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Drilling for Oil and Constructing Difference in Eastern Bolivia

Stephen Cote

 
 

     Petroleum extraction has shaped modern landscapes in dramatic ways that include disastrous incidents when offshore oil rigs explode or tankers collide into reefs, or from the accumulating effects of global climate change. World historians and environmental historians can discover new ways to study and teach about the modern world within the paradigm of the global transition to hydrocarbon-based energy regimes that fueled industrial and population growth, and built the sometimes dystopian landscapes we find so familiar. Studying modern world history within the global transition to a new energy regime, as Thomas Andrews did in his study of Colorado coal miners, opens new frameworks for world historians to examine the construction of built landscapes and social relationships, while the topical relevance of oil can interest students in the study of the modern world.1

     The transition to a petroleum-based economy caused global disruptions accompanying new petroleum-based technology clusters in transportation, communication, industry, and agriculture.2 The First World War made oil a geostrategic resource, and oil became the largest global energy source by the 1950s.3 The drive to obtain the valuable resource grew during this period in Latin America, a region with little coal, but much oil. The extraction of oil from Bolivia's eastern lowlands to fuel new petroleum-based technologies and construct a modern nation led people to re-conceptualize ideas of nature, nation, and race in this small Andean country. Oil constructed new places in the blank spaces on Bolivia's maps, re-directed state development priorities, incited international conflict, and fueled a revolution. Oil extraction also created conflict between the eastern oil regions and the western highlands.


 
Figure 1
From the University of Texas Map Library (2006).
 

     Bolivia's eastern lowlands and western highlands are divided by more than the tropical rain forests and steeply walled canyons of the eastern downslope of the Andes Mountains; dissonant cultures drive political wedges between the regions. Eastern Cambas describe themselves as more "Western" and productive than the highland Collas comprised of the country's majority Quechua and Aymara indigenous peoples.4 Large percentages of easterners oppose the government of Evo Morales, Bolivia's first indigenous president, and seek autonomy from the La Paz-centered state. One of main points of contention between Bolivia's eastern and western cultures is the hydrocarbon sector of oil and natural gas. The eastern departments demand a greater share of oil and gas revenues and more control over the hydrocarbons located under their feet, but the roots of the conflict go deeper. This article investigates the construction of eastern cultures in the oil camps built by Standard Oil in the 1920s and 1930s, and the camps and pipelines built by Bolivia's state oil company in the following two decades. While oil created divisions between the lowlands and highlands, oil and oil pipelines also connected the regions through the interdependent demands of energy dependence and nation-building projects.

Constructing the East

     Standard Oil Company mule trains hauled tons of equipment up the slope of Tacuarandi Mountain in southeastern Bolivia in 1922.5 Hundreds of mules hired from a transportation company in Argentina carried the machinery and pieces to assemble an oil camp in the remote Sub Andean Mountain ranges pressed between the towering heights of the Andes and the torrid lowland expanse of the Chaco Boreal. The mules, tied together in the dozens, trod through rivers impassably swollen during the rainy season, across desert-like plains of low thorny brush, and up the slopes of the mountains on newly cut roads. They hauled piping and steel girders for the drill rigs along with boilers, construction material for housing, food and other sundries, and medicines to stave off the many tropical diseases. Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, hundreds of these mule trains reshaped southeastern Bolivia from a remote wilderness into a center for the world's most important natural resource. Demand for oil during the transition to petroleum-based economies drove domestic entrepreneurs and large foreign companies to penetrate the remote and dangerous terrain of the Sub Andes Mountains.


 
Figure 2
Photograph of Standard Oil mule train hauling equipment up Tacuarandi Mountain from: Standard Oil Company of Bolivia, Informe sometido al supremo gobierno sobre trabajos efectuados en Bolivia por la Standard Oil Company (La Paz: Editorial "Marinoni," 1923).
 

