Abstract
The omnipresence of petroleum makes it an essential part of a history of the modern world. However, this ubiquity also presents a challenge as to which archival materials historians should use to tell this story. By using material gathered during fieldwork in the Colombian oil city of Barrancabermeja, this article aims to investigate the nature of the oil archive. Situated within the broader field of literature on the history of petroleum and archives, the investigation touches upon records in diverse archives, the urban fabric, and repositories of oil’s history to be found underground. By pinpointing such materials across Barrancabermeja, the article argues that the oil archive is not just found in historical documents but embedded in the landscape, in social practices, in human bodies, and even in the geology of the earth. To understand the deep-seated influence of oil, the article argues for the establishment of an interdisciplinary working group of the oil archive. Faced with the impending challenge of climate change and the long-lasting legacy of the fossil fuel age, such a group could provide evidence for how humanity got to this stage, point to different imaginaries of past and future, and clarify issues surrounding climate justice and responsibility.
A Fossil-Fueled Journey
The airplane touches down on the tarmac and soon I’m off. A long bus ride takes me through the Colombian countryside along winding roads with grasslands stretching out as far as the eye can see until, hours later, the first sign of my destination appears. In the distance, hidden at first behind an enormous row of banana plants, rises an oil derrick, the visible upper trunk painted in Colombia’s national colors. We pass through a landscape of fenced-off storage tanks and pipes, eventually passing over an old, now unused railway line to reach the center of Barrancabermeja, Colombia’s primary oil city. Walking on a sidewalk whose asphalt has been warmed up significantly by midday heat, reprieve is only provided by the cooling factor of my polyester shirt and the last sip of water out of a plastic bottle. But finally, there I stand, in front of a building where I seek to find the materials to help me write a history of oil, to explore the idea of what an oil archive might be.
But then, hadn’t I arrived at the oil archive a long time ago? The entire trip was made possible by the fossil fuel of oil, I had passed through landscapes shaped by its extraction and production, I was consuming it in form of its myriad of offspring products such as clothing and plastics. I had, in fact, been surrounded and deeply embedded in a world shaped by oil and its history.
Already this is the first major conundrum of searching for the oil archive. For just as oil is ubiquitous in all aspects of modern life, its endless applications making possible the very configurations on which we depend, so it has claimed a role in the way we think about and access the past. But this omnipresence and the different ways we can find and interpret its traces also provides for a challenging dilemma: How can we tell the history of oil—or rather, with what? Where should we look for material to compile our newest chronicle of modernity? Which materials or monuments, residues, or documents should we look at to help guide us through the immensity of the history of petroleum? What, in short, and indeed where is the oil archive?
What can already be said is that the oil archive is both omnipresent and yet also hidden, with access to specific narratives only visible in certain places and under specific circumstances. To be sure, there is also the traditional archive, records upon records in national archives, for example, where oil has left a long paper trail, but there are also more examples on the ground. The investigation could look at social practices or oil infrastructures around the world such as pipelines, gas stations, road networks, and supertankers. One could look at cars and homes, consumer products and the tools of warfare, state building, and economic theory. At this moment, however, I have decided upon a specific urban-industrial configuration emblematic of oil’s deep reach into the fabric of life: the oil town. This I have chosen for two reasons. First, the oil town represents a key node in the transformation of the natural resource of petroleum into a commodity and in the creation of the infrastructure, politics, and social customs that accompany this process. Here is a concentration of oil’s extraction, its refinement, its consumption, and the lasting effect of all of this on both landscape and society. Second, though there is a long and thorough history of oil to be found in traditional archives, there is an immediacy to studying such an archive in its local reality. Here, the archive will manifest itself unexpectedly, embedded in everyday life and the landscape of the city itself.
The site of this study is the city of Barrancabermeja, or Barranca, in Colombia. A city born out of oil exploration and the extermination of its Indigenous community, it has long been a site at the core of national debates about sovereignty, industrialization, and state building. As the global waves of the volatile resource of oil splashed across the city’s history, it became a focal point for the struggles around modernization, and the fight over the oil industry generated a string of powerful social movements spearheaded by workers’ unions and, later on, human rights groups. A place, in short, that in every aspect of its history exudes the presence of oil.
To situate this investigation, I begin with a short overview of some critical literature to keep in mind both when working with archives in general as well as some new contributions around the various forms an oil archive could have. This is followed by an introduction of the history of the city of Barrancabermeja and oil exploration in Colombia as a whole, which should foreground some of the major dynamics that will be relevant for my source analysis. The main part begins with a brief look at what could be called the traditional archive of state institutions and unions, before diving into a variety of locations and materials investigated while doing fieldwork in the city in the year 2019. This takes the form of a rough travel guide, tracing my own steps while traversing the city and encountering various sites, places, and institutions that portray a snippet of the complexity that is the oil archive.
