By MARK LORENZANA

When Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO) met U.S. President Joe Biden at the Oval Office of the White House on July 12 of this year, AMLO made sure to remind his U.S. counterpart that gas prices in Mexico were lower than in the United States. López Obrador even said that he had “allowed Americans to cross the border into Mexico” because of cheaper gas.

The average price of regular gasoline in the United States, however, is now 8.1 percent cheaper: 20.02 pesos per liter compared to 21.7 pesos in Mexico, removing AMLO’s bragging rights — at least for now.

The “price advantage” of Mexican gasoline over the United States, according to a report by Mexican business daily El Financiero on Tuesday, Sept. 27, has begun to reverse in recent weeks, due to the decline in the price of benchmark crude oil worldwide.

The previous week, oil was quoted close to $90 a barrel, despite the fact that at the beginning of the second quarter of this year, the price exceeded $130 per barrel due to the war between Russia and Ukraine.

“Oil prices appear to be stuck at the $90 per barrel. On September 21, the price boost caused by Russia’s announcement to mobilize troops was short-lived, balanced later in the day by the U.S. Federal Reserve’s interest rate hike,” said Norbert Rücker, head of Economics and Research at private Swiss bank Julius Bäer. “The general picture of the oil market seems to have not changed.”

The U.S. oil state of Texas gives motorists the best bang for their buck, as a liter of gasoline there is priced at 16.8 pesos, much lower than in the adjacent Mexican border states of Coahuila (21.6 pesos), Nuevo León (22.7 pesos) and Tamaulipas (19.1 pesos).