     Bolivia experienced this transition slowly, but dramatically. The country found itself losing a tragic three-year war against neighboring Paraguay during the 1930s in a futile expansionist drive to gain an outlet to the Atlantic Ocean to export its oil. Bolivia nationalized Standard Oil properties in 1937, becoming the first Latin American state to nationalize a major foreign company. And the Bolivian National Revolution of 1952 used oil to break from the vestiges of a feudalistic past dominated by a handful of tin mining families and hacienda owners exploiting the country's majority indigenous populations. All of these dramatic events in Bolivian history contributed in some way to the growing division between the eastern and western Bolivian cultures. For example, the Chaco War redefined the borders of the eastern departments while transforming them from distant and sparsely populated frontiers to strategic, and even sacred, ground stained with the blood of Bolivian soldiers. The populist governments that nationalized Standard Oil Company and founded a state oil company to produce Bolivia's oil funneled a percentage of oil revenues directly into eastern departments. The revenues grew to become the largest revenue source for those departments.6 The Revolution of 1952 built a more centralized state in La Paz, which increased tensions between the state and the departments.

     Yet none of these events alone can explain the intense feelings expressed by lowland easterners against the highlands. The differences go back to the ways in which the east was built. The east was constructed not looking west to the highlands, but "West" to the capitalist markets of Europe and North America. The geographical barriers between the lowlands and the highlands, the markets that ran along the eastern slope of the Andes, and the neglect of the east by the La Paz governments that were more focused on highland mining in the early twentieth century contributed to the cultural differences constructed in the oil camps and Santa Cruz de la Sierra, today Bolivia's largest city and the center of opposition to La Paz. The built landscapes of eastern Bolivia emerged from the development of the oil sector in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by domestic entrepreneurs, but mostly from the activities of Standard Oil Company in the 1920s and 1930s.

     The lack of roads isolated the oil regions from the highland population centers, as did the steeply walled valleys, harsh climate, and danger both from tropical diseases and hostile Native communities. A geology professor from the University of Pennsylvania, Harvey Bassler, and a Danish engineer and oil businessman involved in Bolivian oil speculation, Ivar Hoppe, surveyed the oil regions in the southern Department of Tarija in 1918. Tarija historian Wilson Mendieta Pacheco wrote about Hoppe and Bassler's months-long explorations along the Bermejo and Tarija Rivers, exclaiming, "One can only imagine the difficulties and hostilities of the tropical geography."7 The difficulties included diseases such as malaria and yellow fever, which were known in this area and greatly feared.8  Fear of the region's natural attributes needed to be overcome to successfully attract capital. Oil drilled by Standard Oil and sprayed over open water in the lowlands by Rockefeller Foundation employees in the 1930s helped mitigate the danger from mosquito-borne illnesses and increased oil production.9 Other difficulties remained, however, including a disputed border with Paraguay to the east that stoked anxieties in a country that had lost land rich in resources to its neighbors.

     The state felt some urgency to protect its borders after losing its seacoast and land rich in nitrates to Chile in the 1880s War of the Pacific, but had few resources to do so. Colonel José Manuel Pando's popularized expeditions between 1892 and 1898 into the Acre, what one author called that "savage Arcadia" in the Amazonian north, could not prevent the eventual loss of territory rich in rubber to Brazil in the 1903 War of the Acre, but it did set a precedent.10 As the first Liberal Party president (1900–1904), Pando sent military expeditions to establish small forts at the furthest borders, and this included the most southern point of Bolivia in the oil department of Tarija. A 1902 expedition established Fortín Campero in a heavily forested region along the Bermejo River. Six civilians and twenty soldiers braved the rivers and jungles to found the outpost with patriotic fervor.11 The first commander of the small post, Lieutenant Máximo Poblete, constructed a fort, a farm, living quarters for administrators, a dispensary, dormitories, a watchtower, and other necessities for a remote border outpost. The fort was described as being in "a land of nobody" in a "frontier of nobody."12 Surrounding the fort was dense subtropical wilderness with wildlife that included pumas, jaguars, monkeys, anteaters, sloths, and the usual tropical plague of insects. Captain Darío Barriga reconstructed the small fort in 1909 to accommodate a larger contingent and to make it more comfortable for those, including three or four women, who spent years in the isolated location. Floods during the rainy season of 1912 destroyed the camp. The area remained mostly uninhabited until the Bassler and Hoppe expedition in 1918. The scientists began their expedition at Oran, Argentina, returning confident that the area was rich in petroleum.13 The state did no more than keep a token presence in the region. Oil companies would build the east.

