Brisbane speakers highlight ExxonMobil’s history of support for brutal regimes

Speakers highlighted ExxonMobil’s history of support for brutal regimes in oil-rich countries, dating from its incarnation as the Rockefeller-owned Standard Oil of New Jersey. In the 1940s Chilean Nobel laureate Pablo Neruda wrote a poem on the company, in which he satirised Standard Oil’s arrival in Latin America “with their signs and boots, their cheques and guns, their governments and their prisoners”. In 1979 David Rockefeller congratulated the fascist Argentine dictator Videla for “controlling terrorism and strengthening the economy”.