Oil in the Archives
Throughout history, the archive has been a contested site of power struggles. Through its structure, the archive as an institution provides an order of what is conserved and what is thrown away, creating a specific hierarchy of documents.1 Therefore, the institutions and archivists that shaped this structure become important in working with this resource, prompting Cook to call the writing of history with the archive a cocreation between the order of the archive, the institutions and archivists that maintained it, the original documents and their authors, and the historians who then interpret it.2
The archive, through its space and its practices, serves a purpose of legitimization, achieved by a continuous process of replication and validation of authority through a specific ordering of knowledge. As such, archives might be read against the grain, to discern the margins of the state and question the silence produced in its archives, or with the grain, to gain insights into the archive and the state as a set of practices, whereby the content of the archive and its making serve a legitimization of power.3 As LeMenager, relying on Derrida, reminds us, the archive also has a future orientation, seeking to preserve a specific idea of the past to serve a present configuration and the extension of said configuration for time to come.4
However, just as much as it serves to maintain such a hegemony of knowledge, the archive may also provide a challenge to it through a counterdiscourse. Examples of such counterarchives could be those maintained by different NGOs working on human rights or the archives of marginalized groups. In the case of Barrancabermeja, the archive of the human rights group CREDHOS, discussed in more detail below, served as an important platform for documenting state and parastate violence inflicted on the civilian population from the 1980s onward.5 Maintaining an archive, therefore, is not only a practice of establishing power and order but just as much of resisting it by establishing a different memory framework.
This struggle between institutional archives and counterarchives is also fundamental to discussion of oil. Andrew Barry shows how oil companies, faced with a growing backlash by social movements, NGOs, academics, and governments, and acting according to the establishment of new standards of corporate accountability, founded open archives near the turn to the twenty-first century to engage with this critique and, by producing a specific type of knowledge in abundance, guiding the type of information accessed within such an archive in a specific direction.6 Their very recent establishment is a crucial difference to other archives, because, as pointed out by Timothy Mitchell, for the oil industry the major imperative historically was obfuscation. Keeping hidden the knowledge produced around the strategically important resource of oil helped the industry hide damages to the environment and repressive labor practices, made sure the lack of understanding around actual remaining and future oil reserves would not influence oil prices, though volatile they remained nonetheless, and, most fundamentally of all to our current situation, hid the knowledge about the role of fossil fuels in the impeding climate change catastrophe. This fundamentally means that the oil archive of the industry, consisting in environmental and technical data and the vast amounts of information gathered to facilitate extraction, production, and transportation of oil, did and does continue to exist as a hidden archive.7
A further realm where the notion of an oil archive finds its expression is beyond the repository of documents, texts, images, and physical objects of the “traditional” archive in what Henning Trüper calls the “wild archive.” By this he means the interactions and practices of people with different remnants of the past, be they documents, inscriptions, or even natural objects.8 This becomes crucial when thinking about oil, for it is also this interaction with objects and practices inherited from the past that come forward when discussing ideas such as “living oil” and “petrocultures,” describing the way petroleum has been and is shaping our very lives every day.9 An example of this are the oil towns in the Arab world, which reproduced a US-style suburban modernity and thus changed people’s living and working habits.10 Indeed, following Mitchell, our very economic and political order rests on a foundation of energy flows dominated by oil, which means both the historic formation of oil’s pathways around the world and its many manifestations at all levels of society also become legible as a repository of practices, an archive of sorts.11
This also extends to the landscape, encompassing not only the rusted infrastructure such as decommissioned oil rigs but the entirety of a landscape as an ecosystem.12 It is what Myrna Santiago, in her investigation of the Mexican Huasteca region, calls an “ecology of oil”; this wholesale reconfiguration of human-nature relations, the creation of a “sacrifice zone,” brought on by oil extraction is based on changes in land tenure patterns, away from communal landholdings of the Indigenous population toward commodified property and ownership of the subsoil, which is followed by a drastic reconfiguration of the landscape itself.13 In the case of Barranca, the needs of oil infrastructure and the destructive and polluting nature of the extraction and production of petroleum would change the landscape drastically, with a 2009 estimate that only about 5 percent of the landscape still features the original characteristics while 70 percent has been drastically altered.14 A once lush rainforest would give way to more open grasslands, and in this new landscape, as documented by CREDHOS, cattle ranching and particularly palm oil plantations would spring up after oil extraction had finished in a particular area.15
Both in Mexico and around Barranca, the social composition would drastically change, with an influx of local labor and a managing class from the United States and other Global North countries. Their respective exposure to this new landscape was radically different, however, with the former exposed to the daily toxicity of oil production while the latter enjoyed a position of “mastery” over nature, making and remaking the environment to their desire.
