Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent by Eduardo Galeano

Author:Eduardo Galeano [Galeano, Eduardo]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, azw3, pdf
Tags: non.fiction, history, society, ryan
Publisher: NYU Press
Published: 1996-12-31T13:00:00+00:00

THE BLACK CURSE OF PETROLEUM

Along with natural gas, petroleum is today the chief fuel that keeps our world in motion; it is a raw material of rising importance for the chemical industry and is the basic strategic material for military activities. Nothing compares with this “black gold” as a magnet for foreign capital, nothing earns such lush profits, no jewel in the diadem of capitalism is so monopolized, and no businessmen wield the global political power of the great petroleum corporations. Standard Oil and Shell seat and unseat kings and presidents, finance palace plots and coups d’état, have innumerable generals, ministers, and James Bonds at their command, and make decisions about peace or war in every field and every language. Standard Oil of New Jersey (now Exxon) is the capitalist world’s biggest industrial enterprise; outside the United States no industrial enterprise has greater power than Royal Dutch/Shell. Affiliates sell crude petroleum to subsidiaries which refine it and sell it to branch organizations for distribution: there is no loss of blood in the whole internal circulatory system of the cartel, which also owns the pipelines and most of the oil fleets on the seven seas. Prices are manipulated on a world scale to keep taxes low and profits high: the crude petroleum gets constantly cheaper, the refined constantly more expensive.

With petroleum, as with coffee or meat, rich countries profit more from the work of consuming it than do poor countries from the work of producing it. The ratio is ten to one: of the $11 that the derivatives of a barrel of petroleum sell for, countries exporting the world’s most important raw material get a sum total of $1 from taxes and extraction costs. Countries in the developed zone, where the oil companies have their head offices, get the other $10, the sum total of their own taxes—eight times larger than those of the producing countries—and the costs and profits of transport, refining, processing, and distribution, monopolized by the big corporations.14

While petroleum from U.S. wells enjoys high prices and U.S. oil workers’ wages are comparatively generous, the price of Venezuelan and Middle Eastern petroleum has been falling through the late 1950s and all through the 1960s. A barrel of Venezuelan petroleum, for example, cost $2.65 in 1957 and $1.86 as this chapter is written. The Rafael Caldera administration has promised to unilaterally fix the price much higher, but even by manipulating statistics it will not reach the 1957 level. The United States is at the same time the biggest producer and the biggest importer of petroleum. When most of the crude petroleum sold by the oil companies came from U.S. wells, the price was kept up; but when, during World War II, the United States became a net importer and the cartel began applying a new policy, the price systematically sagged. An odd inversion of the “laws of the market”: the price of petroleum falls as world demand rises and factories, automobiles, and generating plants multiply. And another paradox: while the price of petroleum falls, the price consumers everywhere pay for fuel rises.

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