     Standard Oil Company invested more than seventeen million dollars in Bolivian oil production from 1921 to 1937 after acquiring millions of hectares of the country's most promising oil concessions.14 Standard drilled the country's first successful wells, twenty-eight in total, and built two small refineries. Bolivians dreamed of future prosperity from the company's holdings.15 For example, Bolivian National Deputy Pedro Lopez stated in 1922:

When thousands and hundreds of thousands of barrels of oil gush forth, Bolivia will call the attention of the industrial world, cancel its public debts, its credit will have no limit, its railroads will multiply, many small towns will become centers of production, the agricultural industry will be exploited scientifically; in a word, the Nation in a state of economic poverty and prostration will be turned into a true economic power.16

     Despite making Bolivia an oil-producing nation, Standard Oil never did much more than the minimum to meet its contractual obligations with the state. The costs of exporting from an area with little transportation or communication infrastructure, and surrounded by extreme geographies, disputed territories, and hostile neighbors did not make oil production a promising enterprise. Standard Oil held the properties for a future time when exporting would not be so cost-prohibitive. This complicated Bolivia's plans to use oil to build a modern nation.

     The company did, however, produce new spaces in the oil regions. They brought technology and modern oil production practices into areas formerly known more for exotic natives, tropical diseases, and dangerous animals. They raised oil derricks, what one European traveler referred to as "that dark finger of progress," on the forested hillsides of the Sub Andean ranges.17 New communities grew around oil centers such as Camiri and Bermejo, while the small lowland city of Santa Cruz gained strategic importance. Business relations and diplomatic overtures increased with the neighboring countries of Brazil, Argentina, and Paraguay. Standard Oil activity began an accelerating process of regional development in the media luna (half-moon) region of country, named for the half-moon shape of the eastern departments that make up two-thirds of the country's territory. That part of the country was relatively unknown in the 1920s.

     The author of a 1924 newspaper article about the Santa Cruz Geographic Society by the main Santa Cruz newspaper "El Oriente," noted that, "The departments of the east are without a doubt the most unknown of the republic…Santa Cruz, geographically and historically, is not known even by its own sons."18 There was little government reach east of the Andes, few population centers, and little economic activity. It was, for all intents and purposes, wilderness frontier. The article reported that valuable information came to the society through the construction of the Cochabamba-Santa Cruz railroad and from Standard Oil Company. Standard Oil approached from the south, through Argentina, and by doing so, constructed an eastern Bolivia away from the western highland population centers and cultures. The landscapes of the oil regions generated more than a challenging business enterprise in the subtropical mountain ranges, they shaped persistent regional differences.

     During the early phase of exploration, from 1921 to 1923, Standard Oil survey teams mapped more than 25,000 kilometers of land in three departments between the latitudes of 17°30' to 23°50' south and longitudes 63° to 64°15' west.19 The company compiled thirty-three maps at a scale of 1:40,000. Standard constructed forty-three kilometers of new roads and rebuilt and constantly maintained hundreds of kilometers of old roads. The company cleared three camps, and by June 1923, began drilling at two of them. The President of Standard Oil Company of Bolivia, Thomas Armstrong, stated that due to the difficult terrain, the "magnitude of the work, the enormity of expenses, the diligence in the execution of the work and the scrupulous exactitude observed in each of the details," that the work to that point was "highly satisfactory."20  The geologists and the engineers from the survey teams stayed on at the camps, continuing their work exploring and measuring, looking for anticlines and seepages, and preparing maps. And the state grew increasingly impatient about the lack of production.

