NORTHWEST AND QUITO

BEAUTIFUL SNOW CAPPED MOUNTAINS
SURROUND THE CITY OF QUITO


Quito is the capital of Ecuador: The city was founded on December 6, 1534, by the Spanish Conquistadors on a site previously inhabited by native Indian tribes living for centuries in this beautiful part of the continent, before the Spanish people came to America. It is located in an Andean plateau about 9,000 feet high and it is surrounded by snow capped mountains on one side, and large and fertile valleys on the other. The Quito climate is generally very mild with temperatures oscillating between 40 and 75 degrees Fahrenheit. It’s been said many times that one can have four seasons in one day in Quito, and it is true. You can have a splendid sunny morning with 60 degrees Fahrenheit until eleven o’clock, then you can have three hours of a warm and still very sunny day with 75 degrees, only to find yourself a bit later in a cloudy, sometimes rainy cold and windy weather for one hour or two, and, at the end of the day you may be forced to get your umbrellas and coats to protect yourself from the cold and rainy weather. Nights are normally cool and even cold with temperatures dropping to the mid and low forties.



THE VALLEYS NEAR QUITO,
NATURE AT ITS BEST


The city is surrounded by large, some of them active, permanently snow capped volcanoes, of which, at least four can be seen at the distance in a clear day, adding beauty to the naturally beautiful landscape of the city. The population of the metropolitan area of the city today is approximately 1.7 million, and, by the time we came to Quito in 1976 it must have been around one half
When we moved to Quito, the city was enjoying an exceptionally good Municipal administration headed by Mayor Sixto Duran Ballen, a man who later on became President of the country and, therefore, we were able to witness the building of many of the public works that transformed the city from a backward, conservative, quasi ecclesiastic city, where the most important sites to visit were its colonial churches, built in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, into a modern, well planned metropolis, with modern buildings, good highways and long tunnels, nicely planned neighborhoods and good communications. It helped in this process the fact that Ecuador was going through a general time of prosperity fueled by the newly found oil wealth.


MONUMENT WHERE THE WORLD IS
DIVIDED IN TWO HEMISPHERES;
NORTH AND SOUTH, NEAR QUITO


We fell in love with Quito almost as soon as we moved there. To make things even better, we found ourselves forming a group of several young professionals (and their families) from Guayaquil who, just as us, had recently moved to Quito, in the wave of people who had to moved, following the rapid economic growth of the city fueled by the oil wealth. By the time we moved to Quito, Fanny was six months pregnant of our second child, Rafael Jr. who was born on March 12, 1976. Her pregnancy this time was relatively uneventful but she gained approximately forty pounds, so, again she was like a beautiful little walking ball. Fanny wanted our new baby to be born in Guayaquil, where she could count on the assistance of her mother and the rest of the family, shortly prior, during and right after the delivery.
Rafael Jr. (“Rafaelito”) was born on Saturday March 12, 1976 and he was a big, 1’9” tall, weighing 10.4 pounds. I was extremely happy to have now the blessing of two children, a girl and a boy, and having a good, well paid job, living in Quito, a beautiful city, and married to a beautiful wife whom I loved and was loved in return. What else could have I asked to my Creator?




