Energy independence

National
Sovereign expropriation of the Casa Rosada
Energy independence
By: Carlos Damián April 17, 2012
Calderón: It censors Buenos Aires
México. - The history of the petroleum in Argentina has as punctual to Yacimientos Petroliferos Fiscales (YPF, in Spanish) company been founded in 1922 and privatized in 1992 that president Cristina Kirchner looks for to recover with a law’s project to control 51 percent of the actions. The logical repercussion of the one announced presidential on the birth of a new YPF it put in second plane the fundamental political concept of the law’s project that settles down as high-priority objective of the country the achievement of the auto- supply of hydrocarbons with the objective of guaranteeing the economic development of the country.

When YPF is generated in 1922 Argentina didn't have a law of hydrocarbons and the fundamental objective in passed years was to have a tool to defend the oil resource of the avidity of the big foreign companies and to avoid the monopoly in the commercialization of fuels. In 1923, Mosconi defines a strategic plan for the company with three fundamental objectives: 1) to make of YPF a company integrated with production, distillation, transport, storage and distribution; 2) to act as market regulator, going down the prices to convenient levels to the national interests, crawling in that movement to the private companies; 3) to achieve the auto- supply. This last point was the great failure of Mosconi and it marked the history of the petroleum in Buenos Aires, where in only in brief periods this objective was completed.

The independence of Latin America
The Iberian blood is part of the Mexican and Argentinean blood. Not only from the time of the Colony, but also through the strong average immigratory of ends of the XIX century and the first half of the XX century. In spite of this reality, the unfortunate decade of the 90 it left their bad inheritance the partial rupture, maybe only transitory of these knots of fraternity. Not only for the behavior of the compatriots that, following the recipe of the international financial organisms, they deepened the opening cycle, deregulation and privatizations begun by the middle of the 70’s, but also to the arrogance and indifference neo-Colonialist of the Spanish capitals. The imposture was not limited to the expressions of new rich in satiny earth, but rather it showed in the numbers of the economy.

The Spanish capital emptied signatures emblematical like Aerolíneas Argentinas, and like it was captured in the imports of fuels of 2011, it was one of the main beneficiaries, not the only of the looting of the underground. It only was not a certain phase of the local capitalism, but rather the former Spanish company had a behavior different to the rest of the operators. The fall of the reservations of Repsol-YPF overcame for far away to the stocking of the market. Their action logic was intimately bound to its conduction for the financial capital.

However, in that time the world had big reservations of petroleum, and therefore, the search of the auto- supply had the economic objective, due to the important deficit in the scale of payments. That was the scenario of the ninety, where they were implemented in our region the politicians of reformation of the State and of energy integration impelled by The States. It was considered that the petroleum was a commodity and it didn't have strategic value. Toward final of last century a new scenario generated by the entrance of India and China to the industrial civilization begins and because the conventional oil resources begin to give symptoms of exhaustion.

Contrary to the old YPF where they accumulated the oil reservations slowly after the coalition with Repsol, we have with the current Repsol-YPF a predatory extraction without the compensation of the good business practices exists, those that it says should be carried out investments of reinstatement of reservations for that reason which existed never, the measure of condemning the petroleum like national strategic reservation, it was not as consequence of the politics of prices.

Act of sovereignty of the country
For the first time in the era of the petroleum, the offer has difficulties to satisfy the demand. Before this situation, the search of the auto- supply transcends the economic question to settle as a fundamental political objective. They understand this way it developed countries and emergent countries as India and China that look for to guarantee their energy supply starting from taking aggressive geopolitical energy positions and simultaneously, to look for agreements with the countries that have more reservations of hydrocarbons. In this context, Latin America has a particular situation, since it has the resources energy for auto- supply. Therefore, we should enlarge the auto- supply concept to that of regional energy security.

The bottom noise that today is listened in the peninsula is the same one that was listened here before the terrible crisis of 20001-2002: the cantilena of the trust in the markets, the climate of business and the legal security. Such they were the topics of the recrimination that, with residual colonial arrogance, they expressed with threatening tone the officials of the current Spanish right-wing administration. But they make a mistake: “the hostility” of the Casa Rosada is not with Spain, to which the country takes in the blood, but against the way of acting of a capitalist class that today oppresses to its own people. The decision of Argentina was only an act of sovereignty and of independence, bad that it in spite of the metropolis in decadence. (La Jornada, política, p. 4, April 17, 2012)