Call Rises for Mexicans to Buy Nation’s Petrochemical Plants

With a shouted promise to petroleum workers that Mexico’s oil “is and will continue being Mexican,” President Ernesto Zedillo on Monday opened celebration of that most Mexican of holidays--the Anniversary of the Petroleum Expropriation.

But opponents of the plan to privatize part of the state-owned petroleum industry, a symbol of national pride since it was taken over from U.S. and British firms in 1938, sought to seize center stage.

Better to let the Mexican people themselves buy Pemex’s petrochemical plants, they said, than sell them to foreigners.

“We propose . . . calling together all the people so that with our savings, with our modest possessions, we can buy the petrochemical plants,” said Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, a leading member of the opposition Democratic Revolutionary party, or PRD.

His plan: to raise $6 billion by selling “popular stocks” to Mexicans for as little as about $13.

For years, Mexicans have celebrated March 18 with rousing speeches affirming the glories of oil and honoring the creation of Petroleos Mexicanos, or Pemex. The company, the most important source of federal revenue, is seen as a symbol of national sovereignty.

But this year’s celebrations showed how divided Mexicans have become over the government’s plans to modernize the giant state industry.

Mexico is the world’s sixth-largest oil supplier, producing more than 2.5 million barrels a day, most of which is exported to the U.S. But Pemex says it desperately needs money to become more productive.

In recent months, the government has tried to persuade the public that selling off the secondary petrochemical plants will allow Pemex to focus on its core businesses, exploring for and producing oil. The plants, after losing money for several years, turned an operating profit of $274 million last year. Zedillo wants to sell them this year.

The 61 chemical plants, government officials said, are hardly the family jewels--more like the family costume jewelry.

But faced with mounting protests from union members, politicians and others, Mexico last week backed off its plans to throw the plants open to all international bidders. Instead, the energy minister said that companies majority-owned by Mexicans would receive preference in bidding on plants that produce 13 key chemicals.

On Monday, speaking to hundreds of oil workers and dignitaries at a Pemex facility on an island in the Gulf state of Campeche, Zedillo didn’t even use the word “privatize.”

Instead, he said he was following a “nationalistic policy that recognizes and takes advantage of the great transformations in the world.” He assured workers that the privatization program was not the first step in dismantling Pemex.

Sharing the podium with the president, the head of Mexico’s powerful oil workers’ union offered grudging support for the privatization. Carlos Romero Deschamps, head of the pro-government union, said workers “never . . . would do anything against the national interest.”

But a far less sanguine scene was unfolding in Mexico City. There, more than 15,000 protesters carrying Mexican flags and banners denouncing the sale choked Mexico City’s main Paseo de la Reforma Boulevard, chanting, “Zedillo! You can’t sell our oil!”

“Fifty-eight years ago, [President] Lazaro Cardenas nationalized the oil industry, so that it would be for all of us, so that the foreigners can’t exploit Mexicans,” said Fernando Candia, a 40-year-old Pemex employee at the march.

“We’re afraid that international companies will sack the country.”

A poll of 800 people published in the daily newspaper Reforma on Monday found a majority opposed the privatization of Pemex. However, a majority of those surveyed said the privatization of the petrochemical companies would make them more efficient.