The construction of the Bicentennial Pipeline (OBC) is on its final stretch and is now only 1500 meters from completion as the announced launch in August approaches.
Intercepted communication between organizers of the Farc and the clandestine Communist Party suggests that the guerrilla faction could be involved in the planning of a general strike starting July 20.
The Colombian government has approved an Ecopetrol bond issue of up to COL3T (US$1.556B), a move analysts say will bolster the dollar against the Colombian peso.
The USO will start regional protests in Puerto Gaitán July 12-15 as part of a wider campaign to organize against the presence of multinational oil firms in Colombia, and an economic model that the union says has led to widespread social and environmental abuses at the hands of foreign firms.
A decree expected in late July will reportedly shorten the environmental licensing process for small changes to conventional projects that already have gained approval.
Unusually, counts were identical to last week at 23 below recent and long-term averages. This was an average week for non-armed forces reported/guerrilla-initiated incidents. Our 4-week Moving Average incident count was down to 26.5 incidents (down for the seventh straight week) but the 52 week average was stable at 39.2 incidents per week.
The economic crisis and growth in unconventional oil production are putting pressure on European oil firms Cepsa (Spain) and Total (France) to sell their share in the Ocensa Pipeline in Colombia.
The Transport Minister Cecilia Álvarez Correa-Glen announced that the ministry will form a technical committee to come up with solution to mitigate some of the problems stemming from oil trucks on public highways.
Construction of a new “Pacific Pipeline” could help alleviate bottlenecks in transporting crude from oil fields, complementing the other two main pipelines and speed delivery to meet growing demand in Far East markets like India.
This week the peace process started again in Havana on July 1st, but the headline this week was the entry of the ELN, a revolutionary group which split from the FARC decades ago, but after a meeting between leaders of the two guerrilla forces in June, is now lining up to take a role in the peace process.