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First Iraq, Then the World!
Halliburton Wrecks Mexico
By JOHN ROSS
Macaspana, Tabasco.
The billboard posted along the scrubby highway running east in
sultry, southern Tabasco state displays lush jungle, a sun-dappled
iguana, and a flock of dazzling macaws. "We're working for a better
environment" the giant road sign radiates.
The leafy graphic contrasts starkly with the blighted scenery of this
tropical state whose rivers have been contaminated, the fish
envenomed, and the corn fields blasted as the acid rain drips from
the polluted sky thanks to the efforts of PEMEX, the national oil
monopoly and its multiple transnational sub-contractors--Tabasco
holds Mexico's largest land-based petroleum deposits.
But the billboard here in Macaspana, swampy oil-rich Chontal Indian
land, was not posted by the Environmental Secretariat to inspire
conservationism or even by PEMEX to burnish its tarnished image. No,
this pristine scene is signed off by a familiar U.S. name, in fact
PEMEX's largest subcontractor: Halliburton de Mexico, the Houston-
based petroleum industry titan's south-of-the-border subsidiary. Vice
president Dick Cheney's old mega corps and the largest oil service
provider on the planet, has been doing business in Mexico for a score
of years.
The privatization of PEMEX, nationalized in 1938 after depression-era
president Lazaro Cardenas expropriated Caribbean coast oil enclaves
from Anglo-American owners, was right at the heart of Mexico's still-
questioned July 2nd presidential election. Right-winger Felipe
Calderon, a former energy secretary, is committed to selling off --or
at least entering into joint agreements that would guarantee the
contemporary version of the Seven Sisters a substantial quotient of
Mexico's diminishing reserves (only 10 more years according to the
worst case scenario.)
On the other side of the ledger, leftist Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador,
a native of Macaspana who probably won the presidency July 2nd,
advocates maintaining the state's rectorship over PEMEX which
accounts for more than 40% of the Mexican government's annual budget,
on the grounds that the oil wealth of the nation belongs to the
Mexican people and no one else.
Knowing full well which side their bread was buttered on,
transnationals like Halliburton rushed to support Felipe Calderon--as
did the corporation's former CEO (1995-2000) Dick Cheney and his
running mate George Bush. Both Cheney and Bush have long-standing
ties to the Mexican oil industry--Bush's daddy ran Zapata Offshore, a
PEMEX subcontractor back in the 1960s--his partner Jorge Diaz
Serrano, a former PEMEX director, served time for an oil tanker
kickback scheme. Cheney's Halliburton somehow finagled its way into
lucrative service contracts for the newly opened offshore Cantarell
field (said to contain upwards of 12 billion barrels) back in the
1990s.
How Halliburton got in on the ground floor smells fishy to National
Autonomous University professor John Saxe-Fernandez who watches
strategic resources--the Cantarell contracts were assigned while
Cheney was running the show in Houston and at the same time the Texas
conglomerate was busy bribing Nigerian oil officials across the
Atlantic.
The truth is that the debate about privatizing PEMEX is no longer
much of a debate. Petrolios Mexicanos has long since sub-contracted
out virtually its entire exploration and perforation divisions to
transnationals like Halliburton, Flouor-Daniels, and Bechtel, leaving
PEMEX a virtual shell.
Cheney's old outfit has grabbed off the lion's share of this billion-
dollar boodle. Between 2000 and 2005, Halliburton picked up 159
contracts with the PEP (Perforation and Exploration) division for a
total of $2.5 billion Yanqui dollars, about a quarter of PEMEX's
annual operating budget, according to Saxe-Fernandez. The contracts
cover everything from slant and vertical drilling to maintenance of
offshore platforms to logging out jungle for the perforation of 27
turnkey wells in Tabasco and Chiapas.
