ABSTRACT
Gustavo de las Casas Introduction It is hard to come up with a better poster child for economic liberalization in Latin America than Repsol-YPF. The company, which envisions itself as “an integrated oil and gas company” (Repsol-YPF, 2003: 5), has a history that itself reflects current liberalization trends. Repsol was created in 1987 as the successor of a group of monopolistic enterprises that the Spanish government owned and managed under its Instituto Nacional de Hidrocarburos (INH) (Toral, 2003: 363364). Under pressure from the European Union, Spain began privatizing Repsol in 1989, but by then numerous challenges became apparent. Facing an increasingly competitive domestic market and scarce oil reserves, Repsol focused its attention on Latin America. The region, reeling economically from the “lost decade” of the 1980s, found hope in the liberal prescriptions of the Washington Consensus. Many Latin American states during the 1990s saw themselves opening their markets, eliminating state monopolies, and promoting private investment (Campodónico, 1999: 138). The energy sector was not exempt to these newfound solutions, and Repsol rode the wave of opening markets hailed by economic liberals. With a strategy that mimicked the pseudo-monopoly it once had in Spain, the firm took over Argentina’s Yacimientos Petrolíferos Fiscales (YPF) in 1999 and changed its name to Repsol-YPF (Repsol, 1999: 2, 6, 8). Repsol-YPF became the leading seller of oil derivatives in Argentina, Chile, Peru, Bolivia, and Ecuador; the leading distributor of natural gas in Mexico, and the largest private producer of oil in Brazil. By 1999, the company was already in seventh place among the world’s largest oil companies (Toral, 2003: 81, 437).
