As Mexico's governing Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) plans in coming weeks to concretize its call to open state oil company Pemex to foreign and private investment, the leftist Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD) has announced that it will put the question to a popular vote. On August 25 and September 1, the PRD will install some 3,400 voting booths around the country. It says it expects about 1.5 million Mexicans to turn up to cast their ballot on whether or not their nation's constitution should be amended to permit Pemex to pass out of the hands of the state, in some part.
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The reform of Pemex, which is notoriously inefficient -- it says it lost about $4.1 billion in the first quarter of 2013 alone - has been one of the priorities of the Priista administration of Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto. His "Pact for Mexico," a series of bare-bones proposals agreed upon by the three main political parties, mentions it as part of a compromise in which the nation's petroleum resources will "go on being property of the State" even as "competition in refining, petrochemical and transportation processes" are introduced. But how that might be achieved is still up in the air.
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The President told the Financial Times in June that the changes would be designed to "give private investors certainty" but declined to give much in the way of details. Oil companies like ExxonMobil and Royal Dutch Shell have indicated that they would invest if Mexican Congress passes a measure opening the world's seventh-largest oil producer to foreign interests.
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That prospect doesn't sit well with the majority of Mexican voters. At the end of June, Mexico's Center for Economic Teaching and Research released the results of a survey carried out in August-September of 2012 in which 65 percent of the public said they were against private investment in the energy sector. Now, the leader of the PRD, Jesús Zambrano, has called for the people to weigh in before any change to the constitution is made. If not, he has warned the other parties, "hoarse-throated Mexico" will be awakened -- a public which takes to the streets in protest.
"We want to make people aware of the upcoming referendum that we're going to have about the issue of energy, so that it's the people who decide. They won't see us separated, the PRD doesn't differ on the defense of national sovereignty," Zambrano has said.
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