[PEN-L:30314] Re: Environmental imperialism in Mexico

[Eugene Coyle <eugenecoyle@xxxxxxx>]

I spoke to the Mexican Senate's Commission on Constitutional Points on August
28th on Vicente Fox's initiative to open the Mexican electric power system to
foreign investment.
    President Fox needs one or two constitutional amendments to really open
things up.  A coalition of the PRI and the PRD can block Fox and there is a good
chance that the coalition will hold.
    As the Times reports, power plants owned by other than the Federal system
are now permitted in Mexico, but there are constraints on size and on the sale
of power to other than the owner of the plant.  Sales of power into the Federal
system are tightly constrained.  That is what Fox wants to end.
    Stiglitz' book is getting a big play in Mexico, with individual copies being
given to each PRI delegate at its caucus on August 29th.  A senator who arranged
for that distribution remarked to me that "We knew all this about the IMF and
the WB.  The signifigance is that it is coming from an insider.  It as if the
Pope went on world-wide TV and said "There is no God and the Church is just an
organization for collecting money."  That's how important Stiglitz' book is."

    The electricity privatization fight is a struggle for the soul of Mexico.
Fox can't touch petroleum (though he is nibbling at it) but electricity, though
nationalized, is not nearly the symbol petroluem is.

    Stay tuned.

Gene Coyle



Louis Proyect wrote:

> NY Times, Sept. 17, 2002
>
> U.S. Will Get Power, and Pollution, From Mexico
> By TIM WEINER
>
> MEXICALI, Mexico, Sept. 11 ? American companies have long faced intense
> resistance to big new power plants from communities crying, "Not in my
> backyard."
>
> Now they have a big new backyard: Mexico.
>
> Here on the edge of Mexicali, a few miles from the California border, two
> huge power plants are rising in the desert, near a graveyard and a clutch
> of hovels. They will generate billions of watts for millions of
> Californians, a handful of jobs for Mexicans and pollution on both sides of
> the border.
>
> They are "what free trade is all about," says an official of InterGen, the
> company building one. But a California congressman calls placing the plants
> in Mexico a form of environmental imperialism.
>
> The plants will be the first of many built in Mexico specifically to
> provide power for the United States, says Mexico's energy secretary,
> Ernesto Martens. And that represents a new phase in relations between the
> two nations.
>
> First came the labor of migrant workers. Then, in the 1990's, came the
> maquiladoras, the assembly-line factories providing cheap Mexican labor for
> American and multinational corporations under the North American Free Trade
> Agreement.
>
> Now these 21st-century plants ? call them energy maquiladoras ? represent a
> new way to generate wealth and power by capitalizing on the economic and
> legal differences dividing Mexico and the United States.
>
> Mexico's environmental law enforcement is weaker, its government less
> transparent, its desire for foreign capital bottomless. California's energy
> demand is enormous ? as big as its citizens' resistance to huge power plants.
>
> These projects are the first result.
>
> "Building anything on the Mexican side is much cheaper, mostly because of
> the regulatory system," which is less stringent than in the United States,
> said Ernesto Ruffo, President Vicente Fox's border commissioner.
>
> full: http://www.nytimes.com/2002/09/17/international/americas/17MEXI.html
>
> Louis Proyect
> www.marxmail.org