     Santa Cruz de la Sierra, a small city on the corner of the Andes and Amazonia, saw the Standard Oil contract as a chance to finally achieve attention from the state to help its small economy grow. Cruceños agitated for railroads, a cotton textile factory, a medical laboratory and pharmacy, and other industry, using the nascent petroleum sector for leverage in La Paz.21 The eastern businessmen saw the state as an obstacle to development, as a corrupt centralized bureaucracy that ignored their needs as well as those of all of the country outside the highland mine centers. The easterners imagined themselves to be different from the highland Bolivian politicians who ignored their region. The oil helped them articulate that difference into a modern western industrial culture opposed to the highland indigenous traditional cultures, and a racist discourse of progress versus backwardness.

     The oil industry, and especially Standard Oil Company, opened the eastern part of the country by building and maintaining roads, by installing telegraph lines, and by investing in services such as banking. While much of this investment went to Argentina, Standard Oil also purchased what they could from businesses in eastern Bolivia. The company's activities increased economic activity in the eastern frontier towns and helped them grow. Approaching the remote sites could be challenging, but the camps were oases in the harsh regions. A European traveler related the following account:

The memory of Macharetí, the second camp, bides with me yet. For close on forty miles we had ridden through blazing sunshine and broken canyon country. Up two hundred feet of soft, red sand that was as difficult to negotiate as snow; down again into the valleys where the fickle rivers had dried in the heat; through barren cactus patches we plodded our lonely way, until our saddles and our tempers had become equally hot and unhitched….Suddenly we climbed a high, slippery bank, and Macharetí, radiant in its promise of a night's rest, lay before us. A crimson, bulbous sun shone low above the Franciscan monastery, throwing it into black relief. Wide, tree-lined streets, savage boulevards, showed clearly the priestly influence towards tidiness, and an army of misbegotten dogs snapped at the heels of our mules.22

     The oil camp workers at Macharetí offered the travelers a cold beer, a hot shower, and ices. The built landscapes of the oil camps were, in Yi-Fu Tuan's words, "the security and stability of place" in an otherwise frightening wilderness space.23 Standard Oil took over the former role held by the missionaries to tame the area, like the conquistadors of old building churches atop Incan temples. The flow of song by the Franciscans was joined by the dark viscous liquid bubbling out of the hillside. The camps opened the area to new commerce, new goods, and new ideas.

     The nearby town of Camiri in a river valley along the eastern edge of the Sub Andes and halfway between Argentina and the city of Santa Cruz provided the base for Standard Oil Company operations in Bolivia. One Sunday in 1927 an automobile drove into the oil camp at Camiri, or "La Bomba," as the town was called at the time due to the water pump at the Parapetí River used for two of Standard Oil Company's wells. The car, a four-cylinder Model T Ford, the first automobile to arrive at the town, rumbled and swerved north over the heavily rutted wagon trail from Argentina.24 The car carried two Scots, Robert Sinclair and George Anderson. They drove to the town of Lagunillas, forty kilometers northwest of Camiri, and the home of George Angus.25 The two Scots worked for Standard Oil: Anderson as the Chief of Transport and Sinclair as a machine inspector. Angus managed a business that supplied the Standard Oil camp with provisions and payroll services from 1925 to 1937.

     The large number of employees that arrived in Camiri, especially the foreign technical personnel, reshaped cultural influences in the region. The foreigners brought with them much more than technical expertise, they brought desires for material goods not available locally. Roads from Argentina allowed businesses to bring in food, clothing, and other supplies from Europe and North America. In the process, the Standard Oil Company helped businesses between Santa Cruz and Buenos Aires such as the Madeira-Mamoré Company grow. Standard Oil Company even obtained permission to break the national match company monopoly because of the difficulty of trading with companies in the Bolivian highlands. The company imported matches from Argentina on condition they not resell them.26 Bolivia's steep mountains to the west and lack of good roads made trade to the south easier and less expensive and contributed to the ways in which the eastern lowlands developed separately from the rest of Bolivia.

