BP´s History

The Exxon Valdez

El Exxon Valdez derramó cientos de toneladas de petróleo en tierras de Alaska. Exxon era responsable pero también la compañía inglesa British Petroleum. ¿Cómo empezó? ¿Tenía antecedentes? Ciertamente. BP se había apoderado del petróleo iraní a principios del siglo 20 y hasta apoyó el derrocamiento de un presidente elegido democráticamente. En vocabulario: Wildcatting

En 1908 un grupo de geólogos británicos descubrieron una gran cantidad de petróleo en Khuzestan. Era el primer descubrimiento comercialmente significativo en el Medio Oriente. William Knox D'Arcy, obtuvo permiso para explotar el petróleo por primera vez en el Medio Oriente…

In 1908 a group of British geologists discovered a large amount of oil at Masjid-i-Suleiman located in the province of Khuzestan. It was the first commercially significant find of oil in the Middle East. William Knox D'Arcy, by contract with Ali-Qoli Khan Bakhtiari, obtained permission to explore for oil for the first time in the Middle East, an event which changed the history of the entire region. The oil discovery led to petrochemical industry development and also the establishment of industries that strongly depended on oil. On 14 April 1909, the Anglo-Persian Oil Company (APOC) was incorporated as a subsidiary of Burmah Oil Company. Some of the shares were sold to the public.

British Petroleum history and the Middle East (7, 47)

—Stephen Kinzer is out with a new book that looks back into history to make some sense of these shifting alliances in the Middle East and to try a new vision for the U. S. foreign policy. Stephen Kinzer joins me now from Washington D. C.

—… there´s very little discuss about BP´s history…

—The history of the company we now call BP over the last hundred years has really traced the arc of global transnational capitalism. This company began as a kind of wildcatting operation in Iran back in the first decade of the 20^th century. It was entrepreneurial, risk taking and they had a bunch of geologists running around… and finally they struck what was the greatest find up to that time in the history of the oil industry. They were the ones who discovered that Iran was sitting on an ocean of oil, and then they decided they would take it.

Under a corrupt deal that they had struck with a few representatives of the old declining Iranian monarchy, all of whom had been paid off by the company, this concession which later became known as the Anglo Persian Oil Company, guaranteed itself or won the right to own all of Iran´s oil. So nobody in Iran had any right to drill for oil or extract oil or sell oil.

Then soon after that find was made the British government decided to buy the company. So the parliament passed a law and bought 51 % of that company and all during the 1920´s and the 1930´s and 1940´s the entire standard of living that people in England enjoyed was supported by oil from Iran. All the trucks and jeeps in Britain were being run on Iran and oil factories all over Britain were being fueled by oil from Iran. The Royal Navy, which projected British power all over the world, was run, a hundred percent, on oil from Iran.

So that became a fundamental foundation of British life and then, after World War II, when the winds of nationalism and anti-colonialism were blowing throughout the developing world, Iranians developed this idea “we´ve got to take our oil back.” And that was the general, a kind of national passion that brought to power Mohammad Mosaddegh, who was the most prominent figure of the democratic period of Iran, during the late 40´s and early 50´s. It was Mosaddegh´s desire, supported by a unanimous vote of the democratically elected parliament of Iran, to nationalize what was then the Anglo Iranian Oil Company. They carried out the nationalization. The British and their partners in the United States fiercely resisted this and when they were unable to prevent it from happening they organized the overthrow of Mossadegh in 1953. So that overthrow produced not only the end of the Mosaddegh government but the end of democracy in Iran and that set off all these other following consequences.

The Shah ruled for 25 years with increasing repression. His rule produced the explosion of the late 70´s that produced the Islamic Regime. So it was to protect the interests of the oil company we now know as BP that the CIA and the British Secret Service joined together to overthrow the democratic government in Iran and produced all the consequences we´ve seen in Iran over the last half century.

Prime Minister Mosaddegh with US president Truman, 1951

—And that involved both Dulles brothers and also Teddy Roosevelt´s grandson.

—Yes, history is kind of winking at us from that episode. It´s quite an interesting quirk that Theodore Roosevelt, who essentially brought the United States into the regime change era, around the very beginning of the 20th century, wound up having a grandson who began the modern age of intervention. Bear in mind that Iran was the first country where the CIA went in to overthrow a government… (5, 12)

Vocabulario

Wildcatting: Risky or unsound, especially financially.

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