Only 20 percent of Mexicans approve of PEMEX’s plan of
openness to private capital, presented to the country by the president of the
republic, according to a survey conducted this week in that country by Mexico
City’s daily El Universal. Nevertheless, 62 percent are of the opinion that
PEMEX cannot continue as it has and is in need of a reform, but they are opposed
to allowing private capital to participate in the country’s petroleum
activities. The comments I have read, expressed by Mexicans, concerning this
matter indicate that the fundamental problem lies in the fact that they believe
that private participation would open up the floodgates for the greater
enrichment of Mexico’s powerful families and politicians. In other words, they
think upper class Mexicans are a bunch of petty thieves. In the background to
this matter there is a deep distrust among members of Mexican society.
They may very well know why they’re saying that. Nevertheless,
saying no to PEMEX’s openness to private capital is to sentence it to a more or
less speedy death. For ideological reasons, leaders such as the son of Lázaro
Cárdenas, the president who expelled
foreign companies from Mexico in the 1930’s, are opposed to allowing total
control of Mexico’s entire means of oil production to slip out of the hands of
the Mexican State. What they fail to do is point out what other way there is
for Mexico’s oil production to forge ahead, because its production languishes,
there is no capital in Mexico for the required investments and the company
continues to be afflicted by a chronically high degree of corruption that, in
the past, has resulted in the company being managed by thuggish labor unions.
Unfortunately, this is what we are dealing with, the
struggle for who gains control and who benefits from Mexico’s oil revenues.
Bribery and extortion, multimillion-dollar contracts awarded arbitrarily, bid
processes that benefit politicians’ families and friends, overpayments for
services, collections for services or projects that were never completed; all
this, and more, characterizes PEMEX’s activities in the State’s absolute hands.
Paradoxically, Andrés López Obrador, another
ideologue of the left, says: “there is no need for a reform, what is needed is
to fight corruption within PEMEX,” without wanting to accept the fact that much
of the corruption exists precisely because the only investor is the State and
the corrupt people of PEMEX and its milieu think they can lay hands on that
money with total impunity.
The same situation existed for years at PETROBRAS, in
Brazil, during the era of its ultra-nationalistic oil policy. That company was
mired in mediocrity, until it opened up to private capital. Now 30 percent of
its shares are listed on the stock exchange, and that has created an automatic
mechanism for surveillance by those investors as a way of reining in the guachafita (Venezuelan vernacular for ‘riotous
free-for-all’). Mexico’s oil production has fallen by almost a million barrels
a day during the last eight years and that should cause great alarm for a
country that depends on oil for almost 40 percent of its income.
In Mexico, as well as in Venezuela, words weigh more
than reality. The monkey wrench holding up the works is the word Privatization.
PEMEX must not be privatized, they say. But they do not stop to think that an
industry can allow participation by private capital without the nation losing
control over its wealth. In much of Latin America, dogmas, myths and complexes
have perpetuated our poverty and backwardness. Some primates in our jungles die
of hunger as they cling to a nut they cannot remove from inside the fruit
because the hand and the nut together cannot be pulled out. They could very
well let go of the nut and remove their hand, but they die there, clinging to
what cannot be extracted. What is an irrational attitude in the jungle is
doubly irrational in the case of PEMEX and its dogmas espousing state
ownership.
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