The Environmental Consequences of Privatizing Mexico’s Oil

[marmar]

from Dissent magazine:


The Environmental Consequences of Privatizing Mexico’s Oil
By Christopher Sellers - September 3, 2013




On August 16, an eight-inch pipeline ruptured at Mexico’s oldest refinery in Minatitlán in the south of Veracruz state. Even as oily wastes poured into the Coatzacoalcos River, stretching out twenty miles by the day’s end, a group of long-time residents meeting in this same city recalled the long, damaging toll that the petrochemical industry has inflicted on the environment and people of this region. But their harrowing past and present have barely registered in the many headlines that Mexican oil was making in this nation’s capital, as well as leading American newspapers. There, for the past few weeks, talk has swirled around the new Mexican president’s proposal to (more or less) privatize the country’s oil industry, for well over half a century run by the Mexican state.

This debate over President Enrique Peña Nieto’s plan needs to start considering what any reform may mean for the environment and well being of those in places like Minatitlán. There’s no better starting point for this reflection than the expropriation of 1938, when Mexico became the first developing nation to expel Western-owned oil companies and convert its holdings into a government enterprise. Many Mexicans celebrate this birth of Petróleos Mexicanos, or Pemex, in nearly the same terms as that country’s revolution of the 1910s; it is a modern Declaration of Independence from foreign powers. Hence, leftists like former presidential candidate Andres Manuel López Obrador have charged that the reform amounts to “treason,” while Peña Nieto defends his plan as actually fulfilling the intentions of Lázaro Cárdenas, the president who signed off on the state takeover. Nearly forgotten, both in Mexico and in the United States, is that Cárdenas’s decision to expropriate was sparked by local uprisings in oil refineries and fields that were deeply tied to the labor and environmental abuses of foreign companies.

Excursions into Mexican archives predating 1938 by the historian Myrna Santiago as well as myself have demonstrated just how extensive these abuses were. For local oil workers, strikes and sabotage became a way of life. Beyond the refineries and oil fields of Veracruz and Tamaulipas themselves, massive oil spills regularly threatened the livelihood of fishermen and farmers. And the horrific fires and explosions, the smoke and fumes that billowed from inside oil operations, impinged on the surrounding towns, stoking an anger and resistance that by 1938 made expropriation seem the best solution.

Today’s American readers will find the arguments favoring Peña Nieto’s energy reform familiar. They center around the flaws of the state-run enterprise: its corruption and inefficiency, its coddling of unions, and its monopoly in the national market for consumer goods such as gasoline, which has kept prices high. But thus far, the debates have hardly touched upon the local consequences of this reform for regions that will be most affected, like the towns around the mouth of the Coatzacoalcos River, where 70 percent of Mexico’s petrochemical production has gravitated. ....................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.dissentmagazine.org/blog/the-environmental-consequences-of-privatizing-mexicos-oil

[kristopher]

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