Reading such a landscape as an archive can be difficult, however. Santiago, surveying the site of the “Dos Bocas” oil disaster of 1908, at that time one of the worst oil well fires to ever happen, is greeted by no reminder of the event besides some stunted grass surrounding a lake that had filled the crater formed in the aftermath and a pervasive smell of hydrogen sulfide hanging in the air.16 Though only traces in the landscape remain here, the ecology of oil approach nonetheless points us toward a framework of reading this landscape as an expression of a specific social and ecological framework in history, one that underlines both the historical and present formation of this area.
Indeed, going further below ground might lead us to different discoveries. An example of this can be found at yet another former site of oil extraction in the Ecuadorian Amazon. During an investigation as part of a lawsuit filed on behalf of the Indigenous Cofán people against the multinational oil corporation Chevron, a seemingly innocuous patch of ground is dug up to reveal the sticky and black residues of petroleum within the soil, the excesses of extraction now sunk deep into the ground—or rather covered by a layer of earth as the result of a shoddily done cleanup job—embedded into the landscape and slowly poisoning both soil and water.17 Not only does the oil remain present here as a distinct physical presence, providing evidence of the disastrous extractive practices and backing up the oral testimonies provided by the nearby inhabitants, it also points to a further expansion of what an oil archive can be. Here, the oil archive also encompasses the medical records of cancer patients exposed to the toxic environment, water quality records, soil analyses, atmospheric measurements, and geological readings, making the oil archive a very interdisciplinary affair.
To go even further, it can be said that human activities surrounding oil extraction, production, and consumption have become so widespread and so deeply embedded in our living practices, in soil, oceans, and in the atmosphere, that the archive of oil has to be read at a geological scale, as an archive, too, of the Anthropocene.18 With this, the oil archive will be readable not merely on the short timescale of human experience but perhaps far longer, engraved into the earth itself.
Barrancabermeja
The history of oil extraction in Barrancabermeja carries with it a legacy of destruction. The Indigenous Yariguí who had inhabited the region for centuries were hunted down and exterminated as the region was shaped by a continuity of extractive practices of various raw materials which established routes, provided crucial knowledge, and transformed land into a commodity. Therefore—as opposed to other regions of Colombia such as the Putumayo department or the Amazonian border with Ecuador (inhabited by the Cofán, among many others), where Indigenous cultures would continue to exist alongside oil extraction and dispute the narratives and changes this industry brought—in Barranca the entrepreneurs had made sure to find a tabula rasa to fully implant their vision of fossil development.19 What remains are sporadic symbols, such as the Yariguí airport, which carries the name of the people exterminated by the very fossil fuel modernity it represents.
Oil extraction in Colombia would often be done in enclaves, private concessions, which mostly ended up in the hands of major Western and predominantly US companies, at times under legally ambiguous circumstances. In the case of Barranca, it was Standard Oil of New Jersey, operating out of Canada under the name of Tropical Oil, that was given free rein over the territory. It would soon establish familiar practices from other economic enclaves, building up a system of racial hierarchy and segregation with US managers and workers enjoying comfortable lodging, state-of-the-art medical care and entertainment as well as an ample supply of food, while Colombian workers lived in ramshackle huts outside the foreigners’ fenced-off compound. The state, for whose political elite the concessions were a project of modernization, was mostly present through its armed forces, providing security for the oil installations and at times violently cracking down on labor unrest.
However, though often a miserable experience for workers, the oil enclave provided a space of encounter where Colombians from various regions of the country came together for the first time in a place uninfluenced by the country’s traditional elites or institutions like the Catholic church. The experience of a quasi-imperial project of oil extraction facilitated the establishment of a new proletarian culture focused on anti-imperialism and nationalism in the sense of sovereignty over land, resources, and welfare.20 Soon after the beginning of operations, the first workers’ organization, the later nationwide Unión Sindical Obrera de la Industria del Petróleo (The Union of Petroleum Industry Workers), or USO, was founded in 1923. Reaching across all affected sectors through the enclave, a widespread alliance between labor activists, peasants, and other social and political movements would soon form.21 It is a unity that survives in symbols in the present day, marked by examples such as a mural in the CREDHOS headquarters in Barranca, featuring a peasant and an oil worker, countryside and industry united, holding aloft a rose of peace.
