Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
oil products. Petroleum began to compete with imported British coal
in fueling the nation's railways and electricity plants, meatpacking
factories, and military installations. Then, in 1907, government drill-
ers discovered petroleum deposits in federal lands in the Comodoro
Rivadavia region of the Patagonia.
The government prevented the foreign companies from entering
the Patagonian oil lands while a political debate ensued about the
proper relationship between the Argentine state and the private foreign
companies in developing this modern source of fuel. On one side, the
older conservatives favored open markets and relatively unrestricted
foreign investment. On the other side, the rising nationalist movement
made common cause with the Argentina military. In a telling incident,
one of the first Argentine military aviators, Colonel Enrique Mosconi,
recounted how a Standard Oil clerk had refused to refuel Mosconi's
army plane until he was paid in cash.
It seemed to Mosconi and other Argentine officers that foreign
interests were controlling the defense of the nation. Radical politi-
cians agreed. The existence of a government oil field at Comodoro
Rivadavia, accounting for nearly 80 percent of Argentine production
by the end of World War I, meant that the foreign oil companies of the
1920s did not enjoy the monopoly that the British rail operators had
enjoyed in the 1890s. The government already had extensive expe-
rience with foreign entrepreneurs under its belt and soon adopted
a nationalistic stance with new foreign oil interests. For example,
one British group attempted to negotiate a joint enterprise with the
Argentine government to operate the 12,350-acre national oil reserve
at Comodoro Rivadavia. Under the proposal, the state would have
received 65 percent of the net profits; however, not only did President
Yrigoyen reject the proposal, reported a British agent, but he “also
refused to acknowledge receipt of the memorandum or give a reply to
it, desiring to avoid leaving any record of our negotiations for political
reasons” (Brown 1989, 16). Clearly, politicians were wary of grant-
ing territorial concessions of any sort to foreigners. The nationalists
reserved special animus for Standard Oil.
The government of President Marcelo T. de Alvear formed the
government oil fields into the first Latin American state oil company,
known as YPF. Its first director, army aviator Mosconi, now a general,
felt a moral and nationalistic obligation to break the sales monopoly
of the foreign companies. He built YPF refineries and sales outlets, cut
