Mexican Influence Is Poisoning the Minds of These People: The Hemispheric Struggle over Oil Rights before World War II

Throughout the Americas, in the first decades of the twentieth-century, sovereign nations struggled to assert control over subsurface petroleum resources and the vast new wealth that they represented. Earlier land laws often had left unsettled who owned the oil. Governments seized on these legal ambiguities, and changing political sentiments, to assert a national interest and sovereign claim. In the process, they threw into doubt how private oil companies could secure access and profitably develop oil resources.

This paper investigates oil nationalization in the early twentieth century as a hemispheric history. We explore how fears of the Mexican Revolution shaped United States oil policies in Colombia and how Colombian oil politics had a broader, hemispheric impact. Focusing on the 1920s and 1930s, this paper analyzes how Colombia crafted different regulatory regimes for oil exploitation by appealing to regional and transnational notions of the rule of law, property, economic development, and even revolutionary politics.