HOUSTON, Texas – Mexico’s congress passed the final measures needed to allow direct foreign investment in the nation’s oil and gas industry and Presidente Enrique Peña Nieto signed the legislation into law.
Since the expropriation of all foreign oil companies in 1938, oil and gas activity in Mexico had been the exclusive province of Petróleos Mexicanos (Pemex), the national oil company. The seminal change in policy was brought about by rapidly declining oil production due to lack of investment, low prices and the resulting loss of cash flow. Most of Pemex’s income is either taken by the government for social programs or embezzled with little left over for capital spending.
Quite a bit of political maneuvering and compromise was necessary to get the necessary laws passed. The powerful Pemex labor union and major elements of the country’s left-wing political parties had to be mollified and bought off. Public opinion is still not in favor of the change, but, according to the government, what the hell do they know?
TexxonMogul
However, to Mexico’s great surprise, no non-government foreign oil companies were interested. TexxonMogul CEO Max Avarice explained,
“Those bums stole everything from us once. Now they want us to come back and spend billions to build up production so they can do it again? No thanks, putas. We re-learned our lesson in Venezuela. That swine Chavez burned us good.”
TexxonMogul’s Vice-President of Refining, Dr. Bunsen Berner, added, “Besides, Mexican crude is the worst crap in the world to try to refine. I mean, the stuff has chunks of sulfur and God knows what else floating in it. It smells like they ship it through the sewer system. As a test, we ran a batch through our Baytown, Texas refinery and the whole system had diarrhea for a week.”
Pemex spokesman Soy Tonto said, “Sheesh, you’d think those Americanos would just let bygones be bygones. We swear we won’t expropriate again, and look, I don’t have my fingers crossed! Oh well, we’ll try to get some bobos from a foreign NOC (national oil company) interested. Maybe CNOOC, Statoil or Pertamina. They’ve got money to piss away, uh, invest.” When asked if Rosneft or Gazprom would be solicited, Señor Tonto exclaimed, “Oh hell no! If we welched on a deal with them, Putin would shove about 20 divisions of the Russian Army up our asses. The yanquis don’t have the cojones to do that.”
