Those of us who were raised with close ties to the countryside, in times when modernity did not run over us, it was essential to learn how to milk a cow. For many decades, while dairy herds subsisted in the geographical valley of the Cauca River, and there was no money to buy mechanical milking, a profitable trade was being a milker.
With the passage of time and the scourge of sugar cane, this profession became scarce and without employers. But the image of milking a cow’s teats to let the milk down remained a metaphorical figure that we use today even to explain the latest national scandal, that of the oil pipeline milkers.
We knew about them a long time ago, almost since the beginning of this war that doesn’t seem to end, but since they were hardly mentioned when the rudimentary valves were discovered, and there were no journalistic notes delving into the subject, it occurred to no one that it could be a profession. profitable to milk pipelines that transported crude oil.
It was understood that it was easier and more risky but very productive to commercialize gasoline milked from polyducts. It occurred to very few of them that drilling holes in the tube that the ELN has blown up so many times to take the crude in tank trucks and dispatch it through the Caribbean ports in tankers was a great business for those who are now charged by the Prosecutor’s Office or for the guerrillas, who always they have been obsessed with the tube.
Probably the youngsters of stratum 6, graduated from high schools in Barranquilla and Bogotá, and who ran the business with skill generating international networks, understood much better than their fellow oligarchs that the business was with the Elenos and not with Ecopetrol, which they say is not even Through the telemetry that they handle in the pipelines, he realized the milking that they were hitting him.