     Standard Oil had difficulty obtaining basic goods and services when it first entered Bolivia on roads it had to construct or rebuild. Prior to 1925, Standard Oil bought basic provisions from Carmen de Vannucci, owner of the ranch where Standard obtained subsoil concessions from the state, and her sister, who opened a small store at the oil camp. The señoras provided Standard employees with bread, milk, vegetables, and citrus.27 Some supplies like sugar, noodles, and soap had to be imported from northern Argentina. "Elsner y Cia.," managed by Máximo Dietcher in nearby Lagunillas, provided other supplies and services until being replaced in 1925 by the offices of the railroad company Madeira-Mamoré managed by the aforementioned George Angus. Angus would send his employee Simón Cuéllar to Santa Cruz for supplies to deliver to Camiri. Both trips were taken by mule until the Chaco War when trucks became more available—and profits increased for the merchants supplying the troops at inflated prices. The mules were another import from northern Argentina, an area known for its high quality pack animals. Another Angus from Lagunillas, a bilingual accountant named Candelario, served as an interpreter for the many English-speaking Standard Company employees that arrived in 1924.28

     Camiri became a cosmopolitan town with the arrival of Standard Oil Company administrators and workers who craved the material goods and foods they were accustomed to at home. Senior officials such as the first director of the camp, James Petersen, were almost all North Americans. He was followed in that post by Alexander Levy. The main petroleum engineer was from the U.S., Thomas Morrish, as was the geologist, Joe Tom. Other North Americans included civil engineers, two doctors, drillers, and the main tool pusher. There were at least sixteen employees in Camiri from the U.S. in the late 1920s. There were other foreigners as well.29 The two Scots mentioned earlier were joined by two Germans, two Dutch, two Irishmen, and a Spaniard in charge of the water pump, a Chinese cook, and a Greek. There was one Ecuadorian, Temístocles Endara, and about twenty-five Argentines, including one doctor.

     By 1931, regular motorized transportation service ran from Camiri to Villamontes, such as the green 1926 Chevrolet truck driven by an Argentine they called "el Petiso" for his diminutive size.30 Until the town had a refinery, the automobiles used a light crude on the return to Argentina, belching a distinctive black smoke as traffic maneuvered along the Saranenda mountain chain on the either dusty or muddy roads, depending on the season.31 Standard Oil contracted transportation companies for supplies and transport, but they were also available for use by the general public, increasing traffic and markets in the eastern lowlands. While there were still few automobiles in the lowlands, Bolivians in the highland cities were already complaining about noise and pollution from motorcycles and cars in the city centers.32 Demand for oil grew in the highlands for the mining sector as well, which increased pressure on the company to produce oil.

     Geography mattered a great deal, and in turn, shaped regional divisions. The oil could not be transported to the highland population centers or over the Andes for export through Chile in a cost-effective way. Northern petroleum concessionaires in the departments of La Paz and the Beni planned to ship their oil north through the Amazon. Southern concessionaires in Santa Cruz, Chuquisaca, and Tarija including Standard Oil planned to go south to Argentina or east to Paraguay. Neither option, however, proved viable. The border dispute with Paraguay and competition with Argentina's oil company hindered international cooperation and reduced incentive to produce even as the highlands demanded more oil. While oil created cultures of difference between east and west, oil also connected the regions through the energy demands of highland markets, nation-building projects, and the built landscapes of pipelines and refineries.

     Bolivia's state oil company took over the oil wells and refining operations of Standard Oil Company after the nationalization in 1937 and quickly doubled production levels. The state oil company, Yacimientos Petrolíferos Fiscales Bolivianos (YPFB), funneled oil revenues into state, departmental, and municipal treasuries and transformed the country's petroleum into a public good. Eleven percent of the oil revenues went directly to the oil departments.33 Santa Cruz received approximately 214,000 bolivianos from YPFB in 1938 and 1939, while Tarija received approximately 180,000 bolivianos in the same years.34 The 1938 constitutional convention, operating as the legislative body of the post-Chaco War military government, directed petroleum revenues towards building a stadium in Tarija and an isolation ward for infectious disease patients in Santa Cruz de la Sierra.35 Bolivians began to have a personal stake in the state oil company's production levels as oil revenues funded schools, hospitals, and construction projects throughout the country. Still, in 1946 production remained low. YPFB imported two-thirds of the oil Bolivia needed for domestic consumption. The cost of drilling wells, exploring new regions, refining, and transporting oil from the lowland oil camps to the highland population centers remained an obstacle to Bolivian energy self-sufficiency. The company actually lost money shipping fuel oil and diesel by truck and train to the highlands from the oil camps at Camiri and Sanandita.36

