The New Confessions of an Economic Hit Man

Paul Priddy refuses to accept Perkins’s resignation. Perkins explains that he wants to travel and, perhaps, be a correspondent for magazines such as National Geographic; he will only praise MAIN to others. Staffers try to talk him out of leaving; his team feels deserted.

Within months, however, MAIN hires him back as a consultant at three times his former salary. Perkins now specializes as an expert witness on behalf of power companies.

President Carter loses re-election and is replaced by Reagan, whom Perkins considers a toady of corporate America and its representatives in government: “He would advocate what those men wanted: an America that controlled the world and all its resources” (163).

Early in 1981 Roldós brings his tough hydrocarbons law before Ecuador’s congress. The oil companies resist with threats and bribes. Roldós holds firm; he also orders the SIL missionaries out of the country, threatening foreign interests with expulsion if they refuse to cooperate. In May, Roldós dies while flying in an airplane that explodes.

It’s widely believed that the CIA orchestrated the plane crash. Roldós’s successor, Osvaldo Hurtado, brings back SIL and “launched an ambitious program to increase oil drilling by Texaco and other foreign companies” (165).