This usually triggers a CIA-sponsored coup
More than one Latin America leader has been overthrown and murdered for less than this.
Written by columnist and WSJ editorial board member Mary Anastasia O’Grady and published under the headline “Mexico moves to seize American assets,” the piece notes that Mexican authorities recently shut down three U.S.-owned fuel storage terminals in Mexico.“There’s trouble brewing between Mexico and the U.S., and I’m not talking about immigration,” O’Grady wrote.
“President Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s desire to put the state in full control of the energy industry, as it was in the 1970s, is running head-first into treaty obligations on trade and investment. The arbitrary closing of private gasoline-storage facilities is a fraction of the problem,” she said before condemning the president’s electricity sector agenda.
“Yet while ‘reform’ normally suggests improvement, this legislation, if passed, will take Mexico, and North American integration, backward,” she wrote.
If you're a Latin American president, you can create a corrupt narcostate, like Honduras, or you can slaughter environmental, labor, and human rights activists, like Colombia, and the United States won't care at all, just as long as you subscribe to neoliberal capitalism.
But if you dare to nationalize the natural resources of your country and the property of American corporations for the benefit of your citizens? For the past 130 years, that is BY FAR the biggest crime that you can commit!
O’Grady acknowledged that private companies would still be able to operate in the Mexican electricity market, “but they would have to sell to … [the] CFE, which would set prices as a monopsony and would run a monopoly in selling to users.”
...The columnist asserted that the constitutional bill also violates the new North American free trade agreement, the USMCA, “as it abrogates contracts, capriciously strips investors of value, eliminates market-based competition, discriminates against private capital, cancels access to activities not reserved as exclusive in the agreement, and eliminates independent regulators, including in hydrocarbons.”
Put another way, AMLO is going to violate NAFTA so that he can protect Mexican from being price gouged by private energy companies. (Think the opposite of Texas.)
Time and time again, preventing American corporations from getting outsized profits by pillaging the people of Latin America gets a very negative response from the CIA, and its various front companies, like USAID. It often forces the U.S. to "bring democracy" to that country. And if the CIA isn't up the task, then the U.S. military often is.
Speaking of USAID, they were active before Mexico's mid-term elections happened this past summer, and the CIA left it's fingerprints all over it.
President López Obrador has been railing against the United States’ funding of what he says are political groups opposed to his administration, accusing the U.S. government of meddling in Mexico’s internal affairs.
...
The United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) have provided approximately US $591.5 million to organizations operating in Mexico, according to documents reviewed by the newspaper Milenio.That figure — made up of the amounts the two agencies sent to Mexico in 2019, 2020 and the first five months of this year — is more than double the entire 2021 budget of Mexico’s Interior Ministry, Milenio said.
Despite the U.S. dropping an enormous amount of money into what was essentially a soft-coup attempt, the CIA failed. It seems that AMLO learned the "wrong lesson" from this, because since then he's been pissing off U.S. imperialists right and left.
Since then AMLO has given humanitarian aid to Cuba, when we are busy trying to starve the island. He's hosted a Latin American summit with the stated aim of weakening the Washington-based Organization of American States (OAS). He passed a law that DEA agents will no longer have immunity in Mexico. He's given refuge the Bolivia's president that our U.S. supported, right-wing coup tried to murder.
Given all of that, with his left-wing policies that are causing fury and anger in Washington and Wall Street, and amongst the elites in Mexico, what opinion do you think the voters of Mexico have?
President López Obrador set aside a few minutes for boasting at the tail end of his morning press conference on Wednesday, presenting a graph published in a British newspaper that showed he is the second most popular of 13 world leaders...
The tracker, whose approval ratings are based on a seven-day moving average of the results of surveys conducted with adult residents in 13 countries, currently shows that López Obrador’s approval rating is 65%.
...“Can’t you enlarge it, really, really big?” López Obrador asked an aide, referring to the projected graph.
Comments
If he cuts off the supply
of corona beer to this country it will be war.
I'll fight on the Mexican side as it's a shitty beer unless compared to miller or budweiser.