     After years of weak budget allocations from the impoverished state, the Villarroel government (1943–1946) increased funding for YPFB. But the murder of Villarroel in 1946 by a mob angry over his political violence ushered in a government with classical liberal leanings that defunded the state company and hindered YPFB's development plans. YPFB embarked on projects to forward its mission of making Bolivia energy self-sufficient, while battling against liberal economic forces within the government. The state oil company used the funding it had earlier obtained from the Villarroel administration to build a pipeline from Camiri to Cochabamba in order to overcome the expensive transportation costs to the highlands.37 Refineries in the highland cities of Cochabamba and Sucre allowed YPFB to distribute refined petroleum products directly to the highland industrial and population centers.

     Oil continued to shape natural and social landscapes as it flowed from deep beneath the Sub Andean Ranges to the surface. Pipelines dangled over rivers, snaked through the mountains, and reached into the cities. Bulldozers plowed the semitropical flora to build dirt roads along the canyons and hillsides where oil rigs rose into the Bolivian sky. Drills dug through the layers of sand and clay washed down over eons from the Andes. The metal bits chewed through the capstone into the porous rock below, folded and cracked from tremendous geological forces. The grinding drill passed through pockets of gas and water to reach the oil. Millions of years of organic decay, pressure, and heat turned ancient plants and animals into the black oozing liquid trapped in the rock pores to be released by the drill. Escaping its earthly prison, the oil gushed through pipes hauled by mules and trucks, then painstakingly positioned by oil workers at the rigs above. Reaching the surface, the oil was trapped again, put in holding tanks, piped to refineries, molecularly altered, and burned. The energy from the heat fueled machinery and dreams of a new nation before dispersing into the cold, thin Andean air.

     The oil, a source of division between east and west Bolivia, connected the two regions in profound ways. Physically, the oil shaped landscapes from the eastern lowlands to the western population centers and into the atmosphere of the Andes where, today, global climate change threatens Andean glaciers. Oil connected the regions in other ways, as well. States attempting to build a unified national identity after the Chaco War and the Revolution invoked the historical memory of the soldiers defending the oil wells against advancing Paraguayan troops. Evo Morales did the same when he named his oil nationalization of 2006, "Heroes of the Chaco." Dependence on oil for industry and energy also connected the highlands, traditionally associated with mining, to the eastern departments rich in hydrocarbons. The strategic importance of oil maintains close connections between regions, both exacerbating and strengthening regional divisions and ties.

Stephen Cote, Ph.D., Latin American History, University of California, Davis 2011, recently completed his dissertation titled "The Nature of Oil in Bolivia, 1896–1952." He has an article forthcoming in the July 2011 issue of Khana: Revista Municipal de Culturas (La Paz, Bolivia) titled, "Apuntes para una historia ambiental del petróleo boliviano." He can be contacted at stevecote67@gmail.com.


 
Acknowledgements

I am grateful to the directors and staff of the Archivo y Biblioteca Nacionales de Bolivia in Sucre, the Biblioteca y Archivo Histórico de la Asemblea Legislativa Plurinacional in La Paz, the Biblioteca Arturo de la Costa in La Paz, and Bernardo Prado Liévana of hidrocarburosbolivia.com.

 

Notes

1 Thomas Andrews, Killing for Coal: America's Deadliest Labor War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008).

2 J. R. McNeill, Something New Under the Sun: An Environmental History of the Twentieth Century World (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 2001).

3 Daniel Yergin, The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money, and Power (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1991).

