Talk:Freeport-McMoRan Copper & Gold

Freeport McMoRan Copper & Gold Inc. of course started life as Freeport Sulphur, a company which I recall reading was attributed with a infamous 19th century history, the details of which I never researched.

My interest was how it came to be in West Papua; the corporation's official website use to have a page with a very funny version of events in which one of their researchers in August 1959 while searching records for a nickel came across a Dutch report which had escaped the Nazi occupation and gave details of a 1936 exploration of the Timika area of West Papua. The real history is that Standard Oil in 1935 wanting to know if Netherlands New Guinea which was next to the Netherlands colonies of the East Indies (South East Asia now known as Indonesia) also had any economic minerals purchased 60% of the Dutch company NNGPM through which they were able to send a Dutch geologist Jean Dozy. In 1936 he reported finding the world's richest concentrations of gold & copper; he spent several weeks estimating the extent of the reserves. Standard Oil obviously decided to keep the discovery secret untill a change of government could enable access to the potential mine.

But in March 1959 the New York Times published this article about sending teams in search of the source of alluvial gold they had found was flowing into the Australian Arafura Sea from West Papua. The connection between Standard Oil and Freeport Sulphur was John Rockefeller.

Because Bechtel Inc. designed and built the mine for Freeport, I think it is probable that Rockefeller / Freeport would in 1959 have asked Bechtel for a feasibility study on building the world's largest mine in West Papua. And when you consider the errorenous advice which Kennedy was fed during 1961/62, and the way that it both colonized West Papua and cemented corporate America's relationship with Gen. Suharto ahead of his replacement of Sukarno; it smells very very much like a Bechtel operation.

Freeport is today also one of the senior members of the US Indonesia Society which is a lobby group possing as neutral experts on Indonesia and since 2004 has supplanted the US Dept. of State in providing primary advice & information about Indonesia to the US Congress & Senate.