have also led to expanded military commitments there. Both these areas have experienced widespread violence that has forced them, on occasion, to curtail their oil deliveries to the United States. In response, Washington has lavished key countries with more and more military aid. And, as with the Gulf and the Caspian basin, the procurement of additional oil from these regions has come to be seen as a matter of national security—and so, in line with the extended Carter Doctrine, a valid reason for expanding the level of U.S. military involvement.

The fighting in Colombia is a source of particular concern. Colombia was once one of our leading oil suppliers, and it has the potential to provide far larger volumes in the future. The Department of Energy estimates its current reserves at a relatively modest 1.8 billion barrels, but some geologists believe that huge untapped reservoirs lie awaiting discovery in the country’s northeast, near some of Venezuela’s largest fields.95 However, the violence there has prevented any exploration, and in the meantime Colombia’s output has dropped by 28 percent.96

For the past thirty years, Colombia has been lacerated by a four-way struggle between the central government, leftist guerrillas belonging to the FARC and ELN, right-wing paramilitary organizations, and heavily armed drug cartels.97 The guerrillas want to overthrow the government and replace it with one governed by socialist or communist principles. The paramilitaries, largely grouped into the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC), want to preserve the privileges of Colombia’s large landowners. Both have financed their operations by either selling illegal drugs or serving as protection forces for the drug cartels and rural coca growers. The oil industry figures in this struggle as a critical source of income for the government and an inviting target for the guerrillas.

Contending that the violence has produced an atmosphere of lawlessness in which the illegal drug trade can flourish, the United States has long provided arms and other forms of military aid to the country’s army and police forces. But while the guerrillas and the paramilitaries have both collaborated with the drug barons in their pursuit of operating revenues, Washington has channeled its support to the government exclusively for fighting the FARC and the ELN—groups characterized by American leaders as “narcoterrorist” organizations whose elimination is vital to our security. Meanwhile, Congress has sharply increased U.S. aid to the Colombian government—awarding $1.3 billion in 2000 under Plan Colombia, and a combined $1.1 billion in fiscal years 2003 and 2004.98

Though American support for Plan Colombia and associated programs usually stresses the perniciousness of the drug trade, in 2002 the Bush administration announced another objective: helping the Colombian government protect its oil pipelines from guerrilla attack. The White House requested an additional $98 million to bolster security along the Cano Limón-Coveñas pipeline, a highly vulnerable 480-mile-long conduit from Occidental Petroleum’s fields in the embattled Arauca region in the northeast to Coveñas, on the Caribbean coast.

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