FNS: Oil, Migrants and Santa Anna

Political News

The future of the Pemex nacional oil company continues to be at the center of national politics in Mexico. Negotiations to lift the four day-old blockade of the Mexican Congress, which was carried out by legislators opposed to the privatization of Pemex, were expected to take place, on Monday, April 14. Affilated with the Progressive Action Front (FAP), the legislators stormed and seized the tribunals in the Senate and Chamber of Deputies last Thursday after the administration of President Felipe Calderon submitted a fast-track set of proposals designed to permit the greater involvement of national and foreign capital in the government-owned company’s functions, many of which are already outsourced to both Mexican and foreign businessmen.

Opponents of the Calderon plan argue that it violates the Mexican Constitution, which reserves petroleum resources to exclusive government ownership, jeopardizes national security and cheats social services, which are heavily dependent on Pemex’s income for funding. A second group of lawmakers opposed to the Calderon legislation announced a hunger strike on Sunday, April 13.

Meanwhile, legisators from the former ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), an organization which is not participating in the anti-privatization protests, proposed that Pemex bonds be sold to Mexican migrant workers as way of averting foreign investment while putting remittances earned in the United States to good use back home. The PRI proposal expands on an earlier one pitched by President Calderon that would allow Mexican citizens to buy Pemex bonds in order to strengthen the company’s finances and permit it to expand production, especially in deep ocean waters located in the Gulf of Mexico where Mexican and US territorial waters converge.

Noting that almost all migrant dollars sent back to Mexico go for basic survival needs, PRI Congressman Edmundo Ramirez Martinez, who serves as the secretary for the border and migrant affairs commission in the Mexican Chamber of Deputies, said investing remittances in Pemex could uplift the quality of life for migrant families.

“If we offer them a return of 10 percent, many Mexicans who have gone to work in the US for lack of employment, could then have an important investment and an additional income for their families,” Martinez said.

Holding the decisive vote in legislative showdown over Pemex, the PRI is torn over the Calderon initiative. Congressman Jose Aispuro Torres said the president’s legislation coincides with many PRI proposals, but that party members have “serious doubts” about the participation of private capital in Pemex. The nationalization of Mexico’s oil industry in 1938 by then-President Lazaro Cardenas remains perhaps the key legacy of a political party that aims to recover the Mexican Congress in 2009 and the Mexican White House in 2012. Clearly, PRI leaders are worried about being outflanked by opposition leader Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador of the center-left Party of the Democratic Revolution, who is leading popular and legislative protests against the Calderon legislation.

Compared by the media to the “Adelitas,” or women combatants of the 1910 Mexican Revolution, pro-Lopez Obrador brigades led by women are spearheading the anti-privatization movement across the country. Posters with a picture of the revered President Cardenas backdropped by an oil rig and pointing a finger at passerby have begun appearing on Mexican streets.

“Now it’s your turn: Mexico needs you,” they read, in a direct appeal to patrirotism. Adding a blast at Mexican electronic media coverage of the Pemex issue, which Lopez Obrador’s partisans accuse of bias in favor of the federal government, the posters urge citizens to “Turn off the television, and turn on your mind.”

On Sunday,. April 13, tens of thousands of demonstrators once again turned out in Mexico City’s Zocalo Plaza to hear Lopez Obrador speak against the Calderon plan. It was the third large anti-privatization demonstration in the Zocalo since last March 18. To counter negative media coverage, Mexico’s leading opposition politician announced that his
followers would distribute information about the Pemex issue door-to-door.

“Everyone of us will be a medium of communication,” Lopez Obrador vowed. Comparing President Calderon with 19th century President Santa Anna, the leader who ceded Mexico’s northern territory to the United States, Lopez Obrador said it was “almost a certainty” that the actions of the FAP legislators and the “Adelitas” had rendered the Calderon legislation a dead letter for the current congressional session, which ends on April 30. Joining others, he called for a broader national debate over Pemex’s future.

In response to the growing anti-privatization mobilization, Mexico’s federal government is stepping up its own publicity offensive. Running ads on national television that say reforms are meant to strengthen Pemex and not privatize it, the oil company is making its own brand of appeal to Mexicans’ futures. If it is reformed, Pemex promises, enhanced oil and gas revenues will translate into better educational opportunities, improved social services and universal health care for all Mexican citizens.

Additional sources: AFP, April 14, 2008. El Universal, April 14, 2008.
Article by Ricardo Gomez and Andrea Merlos. La Jornada, April 14, 2008,
Article by Enrique Mendez and Alma E. Munoz. Televisa, April 14, 2008.
Frontera, April 13, 2008. Proceso, April 13, 2008. Articles by Jenardo
Villamil and Rosalia Vergara.


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Center for Latin American and Border Studies
New Mexico State University
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