Mexico: It’s déjà vu all over again

Yogi Berra was a great baseball player, a great baseball coach/manager and a very quotable observer of human behavior. His observations are particularly truthful in today’s Mexico.

His “dichos” — comments— live; as Yogi Berra said, “It’s déjà vu all over again.”

In 1938, Mexican President Lazaro Cardenas seized Mexico’s oil industry, the world’s second largest at the time, from its American, British and Dutch owners and created a 100 percent Mexican operation we know as PEMEX — Petroleos Mexicanos. Cardenas handed over the world’s second largest oil industry to political friends and hacks.

The United States quit buying Mexican oil to protest the world’s first non-Soviet expropriation of energy. From expropriation to June 1942, Mexico could only sell oil to Italy and Germany. German submarines preyed on Mexican oil tankers. That caused Mexico to declare war on Germany and Italy.

Today, the government-owned PEMEX is realistically bankrupt, owes billions of dollars to banks and is refining oil into gasoline at only 28 percent of capacity. Mexico imports many, many barrels of unrefined oil, refined diesel and gasoline. PEMEX simply can’t produce.

So what does Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador (AMLO) do today?

He steals a new oil field developed by foreign companies that spent millions of dollars to explore prospective new production under a Mexican law passed in 2014. That law allows, for the first time since 1938, foreign companies to work with Mexican companies in new production.

This naked expropriation is simple. Foreign companies found new fields of production and have developed several exploratory wells that show promise. Thousands of barrels of oil are close to being pumped. AMLO notified those companies that he was taking the fields away and giving them to PEMEX to start producing.

Yes, the same PEMEX that can’t borrow any new money, can’t refine much oil and is staffed with political hacks, not engineers. That PEMEX.

In 1938, Lazaro Cardenas expropriated the entire oil industry — second worldwide only to the U.S. oil industry and refused to pay the foreign oil companies for their property. If not for Mexico’s entry into World War II as an American ally, Mexico might never have paid for the stolen property.

Cardena’s replacement, President Manuel Avila Camacho orchestrated a 1943 agreement to pay a mutually accepted price by issuing 30-year bonds. They were paid off in the 1970s.

As AMLO’s presidency ends in three years, chances are slim that a successful negotiation will be made to pay the foreign companies to replace the millions they spent on this projected great oil find AMLO stole.

This AMLO robbery is the latest attempt at regressing to 1938 Mexico.

The 2014 Mexican congressional coalition of the 70-year-long ruling party, the PRI (Partido Revolucionario Institucional and the moderate Partido Acción Nacional (PAN) amended Mexican energy law to permit foreign companies to participate in energy production in oil, solar and wind.

Foreign investment flooded into Mexico the minute President Enrique Pena Nieto signed new energy foreign investment into law. When AMLO entered the presidency on December 1, 2018, foreign investors were producing almost 50 percent of all energy in Mexico, mostly in solar and wind production.

For those that don’t know Mexico, there is much sun and wind in Mexico.

AMLO, following his déjà vu philosophy of parroting his idol oil expropriator Lazaro Cardenas, has quit certifying newly built private wind and solar energy production. His reason: AMLO believes that only the government’s Federal Electricity Commission (Comisión Federal de Electricidad — CFE), not foreign-owned companies, should produce electricity for Mexicans.

So, ready to operate, energy facilities are sitting idle.

Overseeing AMLO’s blockage of private energy is an 85-year-old shady authentic party — AMLO’s Morena party — hack, former PRI Secretary de Gobernacion and rejected presidential wannabe Manuel Bartlett, former governor of the state of Puebla, owner of 27 different residences in Mexico (under different names) and millionaire million-times over. The U.S. government believes Bartlett has been involved in major drug activities, including the death of American drug agent Enrique Camarena.

AMLO and Bartlett first tried to ban foreign investors from producing electricity, then tried to ban revenue-producing transmission of privately produced electricity over federal transmission lines.