A crucial moment in time for this movement would be the year 1948, when first a major strike would force the government’s hand and prove crucial in the state taking over the Barrancabermeja concession in 1951 through the creation of state oil company Ecopetrol. This was a momentary culmination of decades of an often vicious back-and-forth of strikes and repressions and saw oil workers and associated unions and social movements demand an end to the rule of enclave and a nationalization of the resource of petroleum. Social unrest was therefore already at a high when, on April 9, popular political leader Jorge Eliécer Gaitán was shot and killed in Colombia’s capital Bogotá, leading to widespread rioting, and eventually precipitating a long-lasting civil war, which, true to its nature, was simply called “the Violence.” In Barranca, these events produced a more general uprising called the Barrancabermeja Commune. From April 9 to 18 a popular council, with strong representation from petroleum workers, took over complete control of the city’s government. They fended off the encroaching army by threatening to blow up the oil refinery and went about fabricating their own cannons to defend the city. Though successful for a short while, the commune eventually had to surrender, and the consequences of their uprising were dire. The crucial oil union USO was abolished, its archives were largely destroyed, its leading members were submitted to court-martial, and many were even killed in the later aftermath by conservative death squads.22
Nonetheless, throughout the second half of the twentieth century, the legacy of 1948 would be crucial in shaping the social and political culture of Barranca. There are two strands that are important to consider here. On a global level, oil would, as it always has been, remain a volatile commodity, with its often drastic price shifts dramatically influencing Colombian politics as the country moved between being an oil exporter and importer at various times. These factors would shape the directions taken by the state oil company Ecopetrol and the political leadership reducing or enhancing investments in the region and impacting the narrative of oil as a stable source of income and development.23 At the local level these instabilities, and the fact that Ecopetrol would function similarly to the foreign oil companies and not as the envisioned national oil company of the people, would shape a constant narrative of an unfulfilled promise, soon the background to popular discontent and protest.24
While up until the 1950s the city and its political landscape had been dominated by oil workers, this makeup would shift in the following years, changing both the protagonists and avenues of political action. Next to the continuous attraction of well-paying jobs in the oil industry, the city had expanded due to a large wave of people who had fled the violence in the countryside.25 Mirroring the earlier enclave character of the city, an ever-expanding informal section to the east was growing next to a now somewhat formalized city core and the heavily closed-off Ecopetrol refinery on the one side. These new arrivals would inscribe themselves into the radical culture of Barranca, with the majority of the city’s inhabitants in 1959 organized in some form of union—there were even serious plans to form a union for prostitutes.26 With the USO sidelined politically for a while, new groups such as neighborhood organizations or social movements organized by the church took up the mantle of protest through the “paro cívico,” a general civic strike. These strikes, with the participation of most sectors, often saw the entire city shut down and were built on the same organizational principles as the larger labor strikes from before.27
This era also saw several important changes in the political landscape. Rural and urban left-wing guerrillas would play a decisive role in terms of presenting a different narrative of political struggle and the 1980s saw the increased operations of right-wing paramilitary groups trying to impose a social order of neoliberal conservatism. But on the civic side, this moment saw an encounter between the old established oil worker unions and rural communists, as well as peasant and emerging social activist groups under the framework of human rights. This significantly broadened the field of actors present in this encounter, giving a space for women’s rights and other marginalized groups to shrug off the invisibility so dominant before.28 Furthermore, the human rights framework provided a vocabulary to render visible the violence occurring and positioned the civic movements within a wider, global context.29 Faced with its toughest test in 1998 when paramilitary groups, often in concert with the state’s security forces, took control over most of Barranca and for years enacted a brutal campaign of violence and repression, often under the banner of “social cleansing,” the city’s labor and social movements nonetheless continued their work, preserving and continuing the legacy of their social struggle.30 While, for now, Barranca’s working class culture of resistance still stands, its future in a time of ever more destructive extraction and the looming end of the oil era remains uncertain.
Barrancabermeja in the Archive
As the preceding pages have illustrated, the story of Barranca is a story of oil. It is a story of the places oil makes possible, the society it creates, and the legacy it leaves behind, and this story has found its way into many different archives. Consequently, there would be a very straightforward way of approaching the history of Barranca’s oil industry. There are collections available at the institutional level, such as Colombia’s national archive, which features extensive documentation of the legal dispute surrounding the crucial 1948 oil strike between oil workers, the Tropical Oil Company, and the Colombian state. It is a repository of the discursive battleground where the different parties’ ideas of who should control the resource of oil and its extraction and whether oil should be considered a public good come to the foreground.31 There are the enclosed archives of Ecopetrol and the private archives of its former management, which served as the backbone for a book on the history of that company and the production of oil in Colombia, released in 2011.32 And, too, there is an archive of a foundation affiliated with Barranca’s oil union USO, the Fundación Aury Sara Marrugo, which features a large chunk of the USO’s documentary collections, crucial for the historical reconstruction of the town’s and the union’s histories.
