In a remote jungle clearing, several dozen Colombian guerrillas in camouflage fatigues gnaw on pieces of stewed rodent and sip a hot brew made from sugar cane. These men belong to the National Liberation Army (ELN); it’s the smaller of Colombia’s two rebel groups, but considered public enemy No. 1 in the boardrooms of Los Angeles-based Occidental Petroleum.
ELN GUERRILLAS HAVE been targeting the company’s facilities in Colombia since the mid-1980s. In a single three-month period last year, they staged 75 attacks against a vital Occidental pipeline. A rebel leader named Comandante Guillermo claims the ELN is acting on behalf of poor workers and farmers in oil-rich Arauca state, near the border with Venezuela, whose resources are being exploited by the company’s drilling operations. “Occidental has taken our oil and left nothing behind but misery,” says Guillermo. Occidental says it has a large social-investment program. The ELN demands a massive increase in that spending, arguing that despite the oil wealth, much of the area remains poor.
Now both Washington and Bogota aim to stop the attacks. Under a recently approved $94 million aid program, 20 U.S. Special Forces advisers began arriving in Arauca state last month. They’ll train two Colombian Army brigades charged with defending the 772-kilometer-long pipeline that delivers Oxy crude to a distant port on the Caribbean coastline. Colombia is the eighth largest source of U.S. oil imports, and guaranteeing a steady flow of crude shipments from the South American country now ranks alongside the twin wars against drugs and terrorism as a top U.S. objective there. But critics question whether the Bush administration should put taxpayer dollars at the service of a private company whose Colombian contractors still pay millions in “protection money” to the rebels. “It is a clear example of how American energy corporations have hijacked U.S. foreign policy and now threaten to get us deeper into a military quagmire,” says Kevin Koenig of the Washington-based Indian-rights group Amazon Watch.
Occidental executives argue that what’s good for the company will also be good for Colombia and the United States. The Bush administration, eager to reduce its dependence on Mideast energy suppliers, would be happy to boost oil imports from Latin America. And petroleum is certainly vital to Colombia: oil exports generate about one quarter of the government’s annual revenues. Oil experts say that Colombia’s potential reserves go as high as 10 billion barrels, but if no major discoveries are made soon, the country could become a net oil importer by the end of the decade.
Guerrilla attacks have made drilling in Arauca state a risky business. Pipeline saboteurs from the ELN and the larger Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) put Occidental out of commission for nearly six months in 2001, costing the company an estimated $75 million in profits. But it isn’t just Oxy’s bottom line that’s suffered. Repeated bombings of the pipeline over the years have spewed almost 3 million barrels of oil over parts of northeastern Colombia—more than 10 times the amount spilled in the 1989 Exxon Valdez shipwreck off the Alaskan coastline. The frequent disruptions also cost the Colombian treasury $430 million in uncollected royalties last year.
Security at Occidental’s installations is tight. Dogs sniff for explosives at the entrance gates, and surveillance planes regularly fly overhead in search of ELN and FARC rebel columns. More than 100 company workers have been kidnapped since Occidental arrived in the mid-1980s. “We are afraid,” says one Colombian employee. “We know the guerrillas can nab us anywhere.” The Colombian Army’s 18th Brigade is one of the units designated for U.S. military training in the coming months. Already, Army officials say, stepped-up patrols reduced the number of bombings to less than 30 during the first nine months of this year, down sharply from the 170 attacks recorded in 2001.
There is nothing terribly new about putting U.S. soldiers in harm’s way to rescue an American company under siege in a foreign land. In the early years of the 20th century, Marine Corps Gen. Smedley Butler was dispatched to several Caribbean and Central American countries to help private U.S. firms. He later described himself as “a high-class muscleman for Big Business, for Wall Street and for the bankers.” A similar dynamic is at work in Colombia. Liberal activists call it corporate welfare. Larry Meriage, Occidental’s vice president for public affairs, disagrees, saying, “This has been miscast as an Occidental initiative. It’s an attempt to shore up the Colombian government.” Either way, with the U.S. military now involved, Occidental’s prospects in Colombia look all the more likely to improve.
