ABSTRACT
As in many other fields of economic endeavour, the attitudes and policies of Latin American countries towards the oil industry—and particularly towards the international firms concerned with it—have provided forerunners to attitudes and policies adopted by developing nations elsewhere in the world in more recent years. The more-than-a-century-old political independence of most of the twenty-odd Latin American nations placed them early in a position from which they could adopt nationally determined attitudes towards the international petroleum Companies. Thus, Argentina, Chile, Bolivia and other countries of Latin America were already reacting to the activities of these firms in the 1920s—through the establishment of state controls over oil and, sometimes, even of state companies with rights and responsibilities for organizing the supply and/or distribution of oil. By 1938, Mexico felt so strongly about the policies of the international firms that it expropriated all their assets—more than a decade before Iran took similar action. And as early as 1943 Venezuela re-negotiated its concessions agreements with the major international Companies and secured, within the framework of the new agreements, provisions favourable to the government of a type not achieved by other major producing nations until the late 1950s and early 1960s. The process of a nationalist reaction to the stimulus offered by the international oil Companies has been under way for a longer period of time in Latin America in comparison with other parts of the developing world.