All of these archives speak to the crucial role of oil and the far-reaching disputes around its nature and use in the history and present of the country. And, crucially, they show the role that the history and the legacy of 1948 have had on this resource. The debates about whom oil should belong to and how its extraction should be handled, so visible in the legal dispute in the archive, have passed down into two very different strands of remembrance. On the one hand, legible in the book celebrating Ecopetrol, 1948 is seen as the triumph of a prudent elite, granting nationalization with a very limited influence by the strike and already, from the beginning, laying the groundwork for Ecopetrol’s eventual conversion into a publicly traded company, fulfilling thus the promise of democratized oil extraction by allowing all Colombians who wish to do so to become shareholders. It is a grand narrative of corporate responsibility, showing how any problems are now of the past as the new shareholder-controlled Ecopetrol will adhere to progressive global standards and evading oil’s often unstable nature by tying the company to the broader world of global finance. On the other hand there is the narrative so abundant in the union’s archives, where it was their agency that was crucial for the eventual creation of Ecopetrol, and it is the legacy of this struggle that animates them to this day. It is a narrative in defense and search of the unfulfilled promise of a truly national oil industry that does not just work to the benefit of an economically powerful elite but to the country as a whole.
While all of these materials provide for great research, they also showcase a general problem with oil and its history. All of them can be researched and written about without ever setting a foot into the city of Barrancabermeja itself, a reflection of oil as a resource extracted and produced in a specific local context while decisions are often made kilometers or even continents away. Oil becomes an abstract, broad political issue, to be discussed and managed at a distance, an issue reflected in the archive that is being researched. Now this is, of course, nothing new when it comes to working with archives and history in general. As Terry Cook puts it, the archive, much as history, is a foreign country, at a distance from whomever comes to visit it, with researchers always at a remove.33 However, it is not quite the complete story. For the oil archive is far larger and, as my field trip has shown me, to be found in abundance and in unexpected places on the ground.
Welcome to the Oil Archive
Upon arriving in Barranca, the relationship with oil announces itself rather quickly. In the city’s center, rising out of a lagoon in front of the enormous oil refinery, shaped by rough, hard wire, stands a statue representing Jesus Christ reborn, holding up his hands toward the heavens in a gesture of triumph. A symbolic figure for a marriage of industry and faith, of progress and tradition. Financed by the national oil company Ecopetrol as a symbol of peace, it seems to stand, much as the city itself, for the inevitable progress of the oil industry.
This monument, much like a nearby church built alongside an old oil tower, speaks of the highly symbolic nature of oil extraction in Barrancabermeja and its deep entanglement with local culture. The connection to religion is particularly interesting as the church has assumed different roles within the city’s history. First largely absent and therefore not able to exude its usual influence over the local population, it played a harshly repressive role during the days after the 1948 oil strike, sponsoring a highly conservative and clerical form of unionism to curtail the labor movement.34 In later times, under the banner of liberation theology and more recently human rights, however, the church then also embarked on a different path, espousing left-wing political ideas, engaging strongly with the refunded USO, and providing a space for other human rights groups such as the women’s advocacy organization OFP to emerge.35 Throughout its history the church has been heavily involved in politics, and in a town like Barrancabermeja politics means oil. The connection between symbols of faith and symbols of this industry therefore become legible representations of the struggles of the culture of oil.
The Oil Is Not Yours
A few steps removed, situated right outside the barracks of the battalion “Nueva Granada” guarding the nearby oil refinery, stands an artillery cannon. Nowadays it is a contemporary, army-built model, and while it might seem a bit ostentatious, it doesn’t appear too unusual. After all, with this being an artillery battalion, the symbolism seems straightforward. However, the story isn’t that simple. Rather than just a symbol of the military might of the state the cannon is, in fact, a complex and contested symbol of memorialization.
For not until too long ago, in its place rested a different cannon that was not built by the state but by militant workers to resist the very institution that would later take the cannon for itself. This, as it turns out, was one of the cannons fabricated by the oil workers in the wake of the Barranca Commune of 1948, for a while a showcase of the power and agency that the workers’ movement had acquired. Building this symbol of state power became a further step in the process of establishing a different social reality, a different configuration of what oil extraction and the state could be.
It comes as no surprise, then, that the army, moving back into their accustomed base near the refinery after the commune had surrendered, would then also go for a highly symbolic strike. One of the cannons, symbol of the uprising, was now exhibited right there at the entrance of the military base. And there it remained for decades, clear for all eyes to see, as a demonstration of the inevitable power of the state.
This cannon, I argue, is a strong symbol for the political and social meaning of oil. It was through oil that Barrancabermeja became the city it is, it was the oil industry’s international and central role that produced a singularly strong workers’ movement at the forefront of Colombia’s social and political struggles, and throughout this history, control of oil was and remains a potent symbol for the order of the state. The ambitious dream of oil as a commons was never fulfilled, and the workers’ movements behind this ambition was brutally crushed. Thinking back to the Brazilian slogan “The oil is ours,” so important in the recasting of oil as a democratic and emancipatory resource, this cannon rather seems to say that the oil, in fact, is not yours.36
What does the cannon’s replacement mean, however? Is it a further strengthening of this meaning, with the message of control so firmly established that the original reminder of the cannon is no longer necessary? Or is it rather a concession to the constant double meaning that was inherent in the original cannon, always ready to be read both as a sign of repression, but also of resistance? Whichever it might be, it is a further reminder of the highly symbolic nature of oil.
