Liquid Gold, Poisoned Potion

On August 21, 2003, the president of Ecuador, Lucio Gutiérrez, drove with his retinue to a small windswept hilltop in the Andes, not far from the capital city of Quito. He was there to inaugurate the new $1.5 billion Heavy Crude Pipeline, or OCP (Oleoducto de Crudos Pesados), which would be the second oil pipeline to stretch from east to west across this small, poverty-plagued country. Built in the face of great domestic and international controversy, the OCP represented the latest chapter in the almost forty-year history of Ecuador's tethering its economy to petroleum.

And now, though the first oil would not gurgle its way westward for several months, the politicians, oil barons, and other VIPs were ready to celebrate. Outfitted for the occasion in an engineer's hardhat, Gutiérrez strode forward to turn a large crank that would symbolically open the floodgates to a new wave of Ecuadoran oil wealth. But with flashbulbs popping and OCP officials looking on, the president could not make the wheel turn. Members of the press fingered their notebooks and played with their cameras. After several embarrassing minutes, the wheel turned, the flashbulbs flashed—the next era of Ecuadoran oil development was dawning.