4 Camba is a Guaraní word meaning "friend." Colla refers to the quarter of the Inca Empire called "Collasuyo" that included what are today Bolivia's highlands.

5 Standard Oil Company of Bolivia, Informe sometido al supremo gobierno sobre trabajos efectuados en Bolivia por la Standard Oil Company (La Paz: Editorial "Marinoni," 1923).

6 Rosanna Barragán, "Oppressed or Privileged Regions? Some Historical Reflections on the Use of State Resources," in John Crabtree and Laurence Whitehead, ed., Unresolved Tensions: Bolivia Past and Present (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2008).

7 Wilson Mendieta Pacheco, "¿El petróleo no tiene patria?" El Potosí, March 23, 2003.

8 Horacio Carrillo (Argentine Ambassador to Bolivia), El ferrocarril al oriente boliviana: algunas antecedentes, la convención, notas personales (Buenos Aires: Casa Editora "Coni," 1922), 109–112.

9 Ann Zulawski, Unequal Cures: Public Health and Political Change in Bolivia, 19001950 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007), 88–90.

10 George Earl Church, "Northern Bolivia and President Pando's New Map," The Geographical Journal 18:2 (August, 1901): 144–153.

11 Wilson Mendieta Pacheco, Bermejo petróleo chapaco: homenaje al CD aniversario de la fundación de Tarija (La Paz: Renovacion Ltda., 1972), 73.

12 Ibid, 74.

13 Ibid, 80.

14 Standard Oil Company, Confiscation: A History of the Oil Industry in Bolivia (New York: Standard Oil Company of Bolivia, 1939).

15 National Deputy Pedro López, report submitted by the "Oficina Técnico Jurídica," published as Bolivia y el petróleo (La Paz: Arnos Hos., 1922).

16 Ibid, 365.

17 Julian Duguid, Green Hell: Adventures in the Mysterious Jungles of Eastern Bolivia (New York: The Century Company, 1931), 324.

18 "La Sociedad Geográfica," El Oriente, August 23, 1924, 2.

19 Standard Oil Company, "Informe sometido al supremo gobierno," 46.

20 Ibid, 48.

21 Dionisio Foianini Banzer, Misión cumplida (La Paz: Fondo Editorial de los Diputados, 2002), 13–15.

22 Julian Duguid, Green Hell: Adventures in the Mysterious Jungles of Eastern Bolivia (New York: The Century Co., 1931), 319–320.

23 Yi-Fu Tuan, Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001), 6.

24 Arnulfo Peña, La fundación de Camiri (Santa Cruz: El Pais, 1999), 46.

25 Ibid, 43.

26 Bolivia: Ministerio de Hacienda e Industria, "Resolución Suprema de 14 de agosto de 1926."  www.hidrocarburosbolivia.com.

27 Peña, La fundación de Camiri, 43.

28 Ibid, 48.

29 Peña, La fundación de Camiri, 40–43.

30 Ibid.

31 Ibid.

32 El País (Sucre), November 20, 1925.

33 Bolivia: H. Convención Nacional, "Ley de 15 de julio de 1938," www.hidrocarburosbolivia.com.

34 Bolivia: Presidencia de la República, Ministro de Minas y Petróleos to H. Cámara de Diputados, April 25, 1940. (PR-MMP-40-9).

35 Bolivia: H. Convención Nacional, "Ley de 6 de septiembre de 1938;" "Ley de 13 de agosto de 1938," www.hidrocarburosbolivia.com.

36 The author calculated gasoline at 57% of transport cost (1.7 bolivianos shipping cost to 3 bolivianos price), 98% for kerosene, 119% for diesel, and 151% for fuel oil, the higher percentages due to lower prices for those fuels. Víctor Hoz de Vila Bacarreza, Petróleo: referencias y su legislación en Bolivia (La Paz: Los Amigos del Libro, 1983), 160.

37 YPFB, Conferencia de prensa dictada por el Sr. Juan Luis Gutiérrez Granier, presidente de directorio de YPFB (La Paz: Editorial e imprenta Artística, 1952), 13.

 


 
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