With 1250 employees and thousands of contract workers, Halliburton de
Mexico has offices in Ciudad del Carmen, Campeche (the fast-shrinking
Cantarell operation); Reynosa Tamaulipas where Dick Cheney's boys are
helping to exploit the Burgos natural gas fields; and Poza Rica
Veracruz, a region in which Standard Oil's Harry Doherty and Lord
Cowry (Weetman Pierson), owner of what eventually became British
Petroleum, once ruled with an iron fist and where Halliburton is now
combing through what is left of their old Chicontepec field.
Halliburton also maintains offices in Mexico City and Villahermosa
Tabasco from which it oversees its off and onshore Caribbean domain.
Mexico's Gulf coast is not Halliburton's only Caribbean operation.
The KBR (Kellogg Brown Root) division of Cheney's conglom built 207
cells at Guantanamo Bay Cuba in 2002 to house "enemy combatants."
Halliburton has had a boot planted in the rebel-ridden state of
Chiapas since 1997, three years after the Zapatista Army of National
Liberation (EZLN) rose up in rebellion and declared war on the
Mexican government, when the conglom built a natural gas separation
plant in the north of that southern-most state. In 2003, Halliburton
won a $20 million USD contract to expand natural gas infrastructure
at Reforma--Zapatista autonomous communities lie south and east of
the Halliburton installations.
Both PEMEX and Cheney's associates have their eyes on Chiapas--ample
reserves lie under the floor of the Lacandon jungle in areas where
the Zapatistas have established their "Caracoles" or public centers,
according to studies by UNAM political geographer Andres Barreda.
Indeed, the first battle between the EZLN and the Mexican military
took place near a capped well at Nazaret in the canyons that lead
down to the jungle floor hard by where the Zapatista caracol "Road to
Hope" (La Garrucha, the autonomous municipality of Francisco Gomez)
now sits.
According to closely-held PEMEX numbers unearthed by Houston oil
investigator George Baker, Nazaret was putting out a million cubic
feet of natural gas a day when it was capped back in the early 1990s--
if Halliburton had been in the picture back then it probably would
have picked up the contract and Dick Cheney, an avid if erratic
hunter, would have gotten a chance to exterminate many endangered
Lacandon jungle species.
In a religious mood, Vice President Cheney once wondered out loud why
God did not put the oil under democratic countries, and with that
mission in mind has set out to democratize foreign oilagarchies. His
endeavor to bring democracy to Iraq have resulted in over 650,000
Iraqi dead, civil war, devastation and destruction in every corner of
the land, and the systematic sabotage of that nation's petroleum
infrastructure.
Now Cheney and his Halliburton associates are "democratizing" Mexico,
having aided and abetted the stealing of the July 2nd presidential
election from leftist Lopez Obrador--as noted above, Felipe Calderon
is commited to the privatization of PEMEX. As a member of the Council
of Communication which groups together transnationals doing business
in Mexico, Halliburton helped pay for a vicious TV spot campaign that
featured libelous hit pieces tagging Lopez Obrador as a danger to
Mexico. Because only political parties can mount such campaigns,
Halliburton's participation was patently illicit according to
Mexico's highest electoral tribunal, the TRIFE.
Planted outside Halliburton de Mexico's offices in a soaring
skyscraper overlooking Paseo de Reforma where Lopez Obrador's people
would soon be encamped last summer, 80-year old former oil worker
Jacinto Guzman remembered the great strikes (his father was a
striker) that had impelled Lazaro Cardenas to expropriate the
Caribbean complexes where Halliburton now rules, and bemoaned the
depredations of Cheney Inc and others of their ilk against what
belongs to the Mexican people. But, dressed in a wrinkled suit and
hardhat, the old oil worker was even more vexed about Halliburton's
participation in the smear campaign to vilify Andres Manuel Lopez
Obrador. "The gringos think they own our elections too" he complained
to a U.S. reporter.
John Ross's ZAPATISTAS! Making Another World Possible--Chronicles of
Resistance 2000-2006 will be published by Nation Books in October.
Ross will travel the left coast this fall with the new volume and a
hot-off-the-press chapbook of poetry Bomba!--all suggestions of
venues will be cheerfully entertained--write johnross@...
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