Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent

by Eduardo Galeano

Standard Oil and Shell seat and unseat kings and presidents, finance palace plots and coups d’état, have innumerable generals, ministers, and James Bonds at their command, and make decisions about peace or war in every field and every language. Standard Oil of New Jersey (now Exxon) is the capitalist world’s biggest industrial enterprise; outside the United States no industrial enterprise has greater power than Royal Dutch/Shell. Affiliates sell crude petroleum to subsidiaries which refine it and sell it to branch organizations for distribution: there is no loss of blood in the whole internal circulatory system of the cartel, which also owns the pipelines and most of the oil fleets on the seven seas. Prices are manipulated on a world scale to keep taxes low and profits high: the crude petroleum gets constantly cheaper, the refined constantly more expensive.