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La Plaza

Mexico: Calderon’s bold Pemex move?

By Hector Tobar
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Pemex is Mexico’s national oil company. American oil companies used to operate in Mexico until the 1930s, when Mexican President Lazaro Cardenas nationalized the oil fields and installations. (He’s still revered as a national hero for doing so.)

Now Pemex is in decline. And conservative President Felipe Calderon wants to bring in foreign investment. But how to do so without alienating the powerful Mexican left and the Democratic Revolution Party (PRD), for whom any ‘privatization’ of Pemex would be tantamount to a declaration of war?

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Why not name Lazaro’s grandson -- also named Lazaro Cardenas, by the way -- to head Pemex. That’s the rumor circulating around Mexico these days. The younger Lazaro is a PRD leader and former governor of the southern state of Michoacan. If Calderon actually does name him to head Pemex, in effect bringing the left into his government, it would be the equivalent of a political earthquake here.

Stay tuned.

-- Hector Tobar in Mexico City

La Plaza
Hector Tobar

Hector Tobar worked at the Los Angeles Times for two decades: as a city reporter, national and foreign correspondent, columnist and with the books and culture department. He left in September 2014. Tobar was The Times’ bureau chief in Mexico City and Buenos Aires and was part of the reporting team that won a Pulitzer Prize for coverage of the 1992 L.A. riots. He has also worked as features editor at the LA Weekly and as editor of the bilingual San Francisco magazine El Tecolote. Tobar has an MFA in creative writing from UC Irvine and studied at UC Santa Cruz and at the Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico in Mexico City. The Los Angeles-born writer is the author of five books, which have been translated into 15 languages. His novel “The Barbarian Nurseries” was named a New York Times Notable Book in 2011 and also won the California Book Award Gold Medal for Fiction; his latest work is “The Last Great Road Bum.” He’s married, the father of three children and the son of Guatemalan immigrants.

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