Regardless of the path in life I chose, I realize it's always forward, never straight.
My personal red line
is the supply of good tequila.
Not that bath-tub swill tequila, Jose Cuervo. I'm talking good tequila.
Obrador is no dummy.
He's bringing national pride back to Mexico.
Shutting down gmo and roundup pissed off the businessman but enamored his countries commons.
The more naked capitalism tries to control any country, the more it looks feeble to current events.
The bully is getting black eyes on a routine basis which I hope continues.
Regardless of the path in life I chose, I realize it's always forward, never straight.
@Pricknick you must not know how to
Mexico is reorienting to the Global South.
That means that Mexico will look south to Central and South America, and expand its trade infrastructure to become part of the Belt and Road Initiative. China is building huge ports in Central America to facilitate regional and global trade. Mexico will eventually acquire high speed rail, which will significantly boost its global economic activity. This will eradicate poverty in Mexico — a potential benefit of BRI participation.
China is currently Mexico's second largest trading partner. While the US thinks of Mexico as a place to wipe its feet — Mexico has grown into a top tier global trader. The US lack of infrastructure has made it a weak link in modern global trade, as we can observe in the US supply-chain breakdown. Mexico is now the 15th-largest economy in the world. Mexico need not be overly concerned with what the US is going to do next with NAFTA — or anything else. It has many large economic partnerships in the international community, and growing global influence.
.
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Although Mexico is not a full member of the BRI yet, I noticed that Cuba has recently signed on. Finally, world class development will be in Cuba's future.
Now you know
where the Afghaniston troops are heading.
I've seen lots of changes. What doesn't change is people. Same old hairless apes.
Somewhat related. How will the CIA react to this?
Paging Juan Guaido.
I think the CIA has given up on Nicaragua for now
They seem to be playing defense since the Peru election.
Most eyes are on Chile, but Honduras can still surprise everyone.
I am not so sure about that.
Also too! Maybe not the CIA but there is this.
https://www.reuters.com/world/americas/us-house-passes-bill-put-pressure...
I miss the shirts made in Nicaragua.
They were good quality. The ones now made in Bangladesh are garbage.
I've seen lots of changes. What doesn't change is people. Same old hairless apes.
Viva AMLO ...
Viva Cárdenas
Viva Petróleos Mexicanos
There was no CIA in 1938, gracias a Dios.
We wanted decent healthcare, a living wage and free college.
The Democrats gave us Biden and war instead.
I've lived for some time in the Southwest
Sometimes, where I live, one hears and feels random loud bangs and rumbling. I'd always thought it was explosives-testing across town...
...but now I understand, it is the clanking of President Obrador's gigantic tungsten ballsack.
In the Land of the Blind, the One-Eyed Man is declared mentally ill for describing colors.
Yes Virginia, there is a Global Banking Conspiracy!
If they can get away with preventing price gouging in Mexico,
they might try it here, in Minnesota. Or similar. Preventing billion dollar profits overthe next few winters.
Poor Americans might not freeze. We couldn't play Saudi Arabia. Biden's influential staff members with heavy investments in natural gas might lose what they thought was a certain win. See http://ShaleBubble.ORG
The US claim that WTO rules require us (and other countries, like Mexico, Canada, and more tha 160 others, require what they call free trade. An extremist corporate centric ideology . It allegedly requires us to export our gas and oil and foods,grains, water, and other scarce commodities till they are gone. We cant say no. Even if people are freezing to death or dying of thirst. Whoever pays the most wins. /. The government gives corporations SUCH a great deal.
>Viva Petróleos Mexicanos
>Viva Petróleos Mexicanos
>There was no CIA in 1938, gracias a Dios.
Scandalosa!
THe OAS and the Uruguay Round stopped all that.
Now the US state of Delaware is the world's largest tax haven.
And the shale Bubble will break exposing how dishonest the Wall St cartel is, in the critical energy dregs sector.
Now as the weather gets colder bills are starting to soar. How will Americans keep their pipes from freezing on their shrunken incomes? They dont have any choice.