Enrique Mosconi circa 1932.
Enrique Carlos Alberto
Mosconi (21 February 1877 – 4 June 1940) was an Argentine
military engineer, who is best known as the pioneer and
organizer of petroleum surveyance and
exploitation in Argentina.
Mosconi
was born in Buenos
Aires
to Enrico Mosconi, an Italian
engineer
hired to build railroads, and María Juana
Canavery, an Argentinian of Irish
ascent. Enrico Mosconi founded the town of Villa Gobernador
Galvez on 26 February 1888. Enrico Mosconi wanted a medical doctor
son; the mother, a military son, to follow the family tradition of
Ángel Canavery, his uncle, who had taken part in the
Conquest of the Desert. Mosconi had
two older sisters and two younger brothers. Being only two years
old the family moved to Italy, coming back a few years later after
the death of Mosconi's mother. Enrico Mosconi re-married to
Countess Maria Luisa Natti.
Early studies
Once finished primary school, young Mosconi entered the Military
College of the Nation on 26 May 1891, and graduated from it as an
infantry sub-lieutenant on 20 November 1894, at 17 years of age. He
was assigned to take charge of the 7th Infantry Regiment in
Río Cuarto, Córdoba,
and he began writing a "Rulebook for Campaign Infantry", with
details on the handling of explosives and instructions to build
bridges. In 1896 he was promoted and transferred to Buenos Aires,
where he started the Engineering career.
In 1899 he performed topographical and statistical surveys of the
Andes in
Mendoza, and the next year he took part in
the studies in the
Patagonia to establish
a strategically important railroad system in
Neuquén.
In 1901 he graduated from the Faculty of Physical and Natural
Sciences of the University of Buenos Aires as a
civil engineer.
His doctoral thesis
dealt with a project to dam the Nahuel Huapi
Lake
and installing a valve to regulate the flow of the
Limay
River
and the Río Negro
, in Neuquén, in order to make them
navigable.
Military career
In 1903 he was transferred to the Engineering division of the Army
as a military engineer, and in 1904 he received a prize for a
construction project.
Between 1906 and 1908 he was part of
commission of Argentine graduate students sent to Europe (Italy, Belgium
and Germany
) to study
and acquire hydroelectric and gas power plants. He was assigned to the
German Army engineering corps, and spent four years embedded in the
10th Battalion of Westphalia, while in
postgraduate studies at the Artillery and Engineering Superior
Technical School of Charlottenburg
. In Germany he became acquainted with the
ideas of Friedrich List (1789–1846),
an economist whose industrialist ideas had great influence in
Europe and the United
States
.
In 1909 Mosconi returned to Argentina as Chief of the 2nd Engineers
Battalion, stays a few months and then travels to Europe again in
order to acquire materials for the Engineering division.
There he
studies and works in telegraphists and railway specialists units in
Germany, France
and Austria-Hungary. He came back to
Argentina in December 1914, and re-took his post as the chief of
the Engineering Regiment until 1915, when he was appointed director
of the Esteban de Luca Arsenal. In 1920 he was moved the
Aeronautics division, which he directed until 1922.
YPF and the nationalization of oil
On 16 October 1922 Mosconi was appointed Director-General of the
Fiscal Petroleum Reserves (
Yacimientos Petrolíferos
Fiscales, YPF), where he would stay for eight years,
devoting large efforts to increase exploration and development of
petroleum extraction.
YPF received an initial grant of 8 million
Argentine pesos by the national government,
and from then on became self-sufficient, financing itself with the
profits of extraction and, of course, without foreign investment or
loans. In 1925 Mosconi considered the possibility of a
state-private society, but in 1928 he turned back on his proposal
and further stated:
- "There is no other way but the monopoly of the State in a
wholesale fashion, that is, in all activities of this industry:
production, elaboration, transport and trade... Without an
oil monopoly it is difficult... it is impossible for a State
company to defeat private capital organizations."
He also remarked that, in order to defend Argentine fiscal oil
reserves from the foreign companies, there was the need of
"a
magnificent insensitivity to all demands on the part of private
interests, either in accord or not with the collective interests,
but even more, what is needed is a political power capable of
containing all opposing forces".
Some of the
nationalistic policies of Venezuelan
President Hugo
Chávez have been marked as a continuation of this
doctrine.
He created in 1927 the
Alianza Continental (Continental
Alliance) advocating economical independence for Latin American
states, an association gathering mainly students and intellectuals,
and focusing in particular on
oil
policies.Between 1927 and 1928 Mosconi toured
Latin America telling and teaching the
authorities about the Argentine experience with regards to
fossil fuels, campaigning for an integration of
efforts in the matter of petroleum as a resource. Mosconi was the
major proponent of a national policy that put natural resources at
the service of economic, industrial and social development of the
nation. He defended
nationalization of these
resources, an absolute fiscal
monopoly on
surveyance and exploitation, the need for Latin American countries
to agree on common actions in this matter, and the passing of
resource-related legislation that was advantageous to the interests
of the national states. During this trip, Mosconi met with
Lázaro Cárdenas, who would
nationalize oil in
Mexico ten years later, and General
Elías Plutarco.
The influence of these
doctrines reached Mexico
, Brazil
, Uruguay
, Bolivia
and Colombia
.
Mosconi
managed YPF efficiently and, while establishing a soon-to-be major
oil company, starts fighting the political pressure of two giants
of hydrocarbon exploitation: the British
-Dutch
Royal Dutch, and John D. Rockefellers'
Standard Oil.
In 1929 Mosconi received Edmundo Castillo, Uruguay's Minister of
Industry, and counseled him about the establishment of a national
refinery and a state corporation to sell its products. This led to
the creation of ANCAP (
Administración Nacional de Combustibles,
Alcohol y Portland), the state energy corporation created by
the Uruguayan government in 1931.
In 1936, after the Chaco War, the state of Bolivia created
Yacimientos
Petrolíferos Fiscales Bolivianos (YPFB) after the model of
the Argentine company, and soon afterward it dictated the
expropriation of the Bolivian Standard Oil Company.
In 1938 the same ideas led to the
Conselho Nacional do
Petróleo (CNP).
That year Mosconi was awarded a medal by the
Academy of Science and Art of Rio de Janeiro
, in recognition for his work.
Mosconi today
Though Mosconi's ideas about energy independence did not survive
long, YPF stood as Argentina's state oil company until 1999, when
it was
privatized by order of
President
Carlos Menem.
A town in
Salta, is named
General Enrique Mosconi, as
well as a nearby
airport in
Tartagal. This town became known in the
Argentine national stage in 2001 due to a serious conflict between
the government and groups of
piqueteros,
workers left unemployed in part by the downsizing of oil
exploitation in the area after the privatization of YPF.
In 1983 the "General Mosconi" Argentine Institute of Energy was
founded. It is a non-profit organization devoted "to promote a
rational exploitation of energy resources and developing its
related activities for the good interests of the population".
In the city of
Comodoro
Rivadavia,
Chubut, there is a
neighbourhood which
was named after the engineer.
References
- A R G E N P R E S S . i n f o - Integración
petrolera latinoamericana en Enrique Mosconi (Parte I) - 10 / 8 /
2008 at www.argenpress.info
- Pablo Villegas N., Mosconi, el petróleo y la independencia integral de
Sudamérica, Bolpress, 19 June 2007
-
http://www.nadir.org/nadir/initiativ/agp/free/imf/argentina/txt/2000/0512protests.txt
- Instituto
Argentino de la Energía "General Mosconi" at
www.iae.org.ar
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