By RICARDO CASTILLO It came as no surprise to on Thursday, May 9, when Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO) declared the bidding for the construction of the new Dos Bocas refinery on the Gulf of Mexico shoreline in the state of Tabasco a deserted tender. Instead, AMLO said in his daily press conference at the National Palace, that
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By ANTONIO GARZA, former U.S. Ambassador to Mexico
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By RICARDO CASTILLO There’s no question about it: Mexico’s once-prolific cash cow has run dry. The country’s economic national pride, the state-run oil giant Petróleos Mexicanos (Pemex), is now in financial straits, with its latest corporate report showing that just in the last quarter of 2018, it “lost” over 2 billion pesos. That definitely makes Pemex the only oil company
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By RICARDO CASTILLO Among the myriad of events the Mexican Senate hosts on a practically daily basis, last Wednesday, Feb. 6, one of them did not garner much attention, at first. But as time went by, many eyebrows are beginning to be raised and people are starting to wonder what a bunch Russian politicos were doing in Mexico. The meeting
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By THÉRÈSE MARGOLIS On Feb. 7, I wrote about how hydraulic fracturing – a process that produces fractures in subsoil shale rock formations to stimulate the flow of natural gas or oil, thus increasing the volumes of hydrocarbons that can be recovered for commercial use – is here to stay in the global world of energy production. Today, I am
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By THÉRÈSE MARGOLIS Napoleon Bonaparte once said that an army marches on its stomach. Similarly, in today’s world, an economy advances on its energy supply. And while oil and natural gas prices are down – and likely to remain down for a very long time, despite attempts by the OPEC fraternity to manipulate prices to the whims of Saudi Arabian
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By ANTONIO GARZA, former U.S. Ambassador to Mexico
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By THÉRÈSE MARGOLIS On Saturday, Dec. 15, newly instated Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO) presented his 2019 budget to the Mexican Congress via his Finance Secretary Carlos Urzúa. The budget plan, which allocates more funding for social programs and infrastructure and less for government payrolls (including his own salary), is expected to be approved easily by the pro-AMLO
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By ANIS H. BAJREKTAREVIC A major new report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was just released in Korea on Oct. 8, and although it is nearly 800 pages long and includes more than 6,000 scientific references, it can be summarized in few sentences: The average global temperature is now 1 degree Centigrade above its pre-industrial levels. That increase is already
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By RICARDO CASTILLO Mingled in the humorous tirades the Mexican presidential hopefuls poked at one another during the “pre-candidacy” period, which ran from Dec. 14 to Feb. 11, there were several hints as to what the hardcore debate issues will be starting April 1, when the real official campaign begins. One of the leading topics will be President Enrique Peña Nieto’s still-highly
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