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Short abstract:

Since the 1980s, Colombia's oil pipelines have symbolized energy and modernity. The oil is disputed and siphoned by illegal actors to produce pategrillo, a ‘dirty’ fuel. Pategrillo profoundly affects northeastern Colombia, while materializing as a local innovation created from chaos to power.

Long abstract:

Crude oil exploitation has been a significant matter in Colombian economic development, mainly since the early 1980s. Infrastructures, such as the Caño Limón-Coveñas pipeline, were built by the industry and the state, based on understandings of energy and their entanglement with modernity. Ecologies of organized crime also adhered to the pipeline even before it was built, compromising and intervening in its flows of energy and profits. The pipeline itself has been shaping landscapes along its route, while becoming controversial, contingent, and disputed as an anticipatory energy destination. Today, the pipeline is being siphoned illegally. The obtained crude oil is distilled within clandestine and transitory refineries in the middle of the mountains and jungles. One resulting material is a 'dirty' kerosene known as pategrillo, considered inherently a risk to the oil industry but big business for illegal actors; armed groups and pategrilleros—the pategrillo makers—supply illicit markets. This paper investigates how oil and pategrillo sculpt the northeastern border regions of Colombia, crossed by the pipeline and heavily involved in coca plantations and cocaine production, beyond environmental degradation. Pategrillo is assumed by this work as a local innovation that does not emerge suddenly, but stems from Colombian historicities. Pategrillo is created from chaos, through unsophisticated technologies, illicit mobilities, and violence at the heart of discredited spaces and communities. Yet pategrillo is a “thing-power” capable enough to meet energy expectations, choreographing engineering knowledges and stabilizing out-of-sight fuel epistemologies.