Colombian Oil, Texas Profits

In memoriam, Gary Webb

Thanks to Avi Chomsky, Francisco Ramirez, and Bill Conroy

PUERTO ASIS, JANUARY, 2001 -- The man from the Kofan reservation in the Guamues Valley had walked all day along stretches of dirt road controlled by the guerillas into a city controlled by the paramilitaries to tell our small group of gringo human rights workers huddled in a church hall what had happened on the reservation just a few weeks earlier.  The tribe had kept a few small plots of coca on its land for use in traditional ceremonies.  They had never sold the plants to drug traffickers.   But that didn’t stop the U.S. from bringing in crop dusters, escorted by helicopter gunships, to fumigate the reservation.  All of the plants had died – the healing herbs, the food crops, the sacred ayahuasca.   The cattle had been poisoned.  The fish died off and the wild animals left.  The children and the old people developed strange rashes.  Most of the people in his village had fled to Ecuador.  But a few of the elders remained.  They believed the Earth was dying.  

Later that afternoon, in hushed tones, the women from PLANTE, the regional alternative development authority, explained that there was oil underneath the Kofan reservation.  The Colombian Constitution protected the tribe’s title to the land.  The fumigation had been designed to force the tribe to “voluntarily” abandon their villages.

The destruction of the Kofan’s crops was a devastating blow.  The conquistadors had brought war, slavery, and disease to Putumayo, reducing the tribe to a population of twenty thousand by 1602.   By 1899, the population had dropped to less than two thousand.   When Harvard enthobotanist came to Putmayo in 1941 to investigate the secrets of yage, a hallucinogenic ayahuasca brew, a measles epidemic had reduced the population to five hundred.  Describing the state of the Kofan tribe at the time of Shultes’ expedition, Wade Davis wrote:

“Those who survived were a riverine people, living in scattered households and small communities, and entering the forest only to hunt and seek medicinal plants.  They oriented themselves in space by the flow of the rivers, in time by the fruiting cycle of certain trees, which formed the basis of their calendar year.  There were four villages in Ecaudor on the Rio Aguarico, a like number along the Sucumbios, and two on the river Guamues, the next drainage to the north in Colombia.  Their territory ran only seventy-five miles east to west along the rivers and had a width of no more than fifty miles.  It was as it the entire tradition had come down to a string of small settlements clinging to the banks of forgotten rivers.”  (Wade Davis. One River: Explorations and Discoveries in the Amazon Rainforest. New York: Touchstone, 1996.)

The Kofan settlements to the south had already faced displacement and ecological destruction because of Texaco’s oil exploration in northern Ecuador.  Now the fumigations were driving the Kofan of the Rio Guamues off their land to make room for another generation of conquistadors searching for oil.  

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That same week, in Washington, DC, Texas oilman, George W. Bush was inaugurated President of the United States.

In the 1990’s, Bush had served on the board of directors of Harken Energy which has extensive oil and gas interests in Colombia – including several oil wells and a gas field in Putmayo.  An old friend who Bush had met at a fraternity party in Austin during their party days, Rodrigo Villamizar, had served as Colombia’s Minister of Energy and Mines while Bush was at Harken.  Villamizar had resigned in disgrace after a corruption scandal and fled to the U.S. to escape trial.  In exile, he sketched out the outlines of a Colombia policy of the new Bush adminstration.

Bush left Harken to become governor of Texas.  In October of 1999, when he was beginning to raise money for his Presidential bid, Bush convinced Colombian President Andres Pastrana and Villamizar’s successor, Luis Carlos Valenzuela, to come to Houston to meet with energy industry executives to discuss reforms and opportunities in the Colombian oil and gas sector at a meeting hosted by the Greater Houston Partnership.   The Greater Houston Partnership was co-founded by Lee Hogan, Vice Chairman of Reliant Industry, a company that profited tremendously from the deregulation of Colombian electrical utilities.   Exxon President Ansel Condray was President of the Greater Houston Partnership at the time of the meeting.   Several accounts also place Enron CEO Ken Lay, Bush’s biggest financial patron, at the meeting.   Pastrana and Valenzuela reportedly discussed changes in Colombian law that would allow foreign companies to retain a larger percentage of the royalties from oil and gas projects in Colombia.    

Valenzuela later resigned after admitting that he had illegally granted gas leases to a company he held stock in – Promigas, the Colombian subsidiary of Enron.

Energy sector “reforms” continued under Pastrana’s successor, Alvaro Uribe.  The Colombian government used to charge a 20% tax on foreign oil and gas production – in 2002, the Uribe government established a sliding scale oil and gas development tax which varied from 8 – 20% depending on an a field’s daily output.  Uribe also reduced the state oil company’s mandatory role in all oil and gas projects from 70% to 35%.   The state oil company, ECOPETROL, had played a central role in all oil and gas projects in Colombia since it had been founded in the wake of a strike against Standard Oil in Barrancabermeja in the 1920’s.  The provision was supposed to insure that the Colombian people would see some of the profits from the expoitation of their own resources.

