U.S. Troops Answered Oil Firm's Pleas | Amazon Watch
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U.S. Troops Answered Oil Firm’s Pleas

December 30, 2004 | T. Christian Miller | The Los Angeles Times

Washington – In the spring of 2001, the president of Occidental Petroleum’s Colombian operations made a private visit to the fortress-like U.S. Embassy in Bogota to plead for help.

A bombing campaign by leftist rebels had nearly shut down Oxy’s Caño Limon oilfield in eastern Arauca province. Oxy had repeatedly repaired a damaged pipeline only to see the guerrillas hit it again.

Guimer Dominguez, the executive, threatened to permanently shutter Oxy’s operations unless security improved. Such a closure would have been a serious blow to the Colombian government, which relied on oil royalties. And the U.S., in turn, relied on Colombia as an ally in its war on drugs.

“Oxy will not resume production at the Caño Limon field until the [government of Colombia] addresses the security situation in Arauca significantly,” then-U.S. Ambassador Anne Patterson wrote in a confidential memo to the State Department after embassy officials met with Dominguez.

Oxy’s previously undisclosed ultimatum is recounted in newly released government documents that show how private meetings at the embassy led to a Bush administration initiative to send U.S. soldiers to train Colombian soldiers to protect pipelines.

The response by the two governments, revealed in a Los Angeles Times story this year, improved security for the oil company. Patterson began working with Oxy and the Colombians to draw up a plan that would eventually cost U.S. taxpayers almost $100 million and send two dozen U.S. Special Forces troops to the South American nation.

It also coincided with a wave of violence in Arauca, an impoverished cattle region of wide-open prairies and endless sky along the Venezuelan border. Colombia’s feared paramilitaries, an illegal anti-rebel army long linked to the military, unleashed a campaign of assassinations and massacres. The Colombian military conducted strikes against rebels that sent refugees fleeing into Arauca’s cities.

Colombian and U.S. officials today describe the effort to protect the pipeline as a stunning success. Pipeline attacks have dropped from 170 in 2001 to only 17 this year. Colombia’s government receives $500 million more from Oxy’s oil operations annually. And the U.S. has trained about 2,000 soldiers to protect the pipeline.

Human rights groups and Democrats in Congress say the program has created a security force for a multibillion-dollar oil company, paid for by U.S. taxpayers. Oxy’s Colombian operations account for about 6% of the Los Angeles-based firm’s worldwide revenue.

State Department officials confirmed that the company’s efforts helped spur the initiative but said the governments acted in the interests of national security. The program was aimed at shoring up an important U.S. ally in the war against drugs, they said, and securing a volatile region. South American nations such as Venezuela, Colombia and Ecuador are increasingly important oil suppliers to the U.S. as violence roils the Middle East and parts of
Africa.

Documents show that while Oxy did not push specifically for a U.S.-funded training program, it waged a far more aggressive campaign to persuade the U.S. and Colombia to improve security for its operations than it has publicly acknowledged.

In a letter to Sen. Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vt.) in 2002, Oxy’s president, Dale Laurance, said the company was simply providing information on the pipeline. He credited Colombia with having “brought to the attention” of the U.S. that the bombing campaign was having a serious financial impact.

Company spokesman Larry Meriage said in an e-mail response to questions that the company asked for U.S. help in securing the pipeline but didn’t anticipate American funding to help protect it.

It “seems rather clear that in meetings with U.S. Embassy officials that Oxy’s Bogota staff hoped the [U.S. government] would urge the Colombians to do more on their own to improve the security situation in Arauca,” Meriage wrote. “There was no reason to believe that the [U.S.] would do anything directly about the security situation in Arauca.”

The rebels have a long history of targeting Oxy, which discovered oil in Arauca in 1983. Most attacks have focused on the pipeline, which transports the resource to a coastal terminal.

Over the years, rebel fighters with the ELN, the Spanish initials of the National Liberation Army, made bombing the pipeline a lucrative business. They extorted money from Occidental and its subcontractors and siphoned off taxes meant for local governance, according to Colombian and U.S. officials. Oxy says today that it does not pay extortion demands but acknowledges that some of its subcontractors do.

Pipeline bombings rarely affected production. Oxy normally was able to store oil in tanks until the pipeline was repaired, then resume pumping.

