Archives » Friday, February 01, 2008
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Joseph Contreras
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Feb 1, 2008 11:55 AM
In an age when even Fidel Castro has rolled out the welcome mat for
foreign energy companies wanting to drill for oil off Cuba's shores,
the Mexican left is stubbornly vowing to uphold the national
government's monopoly on oil and electricity production. State
ownership of energy resources is the last sacred-cow left over from
decades of rule by the Institutional Revolutionary Party, during which
a large chunk of the Mexican economy belonged to the government and
certain strategic industries were off-limits to foreign investment.
When President Carlos Salinas de Gortari sold off the phone company, a
television network, two airlines, several banks and hundreds of
other public-sector enterprises in the 1990s, the notoriously corrupt
and inefficient PEMEX oil corporation and two state-owned electrical
power utilities were withheld from the auction block for reasons that
had more to do with patriotic sentimentality than rational economic
policy.
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