Word: oiling
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...months, the debate over opening up Mexico's petroleum industry to foreign companies raged in the streets. Thousands of riot police held back screaming protesters from invading the Senate. Mammoth rallies screamed that the president was a puppet, selling its nationalized oil wealth out to the gringos. Banner-bearing lawmakers opposed to the president's proposal camped with sleeping bags on the podium of Congress, shutting down the legislature for weeks, as the arguments went back and forth, for and against giving international oil giants the right to sink deep wells in Mexican territory and waters, long the sacrosanct monopoly...
...result is this week's watered down energy reform legislation, supported by the govenrment and most of the opposition. It amounts to far less than the hungry companies had hoped for when President Felipe Calderon first floated the idea of opening up the oil industry in January. There are no sweeping constitutional changes to allow foreign corporations a share in the deepwater reserves in the Gulf of Mexico, which may hold as much as 50 billion barrels. Nor will the trans-nationals be able to build and run refineries on Mexican soil as Calderon proposed in his bill filed...
However, analysts say that for Calderon to be able to touch the sacred cow of Mexican oil at all is a major advance, which could open the door to deeper changes in the following years in Mexico, the third biggest supplier of crude to the United States after Canada and Saudi Arabia. "The law creates a very important framework on which more regulations can be developed," said energy analyst David Shields. "It allows for contracts with foreign companies that can be much more flexible than anything we have seen before...
Pushing for an oil law was always a tough bet for the conservative Calderon, who has promised a series of reforms to modernize Mexico. When the petroleum industry was expropriated from American and British companies in 1938, it was trumpeted as one of the great gains of the Mexican revolution. "The oil is ours," cheered millions in celebrations across the country alongside promises of riches for all. Seven decades later, leaders used the same slogans to defend a state oil monopoly more closed to foreign investment than even that of Cuba or Venezuela...
...Obrador directed lawmakers from his party to occupy the podiums of Congress for several weeks, until the government conceded to a national debate. After a Congressional commission finally hammered out the watered-down consensus bill this month, Lopez Obrador still insisted the government was privatizing, and sent so-called "oil brigades" to blockade the Senate, forcing its members to cast their votes in an alternate venue...