Letters to the Editor
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Pemex and greed
Ok, I get the point now. You do leave out one of the major factors behind the abuse of Mexico's oil fields--the fact that the oil fields were nationalized. Pemex can't/couldn't really take a long term view of profit maximization since it supplies around 1/3 of the Mexican government's revenue. It also serves as a huge patronage machine that is probably 3x overstaffed. There is no room for investing appropriately--let alone managing the fields for long run production.
That's not to say that private companies would necessarily have done it better, but a company beholden to politicians with not that many controls on their influence (as with Pemex) is not going to be in it for the long haul. Way harder to trade longer term oil production over immediate term tortilla subsidies for the poor, say.

