“La batalla de petróleo”: Oil and Gas Drilling in Tierra del Fuego, 1940s–Present

• In Event: Making Latin American Landscapes in the ?-ocene

Abstract

In 1971, Cuban leader Fidel Castro accompanied Chilean President Salvador Allende on an excursion to Tierra del Fuego where Castro dined with workers in Cerro Sombrero, an oil and gas drilling complex operated by the Chilean state. During a brief speech, Castro praised national industries that “have developed petroleum and gas.” Castro and Allende may have misjudged the prospects for creating socialist states in Latin America, but they did not fail to recognize the significance of fossil fuels for nation-building. In fact, the Chilean state pushed gas and oil extraction in Tierra del Fuego in the early 1940s. Oil from Argentine Tierra del Fuego began flowing in 1960, two years after Argentina’s President Arturo Frondizi declared “the battle for petroleum.” In both Argentina and Chile, oil and gas extraction followed a familiar twentieth-century model: state-run companies worked in collaboration with U.S. businesses specializing in prospecting, drilling, or pipeline construction. This paper will share preliminary research into the socio-environmental history of “conventional” fossil fuel extraction that preceded contemporary fracking operations in southern Patagonia. Although not a large supplier by global standards, Patagonia was critical to fueling the “great acceleration” in energy consumption in post-1950 Argentina and Chile. I explore the seeming contradictions of petrostate capitalism by exploring three questions: (1) What role did oil and gas drilling play in expanding the presence of state institutions in a region long devoid of major state investments? (2) How did US companies work with rival, nationalist governments to extract oil and gas during the Cold War? And (3) what kind of local socio-environmental conflicts took place in connection with fossil fuel extraction?

Author

• John Soluri, Carnegie Mellon University