Elite Organization, Multinational Corporations, and Oil Policies: A Comparative Study of Colombia and Peru in the Twentieth Century

This paper studies how the type of organization of the national elite in Colombia and Peru affected the relationship between those countries’ governments and foreign oil multinationals.  I argue that governments developed a more or less friendly legislation on the oil sector in each country depending on the role the domestic elite had in that industry.  For the case of Colombia, where the elite’s main interest was to protect coffee exports and the domestic manufacturing industry, the government did not threaten the operations of the multinationals for most of the twentieth century.  The Peruvian case was similar for different reasons.  The Peruvian elite benefited from the rents it extracted from the foreign multinational corporations.  Once a regime that represented this type of elite was ousted, the government developed a more nationalistic type of oil policy.