Saturday, Aug 30, 2008
The dictator of Equatorial Guinea runs his country like a dungeon. But he's suddenly awash in black gold, so big oil and the Bush White House find him utterly charming.
Apr 29, 2002 | As U.S. politics becomes increasingly dominated by the country's dependence on foreign oil -- and the Bush administration's cozy ties with oil money -- it's only a matter of time before our gaze should finally fall upon the grim little despotic regime of Equatorial Guinea.
Not because the Bush administration, or major oil companies like ExxonMobil, want you to, however.
A recent monthlong crackdown, in which the 23-year-old regime of Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo rounded up about 100 people it alleged were plotting a coup, didn't merit a single column inch in the biggest U.S. newspapers. Not even an urgent Amnesty International press release ("Detainees held incommunicado risk being tortured to death") drew any attention. Partly that could be because the United States does not -- yet -- rely on the deep, newly discovered oil reserves in Equatorial Guinea, as it does in Venezuela and the Middle East.
But that's about to change. The Bush administration, lobbied by the oil industry, has quietly authorized the reopening of the American Embassy in Equatorial Guinea, which had been shut down since 1996 when the Obiang regime threatened to kill then-U.S. Ambassador John Bennett for complaining about human rights conditions. Now that we've become friends again with Equatorial Guinea, there's evidence the country's violent past is resurfacing. The administration, meanwhile, remains mum.
Obiang is a longtime thug. He legalized opposition parties in the early 1990s, but everyone from Freedom House to the U.S. State Department describes the country as a dungeon. Placido Mico, one of the only opposition figures not to have fled into exile or be bought off by the regime, was arrested and tortured in 1993 -- for two months he was held in a cell the size of a coffin -- and has been consistently harassed since then.
In a terrible case of bad timing, just a few weeks after the embassy shut down in 1996, American firms struck oil. Since then, ExxonMobil, Chevron, Marathon, Vanco and Triton Energy have invested $5 billion in the country, and soon, the Obiang regime will preside over a nation that will be the third biggest producer of oil in sub-Saharan Africa after Nigeria and Angola. Within a decade, Equatorial Guinea and its 500,000 people will have moved from being one of the world's poorest countries to one of the richest, at least in per capita terms.
And with money comes reinvention. With the help of the oil industry, Obiang and his country may soon seem as American as, well, baseball: One industry group representative confirmed to Salon that he had arranged for Obiang, who owns two palatial residences outside Washington, to throw out the first ball at a Philadelphia Phillies game last September. But after the Sept. 11 attacks, the baseball schedule was canceled, and that photo-op -- surely Major League Baseball's first ever collaboration with a foreign dictator -- has not yet been rescheduled.
Almost none of the new oil money is reaching the population, as I saw during an eight-day trip to Equatorial Guinea in late February and early March. Ninety percent of the population is poor and lives mostly in slums without electricity or running water. Unemployment is rampant, as is malnutrition. Oil investments have created few jobs, because most of the work is at offshore sites and requires technical expertise possessed by few Guineans. The educational and healthcare systems are abysmal. The State Department's travel advisory for Equatorial Guinea urges visitors who need serious medical attention to leave the country, and virtually everyone I met wanted to move abroad, a step already taken by about one-third of the population. (You know the situation is grim when people are desperate to get to neighboring Cameroon and Gabon in search of a better life.)
Frank Ruddy, the former U.S. ambassador to Equatorial Guinea under Ronald Reagan, doesn't share the industry's red-white-and-blue spin of the Obiang regime. Ruddy believes the political situation in Equatorial Guinea has worsened since the oil companies began operating there, as revenues they generate have enriched the government and left it less dependent on aid from abroad. "Their full capacity to be thugs has grown with the oil money," Ruddy says of the Obiang regime.
But with the oil industry lobbying on its behalf, and an administration apparently willing to look the other way, Equatorial Guinea might be able to buy all the silence it needs. Even when, according to sources on the ground, screams are heard coming from the houses where the alleged coup plotters are being held.
Get Salon in your mailbox!