The president of the National Regeneration Movement (Morena), Martí Batres, said that legislative reform is not needed for energy, because the result "will be to open the floodgates for privatization'' of oil, given the balance of power in the Congress.
At a press conference, he communicated Morena's rejection of secondary reforms that "contradict the Constitution", which establishes that the petroleum belongs to the entire nation. Morena's rejection, he explained, is necessary given the risk of the PRI and PAN might join together to permit the participation of private capital in Pemex. He claimed that concrete public policies are required to strengthen the state-owned company. From a list of fifteen points, he cited: expand the exploration to find new reserves and reduce the over-exploitation of the deposits; increase investment in research and technology; build five new refineries; stop importing gasoline from the United States and export processed, refined oil with added value.
Also: reinstate the state-owned company as a single national company; canceling
"one-sided contracts with foreign companies that perform functions that Pemex is able to accomplish and that require the payment of surcharges much higher than market values.''Also: cut the flow of public reserves to the petroleum union that they might not be part of contractual worker compensation, eliminate the privileges of the state-owned company's top bureaucracy, fix a percentage of oil revenues for the State's finances, thus freeing up resources for productive investment, and absorption of Pemex's debt by the federal government.
While PAN activists declared that their interest is for a far-reaching change to modernize Pemex and at the same time retaining ownership of the hydrocarbons in the hands of the State, the PRI coordinator in the Chamber of Deputies, Manlio Fabio Beltrones, described the PRD's insistence that the PRI wants to privatize the state-owned company a ''false debate".
Beltrones said that the goal is for the energy industry to modernize and combine public and private investment.
''No one is talking about privatization. It is very important to be clear, even though we may have to repeat it a thousand times to avoid confusion," Beltrones said during a visit to Cancún.In Mexico City, Alejandro Zapata Perogordo, a PAN member of the Governing Council of the Pact for Mexico, explained that his party is still working on this initiative, and he trusted that once the July 7 Election Day is past, all the political forces that signed the Pact will present their proposals.
In turn, Deputy Rubén Camarillo insisted that the PAN is neither proposing the privatization of Pemex nor of giving the oil revenues to any private company, but definitely of maximizing it by means of the co-participation of private individuals with the state-owned company. He added that he intended to give Pemex fiscal autonomy and a new management and at the same time to end their monopoly. Spanish original