The first company to benefit from these changes was Houston-based Argosy Energy International which signed a contract for a 20,000 hectare oil field in Putumayo in
August, 2002.

In April of 2004, Uribe eliminated ECOPETROL’s mandatory role in new oil and gas projects.

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By 2003, “The War on Terror” had replaced the “War on Drugs” as Washington’s top priority in Colombia.  Continuing crop fumigations were accompanied by a massive military assault by the Colombian army on areas of the department controlled by the guerillas of the FARC (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia.)   With the help of U.S. military advisors, the Colombian military launched Plan Patriota sending some 18,000 troops to seize control of four of Colombia’s southern departments, including Putumayo.   Two of the battalions sent to the region have been special “infratructure protection” battalions created to protect the oil industry.

Writing in The New York Times, Juan Forero, a U.S. reporter with a reputation as an apologist for the Colombian government, reported that in Putumayo:

“Much of the coca, used to produce cocaine, has been destroyed here in an American-funded eradication drive. The soldiers who now stand guard in the wilting heat say they have been told their job is vital - ensuring that the oil and government revenues flow. Lately, they have been in an upbeat mood. "All of this belonged to the guerrillas," said Lt. Luis Villalba, the young commander of a group of soldiers standing sentry. "Now it belongs to the army." Such boasts may be premature. Across four provinces, the guerrillas have melted into the jungle, avoiding direct confrontations. But they have left behind snipers and land mines that have bogged down army forces, killed about 50 soldiers and wounded hundreds. Here in the cattle pastures and jungles south of the Putumayo River, the rebels also recently burned nine tankers carrying Petrotesting's oil and killed one driver. [ . . . ]

“Still, for the first time in years, soldiers and police have arrived in isolated pockets of this province, as well as forgotten regions of three others, Caquetá, Meta and Guaviare. And while bombings against infrastructure like oil pipelines and wells continue in Putumayo, the attacks have fallen from 149 in 2003 to 58 this year through mid-October. The military and oil company representatives credit two battalions created just to guard oil infrastructure. They and other units protect such companies as Argosy Energy International of Houston, which has 15 wells in Putumayo, and Petrobank Energy and Resources, a Canadian oil producer that has banked much of its future in Colombia on tapping into an oil deposit in the Orito region that may contain a billion barrels. ‘There's a feeling of safety, that we're keeping the peace,’ said Major Pedro Sánchez, an 18-year counterinsurgency specialist who is the second in command of the battalion that protects oil installations in Orito. ‘We've provided confidence so companies can explore here’."  (Juan Forero. “Safeguarding Colombia’s Oil.” The New York Times. October 20, 2004.)

Absent from Forero’s account and from the minds of military planners in the U.S. and Colombia are the indigenous people who once inhabited the land where Argosy and Petrobank are drilling, and the thousands of campesinos who had fled violence and poverty in other regions to come to Putumayo to grow coca, only to be displaced again by fumigations, war, and oil exploration.  

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The U.S. is in Colombia in large part because of an addiction to oil.   There is a dark poetry to the fact that our economy is powered by the decayed remains of plants and animals that have been dead for millennia, and that in order to get that substance we are willing to destroy rainforests, poison rivers, and wipe out indigenous cultures.

Ironically, the same areas of southern Colombia that contain vast untapped reserves of oil also are home to one of the greatest concentrations and varieties of plants containing psychedelic compounds.  These plants play a central role in the ritual lives of the traditional cultures of the region, allowing them to maintain a connection to the mind of the forest and the heart of the creator.   In recent decades, an industry has grown up in the Amazonian areas of the Andean region, focused on bringing spiritual refugees from our culture into contact with the remaining practitioners of these old religions in order to experience the lessons the ayahuasca vine and other sacred plants have to teach.  Essentially, these pilgrims are seeking a cure to the psychological and spiritual disease that drive’s our culture’s oil addiction.

Oil exploration and crop fumigations in Putumayo threaten not only to destroy remnants of these plants and the cultures that understand them in Colombia, but also to poison the rivers that feed into the Amazon.  They also are destroying the forests that recycle the carbon emitted by burning oil and gas into oxygen, cooling the planet.  So the Kofan elders were right when they took the destruction of their reservation as a sign that the Earth was dying.

But as Utah Philips said, “The Earth is not dying, its being killed, and the people who are killing it have names and addresses.”  Many of those addresses are in Houston, and many of those names belong to people with close ties to the Bush administration.  Its time to hold them accountable.