Traces in the Archival Landscape
My penultimate stop brings me to the nearby archive of the human rights group CREDHOS, or Corporación regional para la defensa de los Derechos Humanos, in full. It was founded in 1987 as an advocacy and rallying point, combining research into human rights abuses with educational activities and establishing itself as an interlocutor between victims and the state’s institutions, collecting testimonies and helping those who wished to bring forth complaints or seek reparations. In this capacity, CREDHOS brought together the efforts of the USO, the church, and Barranca’s neighborhood associations, serving as a key node in an ever more endangered network of social organizations.37 This connection to the different sectors is evident at first sight in a mural with their headquarters, showing a farmer and an oil worker, countryside and industry united, holding aloft a rose of peace.
Within the archive, dissenting voices are stored to frame a different story of oil extraction. Besides the judicial filing by CREDHOS, there are newspapers, letters, magazines, bulletins, and documents encompassing the broad variety of actors making up Colombian society. Death threats from paramilitary groups are stored in the same room as Guerrilla press releases, and the complete documentation of the 2004 strike by the USO inhabits the same shelf as publications by Ecopetrol and the police. The space of the archive, facilitated by the loose order of the documents within their folder, then becomes a physical representation of the discursive and quite literal battle that was fought in Barranca. And oil, owing to the nature of this city, makes many an appearance, of which the following documents are but a select few.38
The first document is a press release from Ecopetrol, dated June 13, 2008. Titled “Ecopetrol and the Mayor’s Office Deliver to Barrancabermeja,” it outlines various projects within the city that the company has funded and supported.39 These included drainage systems, parks, the equipment of schools with state-of-the-art computers, and other infrastructure projects, all detailed with the exact amount of money spent on them. It is a clear expression of oil’s developmentalist promise, a showcase of the successful alliance of the city and the oil industry, and the progress made possible by it.40
So far so familiar, but a deeper dive into the available documents then quickly provides counterpoints to this narrative. Particularly, it is a collection of press releases by various neighborhood associations from the wider Barranca region. The documents were released between the years 2005 and 2008, and all concern the planned reactivation of the Cira-Infantas oil field, the place where oil was first extracted in the 1920s, to be executed in a joint venture by Ecopetrol and the US oil company Occidental Petroleum (Oxy).
A bulletin published in 2006 by a group called the “Mesa de Trabajo” of the neighboring town El Centro, which sits right by the oil field, begins with a fierce critique of the planned project. The community activists lament the fact that they are once again denied their proper participation in the planning, execution, and eventual remuneration of the project. Against a backdrop of eviction threats the group demands proper compensation for the lands that will be exploited, monetary participation for the community, and well-paid jobs within the project. Furthermore, there is a repeated demand for a proper and independent scientific study of the project and the area to guarantee the least harm done to the environment and a recuperation scheme to mitigate any damage done. The group justifies these demands by recurring to history, stating that it was due to the efforts of oil workers, peasants, and local settlers that this oil field ceased to be in possession of the Troco and Ecopetrol—the “patrimony of all Colombians,” as they call it—was founded.41
The second document is a bulletin released on November 27, 2008, by a group representing the neighborhood “16 de Julio” to the north of Barranca, where Ecopetrol has been active in extraction. The document was written in the name of sixty-three families that have decided to occupy the area of “El Llanito” as a form of protest. Referring to the “positive pact” that oil exploration by Ecopetrol was supposed to be for the region, the document foregrounds how that has still failed to arrive for the local population and “the social debt” has not been fulfilled.42
This is also present in the third document, emitted by the assembled neighborhood associations of El Centro on November 10, 2007. This bulletin addresses in detail the shortcomings of the Cira-Infantas oil project. Foregrounding the fact that oil should serve as a tool for development and national prosperity, the document goes into the lack of decent working conditions, the aggressive evictions, and the damages to the environment. Then it proposes a list of improvements to be made to the process. Furthermore, the bulletin specifically addresses the abandoned well number 245 of the La Cira oil field, demanding an immediate retrieval of the radioactive capsule buried there.43 What better reminder, it would seem, of the deep rooted and lasting nature of the oil archive? Not only expressed in the alteration of the landscape and the long-lasting repository of infrastructure that might be found and analyzed for centuries to come, but indeed the specter of radioactivity suggesting an extensive longevity, a trace of this particular human activity permanently sealed into the landscape as one of the Anthropocene’s most toxic poster children.44
All in all, the documents found within the CREDHOS archive point toward a few interesting concepts regarding an understanding of the oil archive. To begin with, they would seem to fit into the configuration of the counterarchive, giving room for the preservation of the grievances aired on the ground by the affected population and countering the cleaned up developmental narrative espoused by Ecopetrol or the municipality’s development plans. With this, they provide a repository of a different history of the oil industry, showing the damages and violations of human and environmental rights often inherent in its execution. A reminder, too, of the way oil exploration has often proceeded in Colombia, with the benefits accruing to a “developed” center while the fringes are left behind. Furthermore, they show the importance of who gets to create knowledge in the oil industry. When the community group from the first document demands an independent scientific study of the project, they are also demanding that both the creation and access of knowledge is done in a democratic manner.
