Juan Pablo Pérez Alfonzo

Juan Pablo Pérez Alfonzo was the Venezuelan oil minister who had studied how the Texas Railroad Commission kept American prices up by rationing production, proposed the same cartel for the countries that owned the oil, found a partner in Saudi Arabia's Abdullah Tariki, and in Baghdad in September 1960 got five governments to found OPEC; he spent his old age calling oil the devil's excrement and saying it would ruin his country, which it did. He was born in Caracas in 1903, read law, and was a founder of Democratic Action, the party that took power in the coup of 1945 and made him minister of development. In 1948 he wrote the fifty-fifty law that split the oil companies' profits equally with the state, which the companies accepted and every producing country then demanded. The military coup of that November ended it along with the government. He spent the dictatorship in exile in Washington and Mexico, reading the prorationing orders of the Texas commission, which fixed how much each well in the state could pump so that the price held, and concluded that what worked for Texas would work for the world if the producing states would agree. Democratic Action came back in 1958 and he was minister of mines and hydrocarbons. The companies cut the posted price in 1959 and again in August 1960 without asking anyone, and he and Tariki, who had been talking since the Arab oil congress in Cairo the year before. They convened Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and Venezuela in Baghdad, where on 14 September the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries was founded to defend the price. It took thirteen years to matter. He left office in 1963 and government in 1964, turned against what he had made as he watched the money corrupt the state, wrote Hundiéndonos en el excremento del diablo, Sinking in the Devil's Excrement, in 1976, and died in Washington in September 1979, ten years before the riots that the oil state's collapse produced.

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