Huasteca Oil - 2nd Edition

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In the years after World War I, an area of Mexico along the Gulf coast known as La Huasteca, became the largest producer of oil in the world. American oil companies moved in, took over the land and drilled as fast as they could showing little regard for the people in the oil rich regions and even less for Mexico as a whole. Even as powerful as the oil companies were, they were not free of risk. It had not been long since the Mexican Revolution and men like Pancho Villa. Other men who had been in the army now called themselves colonels or generals and led bands to try and get their part of the oil money.
The amount of oil being pumped produced greed and corruption on a huge scale. People that were not making money directly from oil tried to make it from those that did. Stories abounded in the US about the money that could be made by anyone who went there. Steve Robinson left the west Texas oil fields with his wife to make a fortune. He found reality to be very different. Juan Graffe started a freight business hauling material to the drilling sites and was doing well. He expanded his business by hiring Steve Robinson. He wanted Robinson’s organizational skills and also Robinson’s wife. Graffe and Robinson eventually split apart with Robinson forming his own small oil company but the hatred between the two never diminished. Each planned the demise of the other.
Life for everyone changed when Mexico expropriated the oil and threw out the American companies. The Mexican people in the Huasteca now wanted the oil money and they also wanted their pound of flesh from the Americans.