Remembrance is a key factor in all these documents, as the historical nationalization struggle resurfaces in form of a constant tension between what was supposed to be achieved back then, with Ecopetrol serving as an agent of oil as commons, and the inevitable disappointment that came when this agent turned out to be more of the same. Nevertheless, the idea of what oil extraction could be in a nationally minded, sovereign, and conservationist context is being kept alive in forms of memory practices and concrete demands for the present, serving as a claim of vindication by various civic and labor organizations.
This is particularly important, as it would seem that extraction plans are also coming full circle, with the country’s oldest and therefore already rather exhausted oil field being front and center. Instead of alternative pathways toward a different version of what oil extraction or energy generation in general could mean, the Cira-Infantas project suggests a doubling down on historical practices of extractivism, with the usual problems of damages to the local population and the environment at large seemingly little changed.
A Landscape of Oil Archives
As the sun sets at the end of a day of archival exploration, my gaze shifts over the city, moving beyond the refinery complex and toward the landscape of the Middle Magdalen, where nothing has been left untouched by oil. The landscape has been radically changed, the town has been set up according to the needs of this extractive industry, and people’s memories, social practices, and daily lives are fundamentally entangled with the presence and history of this fossil fuel.
What does this fact mean for the initial question of this article concerning the nature of the oil archive? The answer, as could have been expected, is that it is complicated. The oil archive is not one thing but a complex relationship of different repositories of documents, data, particles, memories, and practices. Just as the extraction of oil brings with it the establishment of an ecology of oil, so will its legacy leave a multitude of archives that are at times hidden, diffuse, and spread out across the landscape. They are present in the changed chemical composition of nearby bodies of water, in the residues of oil left in the soil, in the (sometimes) radioactive infrastructure left behind, in the geological record as humanity’s long-lasting legacy, and in the daily repertoire of human action shaped by a fossil fuel past and headed for an uncertain future.
How, then, should historians or other people interested in questions of the oil archive deal with this complex reality? In the documents discussed and spread out among different institutions, the debate about oil’s role in society, its trajectory, and questions around energy, development, and democracy are present and tangible in different forms. However, as I have tried to show in this article, the paper trail is just one part of the story, as the struggle for control over this industry can also be seen in the city’s open spaces and particularly its monuments. It becomes clear that oil was and is such a powerful and essential resource, that the struggle over its control becomes more than another industrial or economic dispute and rather, as Timothy Mitchell argues, cuts right to the core of what makes up modern society.45 This central and far-reaching role of oil should be kept in mind when analyzing an archive related to its history. Naturally, any documents within an archive will have to be read within a broader complex of relationships and societal configurations, but with oil there is a distinctive all-encompassing materiality, a trace of the sticky black gold that can be found therein.
Indeed, the oil archive, if anything, prods us to expand our analytic framework to encompass a broader base of knowledge. It must also be found in the realms of geography, geology, and meteorology, in soil analyses and atmospheric readings, in medical data and in the records of biology, making for a seemingly inexhaustible list of different practices. The oil archive, in the end, sits at a node of interdisciplinarity, a crucible of social and cultural practices, environmental factors, and lasting ecological change.
This does not leave “traditional” historical research out of the picture, however. This classic notion of archival research should not be neglected, and an understanding of the long-term historical evidence remains essential for any analysis of how our modern world shaped by oil came to be. What I am arguing, however, is that there is much to gain by going one step beyond this realm of the traditional archive, where additional insights lie buried in unexpected places.
While it might seem, therefore, that such a comprehensive understanding of the oil archive is a task too daunting to be undertaken properly, I would argue that it would be crucial to do precisely that. A more thorough understanding of the history to be found within the oil archive becomes ever more important considering the moment we are at and the varieties of futures we might be heading toward. Returning to the sources analyzed in the CREDHOS archive for a moment, it is possible not only to catch a glimpse at the past but also to get an image of the present and possible futures. The return of familiar extractive practices, with accompanying environmental damage, insufficient protection for local communities, failures to provide for cleanup, and accusations of forced evictions—indeed, the plans to once again tap the oldest oil well within Colombia—paint a disconcerting picture. Here it seems that, far from moving on, the oil past returns. These archival traces then become a repository, a template even, of the oil field as a sacrifice zone, with the current fossil order perpetuated at the cost of human lives and the environment as a whole, making the oil archive not only a repository of the past but a dire warning for the future.
