South American Pipeline Wars

We are witnessing “a move towards establishment of a regional joint venture of state-sector oil companies, to be dubbed PetroAmerica, which would integrate Latin America and the Caribbean on principles of self-sufficiency, and re-invest profits into development and social programs.”

This should be interesting.

As the left-populist Evo Morales takes office in Bolivia, a clear anti-imperialist bloc is consolidating in South America, led by Venezulea’s Hugo Chavez and also including Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay and potentially Chile. Days before Morales was inaugurated Jan. 22, Chavez and other regional leaders met in Brasilia to announce ambitious plans for new gas and oil pipelines spanning the continent, linking national markets across vast areas of rainforest and towering mountains.

Now a race is on between a series of pipeline projects already being developed under the auspices of multinational corporations and the proposal unveiled at Brasilia: the first predicated on extracting resources from South America with the minimum return to the continent’s inhabitants; the other on harnessing those resources to lift the continent’s masses out of poverty.

The corporate projects invariably link oilfields in the continental interior—the Amazon and Orinoco basins—with the Pacific and Caribbean coasts for export to the United States. The Cano-Limon pipeline, run by a consortium led by California’s Occidental Petroleum, links Colombia’s Arauca oilfields in the Orinoco with the Caribbean. To the south, the Putumayo-Tumaco line links the new oilfields of the Colombian Amazon to the Pacific, with Petrobank Energy of Canada a major investor. In Ecuador…

Posted by ShiftShapers
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