THE COLONIAL QUITO, WHERE RELIGION,
HISTORY, ARCHITECTURE AND ART
ARE BEAUTIFULLY PUT TOGETHER

Our social life was very active and rotated mostly around our Guayaquil friends and their families. Without anything specifically agreed upon, we started meeting on Fridays and Saturdays at one of our places, at least twice a week on a rotating basis. Our entire families used to get together, the adults to play cards while the kids had their own ball with their toys displayed all over the place. The hosting family would be in charge of dinner and music for all. Our children, our wives and we, the heads of households, were about the same age, had about the same level of income, and shared most political and social views of the world around us, but more than anything else, together we felt like being back home in Guayaquil, even as being transplanted to Quito, a city in which there were still surviving prejudices against “the monkeys” as (thank God) ever fewer Quito people call the people from Guayaquil.
We never felt unwelcome to any place we went, that’s something I personally feel very happy to say when I talk about this time in Quito. Our group was so solidly united and so fun to belong to, that not long after, some Quito people joined us, and, of course we welcomed them wholeheartedly. We all looked forward to the weekends together, which sometimes included country gatherings and pick nicks in a place in the country side, only about a mile from the Equator line, which divides our planet in two equal hemispheric halves, North and South. In sum, our life in Quito was as happy as it could have been, we were all extremely surprised that we had little to miss from our lives in Guayaquil; in fact, we all decided that we wanted to stay in Quito and no one, but no one, ever wanted to return to Guayaquil. At the risk that I might forget some of the names of our friends in our group in Quito, I’ll mention Raul and Cecilia Ortiz (Texaco); Antonio and Leonor Sanchez (Gulf Oil), Winston and Elizabeth Izurieta (Nestle), Bolivar and Alicia Rivera (ITT) Alejandro and Fermina Gonzalez (Hilton) Francisco and Silvia Ascensio (Insurance); Alfonso and Martha Silva (Carbajal-Colombia) Francisco and Teresa Valarezo (Farming); Rene and Mirtha Saavedra and Eduardo and Cecilia Espinoza (MD). Each and every one of our friends became like brothers and sisters, each and all of us looked after one another just like we all belonged to a fraternity, and in fact, it was a fraternity. Those were wonderful days!
In the meantime, things started to move fast in connection with the Northwest project in the Gulf of Guayaquil. In accordance with the contract, the company needed to do additional exploration, including seismic studies and drilling in the area under the contract before starting the gas production and industrialization. A very experienced Geologist was brought in from Argentina and a few people were hired to work with him, the technical office was opened in Guayaquil where Alberto Angeleri, a very experienced Argentine geologist was the head of.

The CEPE people kept on insisting that the industrial complex to process the gas and produce ammonia and urea should be the project’s a priority, since there were already enough proven reserves of gas, in the so called Santa Clara Field, The company, on its part, insisted that the industrialization part of the project should be held back until such time when the return on the investment could be assured and that meant that the prices of ammonia and urea in the global market needed to improve materially, since at the current prices of $90/MT, the project was a no fly.
The Italian conglomerate Snamprogetti, based in Milano had been originally contacted by Northwest to be the designer and builder of the industrial project, and, to that extent, a group of Italian technicians came to Ecuador in order to discuss some specifics of the project. When these technicians reviewed the numbers that we had prepared, they all agreed that the project was a no goer, and that its implementation should wait for better times in the market of urea and ammonia.
That was not the position of the “patriotic” people of CEPE and the Ministry of Hydrocarbons of Ecuador. They wanted to have their toy built no matter what, and they wanted to have a meeting -in Milano- to discuss this matter in a more “discreet” environment. Though neither Snamprogetti nor Northwest saw any meaningful purpose in having a meeting in Milano, such idea was forced through by the general manager of CEPE, who, accompanied by a group of four department heads flew to Milano where they would meet with four executives of Northwest and a similar number of Italians from the host company. The little understanding the CEPE people had of the whole matter was never clearer than the day when the GM of that company, a General of the Ecuadorian Army, said in front of the executives of both Snamprogetti and Northwest, that the project had to be carried on because it was politically important for the government to calm down the growing disaffection the Guayaquil people was feeling for the military government. “We need to do something to get the waves controlled in Guayaquil”, the man said, and he showed no shame to do it. He just either did not know, or decided to forget, who would have to pay the bill for the white elephant he wanted to be built.





SEVERAL VIEWS OF QUITO, THE
BEAUTIFUL CAPITAL OF ECUADOR


That same night, the same man, after having a few drinks, invited the Northwest Chairman to have a private conversation, in which the General said he wanted a “contribution” of one million dollars to be more understanding of the situation, or he would press the construction of the industrial complex with Snamprogetti. This was a classic display of “patriotism” from this pathetic man whose understanding of the whole matter was extremely “basic” to say the least. That was the day when the Northwest people fully realized who their business partners in Ecuador were, and that same day was, perhaps, when the whole project, for all practical purposes was killed.

In my next posting: PROPOSING ALTERNATIVES