However, in the late 1990s, the number of attacks jumped from an average of 45 a year to 73, and documents show that Oxy complained to the U.S. Embassy that Colombian authorities were pulling out local police units in the face of increased rebel attacks.

In 1998, Dominguez posed pointed questions to Peter Romero, then assistant secretary of State for inter-American affairs. Oxy had suffered 530 attacks in previous years, he said at a reception with business leaders.

“What would it take to get the [U.S. government] involved in the peace process?” he asked, according to the documents.

Attacks continued to increase, and in 2000, then-Ambassador Curtis Kamman wrote to the State Department that Oxy had decided to “seek a greater degree” of involvement by the U.S. and Colombian governments.

Then, in 2001, the conflict for control of Arauca exploded between the ELN and a second rebel army, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC. The FARC began bombing the pipeline, cutting into the ELN’s source of income.

Attacks soared as never before, with bombings occurring several times a day sometimes. A senior U.S. official remembers taking an aerial tour and watching rebels dig holes to plant explosives along the buried conduit.

Oxy was forced to shut down operations. Between February and May, the company pumped oil for only 30 hours, according to an embassy report. But meetings with senior Colombian and U.S. officials in early 2001 produced few results, a State Department official said in a recent interview. Colombia and the U.S. were in the middle of implementing Plan Colombia, a multibillion-dollar program to cut Colombia’s cocaine production in half.

“There’s a lot of violence in Colombia, and it takes a while for these things to break through in a country that is totally burdened with all kinds of dramatic issues,” a U.S. official said. “It did take a while before the Colombian government, and by extension the U.S., began to see this as a real sea change.”

Finally, Dominguez issued his warning that Oxy would stop trying to repair the pipeline and just shut down – first in a meeting with Colombian government officials and then in a May 14 meeting at the U.S. Embassy. Within days, Oxy’s troubles began to ease.

On the day of the meeting at the embassy, Colombian newspapers published an interview with Carlos Castaño, the head of Colombia’s paramilitary forces. Castaño announced that the rightist fighters would invade Arauca.

“The guerrillas are going to begin to die,” he declared.

Luis Moreno, Colombia’s ambassador to Washington, said it was “preposterous” to suggest a connection between Oxy’s demands and Castaño’s announcement. Although Colombia has improved its human rights record in recent years,
advocates remain concerned about links between mid-level military commanders and the paramilitaries.

“Nobody can say that at the lower ranks that something like this didn’t happen,” Moreno said. “But I don’t believe it.”

The paramilitary invasion unleashed a wave of killings of political leaders, union bosses and leftist activists. By 2002, Arauca had one of the highest murder rates in Colombia, which has one of the highest murder rates in the world.

The paramilitaries were followed by Colombian special forces units, which clashed with rebels in the countryside. Refugees began fleeing toward Arauca’s overburdened cities.

The Colombian government also created a team of special prosecutors to arrest insurgents in Arauca. Mass arrests drew criticism from human rights groups. Oxy agreed to provide up to $800,000 for the team, according to the
documents, although Oxy executives said they paid far less.

The aid was in addition to Oxy’s long-standing payments of $5 million to $15 million a year for security and reimbursement of the Colombian military for housing, transportation and fuel expenses, according to a letter obtained by The Times. The amount is far greater than the company has previously acknowledged.

In September 2001, Al Qaeda launched its attack on America. In the aftermath, the Bush administration decided to loosen restrictions on aid to Colombia, which had been limited to drug enforcement activities. U.S. officials decided to test whether lawmakers would fund a strictly military initiative there.

In October 2001, the embassy sent three teams to Arauca to discuss problems at Oxy’s remote Caño Limon compound, all tubes and hissing steam in the midst of verdant prairie.

Soon all the pieces were in place. The administration would include $98 million in its budget request to Congress to finance training. The bulk of the money would pay for new helicopters, which are scheduled to begin arriving next year, a U.S. Embassy official in Bogota said.

In mid-November, Dominguez paid another visit to the embassy. The security situation was still bad, he told officials, but he now had hope that it would improve.

“Dominguez expressed guarded optimism that judicial and military initiatives scheduled for early next year will enhance pipeline security,” Patterson wrote to the State Department.

A month later, Oxy recorded only one attack against the pipeline. The oil has flowed freely ever since.

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