Cold War Oil, Development, and Political Unrest

“Before the Revolution [of October 1917],” confessed Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev to an attentive listener, Brazilian Vice President João Goulart, during a meeting at the Kremlin in August 1961, “we were also unable to find oil, since we had no industry.” “We drilled to a depth of 500 meters and we did not find what we were looking for, and when we went in for 3000 [meters], we found it. Brazil is a rich country too,” concluded Khrushchev in an effort to entice a Latin American leader to adopt a pro-Moscow strategy in the region at a time when not even Cuba had done so.1 During the conversation, Khrushchev also mentioned that the USSR was selling oil equipment to Argentina, something the U.S. government “would never do.”2 The federal deputy Gabriel Hermes, accompanying Goulart, alerted Khrushchev to an important particularity of Brazil’s geology: oil was hard to find. Hermes also mentioned that a group of U.S. technicians had led the search for it, concluding there was nothing economically viable in Brazil, referring to the conclusion of the August 1960 “Link Report,” produced by Walter Link, a former Standard Oil of New Jersey employee hired by the Brazilian state oil company Petrobras to structure and lead its Department of Exploration. In his reply, Khrushchev noted that India had faced the same struggle when the British searched for but did not find oil, pointing to Brazilian industrialization as key to achieving energy self-sufficiency.3 These comparisons were not accidental. As they had done in India, the Soviets were trying to get closer to the South American giant, with which they had had no official diplomatic relations since 1947. Meanwhile, the U.S. government continued to assert that Brazil’s “development needs could best be met by private capital.”4

Cold war · Economic history · Political science · Politics · Unrest · Brazilian cultural history and politics · Brazilian History and Foreign Policy · History · Law

• Latin American Cold War

  Open Access•Gianfranco Caterina•Revista Brasileira de História &…•2025

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