Watch Mexican Senators Protest Energy Reform And Privatization By Stripping And Swearing During Floor Speeches [VIDEOS]

An energy reform bill which amends the Mexican constitution to open the country's oil reserves to exploitation by foreign firms passed Mexico's Congress on Thursday. In the days leading up to the vote, senators from a host of leftist parties bitterly criticized the reform - which ended up passing by a large margin, with 353 "ayes" and 134 opposing - including one act of protest in which senator Antonio García Conejo stripped down to his underwear during a floor speech and another in which Layla Sensores denounced the privatization of oil resources by directing swears at the coalition of senators from the governing PRI and conservative PAN parties who wrote the bill. Scroll down to the end of the page to see video of García Conejo's protest.

As García Conejo, a senator from the Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD) began to strip off his clothes, he told the chamber he was doing it "just like you all have stripped the nation with privatizing Teléfonos de Mexico" - the country's largest telecommunications company, once property of the state before being privatized in 1990. "I'm not ashamed! Because that's what you're all doing! You all took away and privatized Teléfonos de Mexico, and where are the benefits?" He added, in response to a group of senators who shouted from the chamber floor for him to take off his underwear as well, "I'll do it! Of course. I'm not ashamed - you all have bodies too."

Days before, Sensores paraphrased the Portuguese Nobel Prize winner José Saramago in telling senators from the PRI and PAN, "Privatize dreams, privatize the law, privatize justice, but if you all really want a full privatization, go ahead and privatize the whore that birthed you. It'd be much better for you to do that because at least she's yours. This country doesn't belong to you." Click here to watch Sensores as she delivers her profane floor speech earlier this week (in Spanish).

The bill, which will allow multinational oil companies to enter into short-term contracts as well as obtain licenses to access Mexican petroleum for an as-yet-undefined amount of time, marks a sea change for the country, where oil reserves have been exploitable exclusively by state oil company Pemex since 1938.