A battle for control of Mexico

Husain ibn Ali of Mecca, Feisal bin Husain. British Royal Air Force aircraft were permanently based in Iraq and its administration was placed under the effective control of Anglo-Persian Oil Company offi cials.

When the U.S. State Department registered an offi cial protest on behalf of American Standard Oil companies eager to share the concessions in the Middle East, British Foreign Secretary Lord Curzon, on April 21, 1921, sent a curt reply to the British ambassador in Washington that no concessions were to be allowed American companies in the British Middle East.6

The San Remo accord ignited a fi erce battle for world oil control between British and American interests, which raged through the 1920s and played a decisive part in shaping the form of U.S. and British diplomatic and trade relations with the new Bolshevik regime in the Soviet Union in the critical fi rst years under Lenin, and later Stalin. Alarmed American oil and banking interests feared Britain was well on the way towards securing a global monopoly on oil at U.S. expense. Deterding’s Royal Dutch Shell had an iron grip on the vast oil concessions of the Dutch East Indies, on Persia, Mesopotamia (Iraq) and most of the postwar Middle East.

Latin America now became the focus for a fi erce battle between British and American interests into the 1920s.

A BATTLE FOR CONTROL OF MEXICO

Shortly after the discovery in 1910 of huge petroleum reserves in the coastal Mexican town of Tampico on the Gulf of Mexico, U.S. President Wilson sent American troops into Mexico. The real objective was not the Mexican regime as such, but British interests behind that regime. In 1912, using as pretext a minor incident in which U.S. Marines were detained while in the Tampico port, President Wilson ordered the U.S. naval fl eet to take Vera Cruz. US Marines landed under fi re and seized the Mexican customs house, in an exchange in which 20 Americans and 200 Mexicans perished.

Their objective was to oust the regime of General Victoriano Huerta, which signifi cantly had been placed in power and was fi nancially backed by the Mexican Eagle Petroleum Company. The Mexican Eagle president, Weetman Pearson, later Lord Cowdray, was an English oil promoter who had been recruited to the British Intelligence Service, and who worked closely with Deterding and Shell in carving out Mexico’s oil potential for British interests. Mexican Eagle had