As a minor point of interest, I have been to Cabinda. I went in 1998, as a programmer/supervisor, installing an enterprise application I'd written related to controlling the warehouse on a drilling rig. I have to admit that at the time, I didn't pay much attention to what was going on in Angola at the time.
It's a small area in the middle of the Congo that that was controlled by Angola but there were people who thought the area should be its own little country and liked to attack the Angolan troops in the area. But I really don't know much about the actual situation in the area - my trip there was does not leave me with any fond memories and I never felt a desire to know more about it.
I flew into Cabinda on a twin prop, very small, passenger plane. It had one row of seats along the fusilage, 8 or 9, in the front on the left side, the back on the right of the plane. The seats were metal frame, rusting, with padded boards nailed to the seat and back.
We were met at the airstrip by an employee in a jeep. We actually drove inside the fence, along the double barbed wire fence where the mines were located. Huge, beautiful trees with spreading branches were all around. Green everywhere. Little monkeys flying through the trees. It was really cool, but that fence on the right side as we drove along kind of itched.
The company I worked for was a drilling contractor working for Chevron at the time. We operated two rigs out of Cabinda for Chevron.
We got to the Chevron part of the compound where the oilfield personnel were housed. Little shacks with three rooms. A small gathering room, a small kitchen, and a room with three two-person bunk beds and foot lockers. On each bed, at the foot, was a thick, heavy blanket. It was obviously not a normal blanket.
I asked the guy who took us to our particular shack what kind of blanket it was.
He answered "it's a Kevlar blanket. When you hear gunfire or shelling, grab it, roll off your bunk, get under it and just lay there until it's over."
Luanda was a shit hole at the time. We had to ride around in Land Rovers with at least two guards armed with automatic pistols. The Land Rovers were needed to get through areas of the city where buildings had fallen due to explosions and craters in the middle of the steet, etc.
It may seem I went a little off-topic here, but oil companies go through a lot of shit to get the oil they have been contracted to get out of the ground and they get it refined. They put up with the rather moderate issues I described above (in not very good detail), as well as things like pirate attacks and crew takeovers (usually, by contract, the companies have to use local labor exept for the rig managers and certain positions related to maintenance and the actual science of drilling and such) where people get hurt or killed.
Argentina isn't going to cause much of a problem to getting that oil out of the ground when related to many operations that go on in Africa and other places around the world.
