“The Adelitas have arrived/To defend our oil/Whoever wants to give it to the foreigners/ Will get the shit kicked out of him!” yodelled the brigades of women pouring onto the esplanade of the Mexican senate. The demonstration was to protest a petroleum privatisation measure President Felipe Calderon insists is not a petroleum privatisation measure — and which he sent onto the Senate for fast-track ratification at the tag end of the session this April.
Inside the small, ornate Senate, leftist legislators aligned in the Broad Progressive Front (FAP), some dressed in white oil workers’ overalls and hard hats, were camped out under pup tents arranged around the podium for the eighth straight night. They paralysed legislative activities and demanded an ample national debate on Calderon’s plans to open up the nationalised petroleum corporation PEMEX to transnational investment.
Sneak privatisation
The hullabaloo, which has been brewing for months, exploded when rumours circulated that Calderon’s right-wing PAN party and allies in the once-ruling (71 years) PRI had cooked up a secret vote approving the privatisation measure.
Such covert manoeuvring is called an “albazo” or “madruguete’ — a pre-dawn ruse to approve legislation in the dark when there is significant opposition, often behind locked doors and military and police barricades. Seizing the podiums in both houses of congress and the timely arrival of the Adelitas prevented a madruguete and derailed plans to fast-track the privatisation.
Under Calderon’s “energy reform” package, building and operating refineries and pipelines will be opened up to the private sector — 37 out of PEMEX’s 41 divisions would be subject to partial privatisation.
In an analysis anti-privatisers label “catastrophic”, which Calderon sent on to congress to back up his initiative, the president pinned salvation of PEMEX on deep water drilling in the Gulf of Mexico that would necessitate the “association” of private capital.
Mexico’s petroleum industry was expropriated from an array of oil companies known collectively as the “Seven Sisters” in March 1938 by then-president Lazaro Cardenas — an act that remains a paragon of revolutionary nationalism throughout Latin America.
But down the decades, PEMEX has subcontracted out important parts of its structure to transnational drillers and service corporations like Halliburton, now its number one subcontractor, that suck billions of dollars in profits from Mexican oil each year.
http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=9057
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