Faced with this possible threat, a better and holistic understanding of our fossil past seems more pressing than ever. The oil archive could not only serve as a repository of knowledge to understand our current state of being but also serve as a tool to explore alternative conceptions of energy and go to the historical roots of concepts such as climate justice. Bringing together historical documents, oral testimonies, and scientific measurements of environmental and medical data, a project undertaken by an interdisciplinary working group of the oil archive could provide evidence both of the current problems and point to different imaginaries as well as clarify issues surrounding climate justice and responsibility. This seems especially pertinent as we have to consider that even as we are moving toward the exit of the oil age and perhaps even the fossil age, its legacy seems likely to haunt us for quite a long time.46 Fossil fuels such as oil have imprinted themselves so deeply onto the economy, the infrastructure, and the social and cultural imaginaries, that even in a post-fossil age their influence will still be felt. Though we might move away from burning fossil fuels and on to more sustainable energy sources, our continued reliance on growth and extracted materials such as lithium still seem to follow the logic laid out by fossil developmentalism. If that is indeed so, a detailed historical understanding of the holistic nature of fossil fuels becomes critical even and, perhaps, especially for the post-fossil age.
Notes
CREDHOS, “Comunicado a la opinión pública nacional e internacional,” February 1994, Serie Comunicados de Prensa 162, CREDHOS archive. Particular cases of archival activism or preservation were also seen in Chile during the Pinochet dictatorship. See Strauss, “Treading the Ground,” 371–90.
Mitchell, Carbon Democracy, 238–45. Indeed, more and more details about the early knowledge of the industry are emerging. See Bonneuil, Choquet, and Franta, “Early Warnings.”
Berlinger, Crude. For a deeper discussion of the effect of pollution in Amazonia, see Feichtner, “Toxic Ghost Acres.”
Humanity’s rise to the status of a geological agent and human activities having such widespread impact that the current era of the earth system should accordingly be renamed the Anthropocene have become a topic of broad discussion within academia and history. See Angus, Anthropocene; Chatterjee, “Asian Anthropocene.”
Velásquez Rodríguez and Castillo León, Los Yareguíes; Vega Cantor, Núñez Espinel, and Pereira Fernández, Petróleo y protesta, 2:143–54.
Vega Cantor, Núñez Espinel, and Pereira Fernández, Petróleo y protesta, 1:368–88. This invisibility was part of the general repression of alternative political projects but also worked within the working-class culture spearheaded by groups such as the USO, which relied on a heavily male-centered ideology, a machismo or petro-masculinity that often excluded other groups such as female laborers, domestic workers, or prostitutes, which all played a crucial role. Indeed, throughout history the development of fossil fuels has been inextricably linked to specific construction of masculinity. See Daggett, “Petro-masculinity.”
Vega Cantor, Núñez Espinel, and Pereira Fernández, Petróleo y protesta, 1:308–39; Acker, “Different Story.”
It is, of course, not the only archive where oil makes such a prominent appearance. A quick look at the documents available online in Barranca’s municipal archive shows the omnipresence of oil. Oil determines how much money there is to spend, the already existing infrastructure of oil defines where the city can build and expand to, oil marks its toxic presence in development plans addressing the water quality of nearby aquifers or in pollution cleanup efforts, and the logic of a constant drive toward expansion dictated by fossil capitalism seems unchanged. See “Plan de desarrollo económico-social.”
Unless otherwise indicated, all translations are my own.
Ecopetrol, “Ecopetrol y la Alcaldía le cumplen a Barrancabermeja,” June 13, 2008, Serie Comunicados de Prensa 182, CREDHOS archive.
Mesa de Trabajo, “Comunidad del Corregimiento El ‘Centro’: ‘Boletín Informativo.’” August 2006, Serie Comunicados de Prensa 252, CREDHOS archive.
Barrio 16 de Julio, “La Crisis de Vivienda en el Corregimiento El Llanito,” November 27, 2008, Serie Comunicados de Prensa 39, CREDHOS archive.
Asociación de Juntas de Acción Comunal—Corregimiento El Centro, “Pliego de Peticiones de las Comunidades del Corregimiento del Centro a ECOPETROL—OCCIDENTAL ANDINA,” December 29, 2005, Serie Comunicados de Prensa 241, CREDHOS archive.
The use of radioactive materials is indeed widespread in the oil industry and, it seems, once again many of its dangers have been underreported and kept secret. See Nobel, “America’s Radioactive Secret.”
