With the help of Mexico President Felipe Calderon, San Diego-based Sempra Energy on Thursday inaugurated its $1-billion Energia Costa Azul gas import terminal to serve fast-growing energy demands in the southwestern U.S. and Baja California, Mexico.
The first such facility on North America's West Coast, the Sempra plant receives natural gas that was cooled to a liquid for overseas shipment by tanker. The fuel is then processed back into a gas for pipeline transport to users, including power plants, industry and homes.
As we reported yesterday, Calderon traveled to northern Baja California to open bidding on a $4-billion seaport that his adminstration hopes will one day rival those of Los Angeles and Long Beach and catapult Mexico into being a major player in North American logistics.
To read on about the new Sempra Energy gas import terminal here.
For more business click here and more about Mexico click here.
-- Deborah Bonello in Mexico City
Inflationary pressures are rising. Remittances are falling. Mexico's economy is slowing. So is job growth, writes Marla Dickerson from Mexico City.
Mexico's central bank released a string of bad news Wednesday confirming that the nation is feeling the effects of a U.S. slowdown and exploding global prices for food and fuel.
The Bank of Mexico revised its inflation expectations sharply upward to a high of 6% for the fourth quarter. That's well above the 5.26% annualized rate recorded in June and double the central bank's long-term target.
Mexicans have long fled to the United States when things got tough at
home. But tight employment conditions north of the border may dissuade
some from making the trip.
Money wired home by Mexicans living outside the country, most of them
working in the U.S., totaled $11.6 billion through the first six months
of the year, according to figures released Wednesday. That's down 2.2%
from the same period last year -- the longest sustained drop since the
Bank of Mexico began tracking the flows in the mid-1990s.
Read on about Mexico's financial woes here.
Turnout was light, but voters in a nonbinding referendum gave an overwhelming "no" to President Felipe Calderon's proposal to give private firms a bigger role in Mexico's government-controlled petroleum industry, reports the L.A. Times' Marla Dickerson.
More than 80% of those who cast ballots Sunday in Mexico City opposed the plan, according to the official tally of the federal district released Monday. The results were even more lopsided outside the capital, where nine of Mexico's 31 states also participated. With about two-thirds of the ballots counted, more than 90% of those voters gave the president's proposal a thumbs down.
Slightly more than 1.5 million people cast ballots Sunday. Organizers had been hoping for a turnout twice that size in the greater Mexico City area alone.
But according to El Universal here in Mexico this morning, Calderon said in a meeting last night that the Consulta Ciudadana failed to achieve its objective of discrediting his reforms, and that it had been designed to obstruct the discussion.
Read more about the results of the ballot on the future of Mexico's oil here, and watch a video of Mexicans voting Sunday here.
-- Deborah Bonello in Mexico City
Photo: A woman wears a T-Shirt which says "I decide" during a voting session Sunday in Mexico City's Zocalo. Those who took part voted "no" on the question of opening up parts of Mexico's nationalized oil company Pemex to outsiders. Credit: Deborah Bonello / Los Angeles Times.
Venezuelan motorists are crossing the frontier with Colombia to sell gas to their neighbors, making the most of the varying price of oil across Latin America.
These gas-sellers -- or "pimpineros" as they're known -- are taking advantage of the fact that in the border city of San Antonio de Táchira, Venezuela, gas is a whole lot cheaper than on the Colombian side of the border in Cúcuta, where it sells for around US $3.44 a gallon. A story in Reforma states that gas prices in Venezuela are around 7.6 cents a gallon, but other sources say it's more around 12 cents a gallon.
Cheap gas prices in Venezuela mean that those enterprising individuals who cross over to sell the contents of their car tanks can make a good profit. Some are even living off the earnings, according to this report in today's Reforma (in Spanish).
The same kind of thing is happening in Mexico, where gas is much cheaper than in the U.S. This has led to United States citizens crossing over the border into Mexico to fill their tanks. The Dallas Morning News reported in June that Texans were heading across the border to escape gas prices at home, which at the time were around US $4 a gallon.
Today, the cost of oil per gallon in Mexico is about US $2.72 a gallon. In the United States, it's US $3.95 a gallon.
The cost of oil in Latin America varies. But surging fuel prices across the region have ignited inflation throughout Latin America, driving up the cost of food, the price of which was already on the upswing thanks in part to ravenous global demand for its farm products, as we reported in June.
Read more on the Venezuelan cross-border gas sale here.
-- Deborah Bonello in Mexico City
Despite the many hardships suffered by its people, Mexico is a rich country, in terms of its natural resources. And none of those resources is more highly prized than the nation's oil reserves. The country's wealth of black gold is a great source of nationalistic pride, as well as political opportunism. Raising the question of how much to open Mexican oil fields to foreign investment or development is a sure way to spark a heated discussion.
