Word: putumayo
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...truism that oil companies will go almost anywhere to find oil-and the jungles of Colombia are no exception. In 1963, after 15 years of geological surveys, Texaco discovered oil in the wilds of Putumayo on the Ecuadorian border. The find was among the world's richest; the location was one of the world's worst...
Texaco's 4,000,000-acre claim is carpeted with thick jungle fed by a 200-inch annual rainfall. As one engineer puts it: "Five hours without rain is a dry season." To make matters worse, the Orito field in Putumayo is 193 miles from the Pacific port of Tumaco, and in between loom the Andes mountains, requiring a pipeline rising to 11,450 ft. Because of the physical difficulties, development costs became prohibitive for Texaco alone, so the company formed a fifty-fifty partnership with Gulf, which supplied the necessary capital boost while Texaco handled the exploration...
...Colombia, the Texaco-Gulf project is a chance to inject much-needed income into the economy while easing its dependence on coffee, which currently accounts for 60% of the country's export earnings. For the two companies, which decline to estimate the total value of the Putumayo find, the project may initiate a far-ranging cooperative exploratory effort. Texaco and Gulf have already staked a claim on 5,000,000 acres in neighboring Ecuador, where last spring they discovered a rich oil field. Geologists, moreover, venture that the Colombia-Ecuador finds are only the beginning, and that much more...
Later Casement investigated conditions on the rubber plantations of the Putumayo Valley in Peru and found horrors of mutilation and murder even more shocking than those of the Congo. He was a man of passionate idealism and undoubted courage. Joseph Conrad thought him "a limpid personality" with "a touch of the conquistador in him." After Casement resigned from the consular service in 1913, he was caught up in Ireland's seething demand for home rule, denouncing Britain as the "bitch and harlot of the North...