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Onward,
Alexander, Jeffrey, Becky and Deva
Weekend
Edition
November 18 / 19, 2006
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.
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