That's the historical background to what Times business writer Marla Dickerson describes as the current "bitter debate" over "how to rescue Mexico's troubled state-owned oil company," known as Pemex. That debate, she writes, "went directly to the people Sunday as residents of the capital and nine states voted in a nonbinding referendum on President Felipe Calderon's plan to open some portions of the petroleum industry to outsiders."
"The vote, organized by the opposition Democratic Revolution Party, or PRD, has no official bearing on energy legislation making its way through Congress. But opponents of Calderon's reforms hope a decisive 'no' vote will force legislators to back off."
"The balloting was the first of three so-called Citizen Consultation referendums over the next month that will eventually cover Mexico's 31 states and federal district.... Mexico City's historic center was bustling with poll workers wearing T-shirts emblazoned with 'I decide,' the referendum's slogan. A six-piece band performed 'The oil isn't for sale,' a popular refrain among Mexicans wary of privatizing Pemex, the state oil company."
Here's a video by Times staffer Deborah Bonello looking at Sunday's scene.
-- Reed Johnson in Caracas, Venezuela
 Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez blew through Russia on Tuesday, being his usual, controversial self, according to our correspondent Megan K. Stack.
Chavez cut some business deals and pumped up the friendship between the two oil-rich nations, while criticizing the United States.
He pressed Prime Minister Vladimir Putin to pay him a visit in Venezuela. He subtly ribbed President Dmitry Medvedev, who has been widely portrayed as Putin's handpicked puppet. And he announced that his country would buy Russian weapons "to guarantee the sovereignty of Venezuela, which is being threatened by the United States."
Click here to read more on President Hugo Chavez's visit to Russia.
-- Deborah Bonello in Mexico City
Photo: Venezuela's President Hugo Chavez smiles during his meeting with Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin. Credit: Dmitry Kostyukov / AFP/Getty Images
 With gas prices soaring and millions of people in Latin American and other parts of the world being plunged back into poverty, it's not surprising that there's a global scramble to find new energy sources.
Many energy-hungry countries are buying up coal to fuel their power plants, as the Times' Chris Kraul writes from Colombia. Never mind that this Industrial Age fossil fuel is one of the dirtiest pollutants known to man and a leading source of the carbon and methane emissions that help produce the greenhouse gases that most scientists agree contribute to global warming.
Or, as Henry Henderson, the Chicago-based Midwest director of the Natural Resources Defense Council, puts it in Kraul's story, "Growing coal use threatens nothing less than the end of civilization as we know it."
Read on »
Are exploding oil prices about to burn Latin America?
With the largest petroleum reserves outside the Middle East, the region has been on a roll in recent years. Record exports of crude and grain fueled economic growth not seen since the 1970s. The region's stock markets roared. Easier credit spawned a consumer class that snapped up homes and cars. About 26 million Latin Americans climbed out of poverty between 2002 and 2006, United Nations figures show.
But, writes The Times' Marla Dickerson, the same forces behind that prosperity are now, paradoxically, creating misery in the midst of bounty. Surging fuel prices have ignited inflation throughout the region, driving up the cost of food, the price of which was already on the upswing thanks in part to ravenous global demand for Latin America's farm products.
Read on about oil prices in Latin America.
-- Deborah Bonello in Los Angeles
Photo: Marvin Hernandez, 12, bathes on the site of a former dump that’s home to nearly 2,000 people in San Salvador. At least 500,000 people in El Salvador and Guatemala fell into poverty last year, the United Nations estimates. Photo credit: Roberto Escobar / EPA.
Opinion L.A. highlights a story this morning that reports that U.S citizens are heading over the border to fill up on cheap Mexican gas.
Now that a gallon of regular unleaded in Southern California averages a mind-boggling $4.61 cents a gallon, the San Diego Union Tribune says Gringos are crossing the border in droves, filling up in Tijuana, where gas is about $2.54.
Read the post here...
Mexicans (at least the relatively limited number who can afford cars and gasoline at all) spend far less at the pump than their neighbors to the north. That's because Mexico maintains heavily subsidized gas prices through its national oil monopoly, Pemex.
As the Times has reported, however, Pemex is experiencing problems of its own; its oil reserves are running out fast, and the country lacks the technical know-how to do risky and expensive deep-water drilling.
-- Deborah Bonello in Mexico City
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Chris Kraul
Buenos Aires:
Patrick McDonnell
Caribbean:
Carol Williams
Mexico City:
Hector Tobar
Deborah Bonello
Marla Dickerson
Ken Ellingwood
Reed Johnson
San Diego:
Richard Marosi
Washington:
Nicole Gaouette