Teaching Comparative Government and Politics

Tuesday, September 14, 2010

Rentier state held hostage

In Nigeria, rebel gangs in the Niger Delta are powerful because of their ability to disrupt the oil production that generates more than 80% of the nation's public revenue.

In Mexico, drug cartels are finding that they can exercise the same kind of power.

What does that mean for the legitimate authority of the government? Will there be political ramifications? Are these signs that violence is becoming political?

Mexican drug cartels cripple Pemex operations in basin

The meandering network of pipes, wells and tankers belonging to the gigantic state oil company Pemex have long been an easy target of crooks and drug traffickers who siphon off natural gas, gasoline and even crude, robbing the Mexican treasury of hundreds of millions of dollars annually.

Now the cartels have taken sabotage to a new level: They've hobbled key operations in parts of the Burgos Basin, home to Mexico's biggest natural gas fields.

Forced to defer production and curtail drilling and maintenance in a region that spreads through some of Mexico's most dangerous badlands, the world's seventh-largest oil producer has become another casualty of the drug war…

The capacity of the traffickers to exert influence over a company as mighty as Pemex only solidifies the widely held perception that the cartels are growing in size and strength despite the government's crackdown…

Pemex, which is Mexico's largest income earner, pulling in nearly a third of the national budget, once staked great hopes on the area and its prospects for yielding gas, abundant thanks to the sandy soil and porous rock that make for ideal production and exploration conditions.

After dedicating nearly half a century to testing and exploration in the basin, Pemex in 2002 took the unusual step of opening it up to foreign investment…

Then convoys of mysterious gunmen started plying the roadways, followed by shows of force, intimidation, beatings and, finally, the abductions. Pleas for help and better protection, union leaders and workers say, went unheeded…

"These are territories where the organized crime infrastructure, inside and outside of the police forces, has established power — a parallel power, a parallel government," Alejandro Gertz, now a congressman and rector of the University of the Americas, said. "That territory is in the hands of a parallel power that has penetrated the government at all levels."