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Rebels Blow Up Pipelines in Mexico, Disrupting Service
James C. McKinley Jr., New York Times
For the third time in three months, saboteurs blew up several pipelines belonging to Mexico’s state oil monopoly, disrupting service to dozens of factories and briefly rattling financial markets, officials said, but not killing anyone.
The oil company, Petróleos Mexicanos, or Pemex, issued a statement saying that someone had deliberately detonated bombs at six points along four natural gas pipelines and one oil pipeline in the eastern state of Veracruz early Monday morning.
Later in the day, The Associated Press reported that the state police in Veracruz had evidence implicating the Popular Revolutionary Army, a small guerrilla movement formed in the 1990s, in the attacks. The report could not be immediately confirmed.
In July, the same guerrilla group claimed responsibility for similar attacks on two major gas pipelines supplying the cities of Querétaro, Salamanca and Guanajuato. Carried out on July 5 and July 10, those attacks shut down the flow of gas to dozens of factories for more than 48 hours. At the time, the rebel group promised in a communiqué a campaign “against the interests of the oligarchy and of this illegitimate government.”
(10 September 2007)
Contributor Rick Dworsky writes:
As the tension of peak oil builds…
Mexico: A Nation-State Dissolves?
Jeff Vail, The Oil Drum
In my annual new years predictions, I said that the most significant, and surprising, development of 2007 would be the collapse of both Mexico’s economy and its very existence as a viable Nation-State. While there hasn’t been a spectacular, single event confirming my prediction, there has been a steady erosion on all fronts-with five months left in the year, I’m not yet willing to push back my prediction of Mexico’s “collapse” to 2008. The decline of the Mexican Nation-State is a bellwether for the massively complex network of geopolitical influences sometimes termed above ground factors. It provides some insight into how symptoms of oil scarcity already being felt in poorer parts of the world will increasingly spill over into our own back yard…
(Repromoted due to today’s explosions in Pemex’s pipelines and JHK’s story and link to us today…originally posted 7/12/07)
(12 July 2007)
Tribes Sabotage Kirkuk Pipelines
Environment News Service (ENS)
Oil and Corruption in Iraq Part I:
KIRKUK, Iraq, September 10, 2007 (ENS) – Masked men infiltrate the village of al-Milih, 75 kilometers west of Kirkuk, and approach an oil pipeline that passes nearby. Under cover of darkness, they steal oil from an opening they drilled into the pipeline weeks earlier.
Over a period of weeks, this scene is repeated nightly.
Despite the presence of special oil ministry units, pipelines around Kirkuk are destroyed and hundreds of tons of oil stolen every day by tribe members from surrounding villages, such as al-Milih, Wadi Zghetun, al-Muradiyya, al-Saduniyya, al-Kanaina and al-Safra.
Emergency services units patrol the streets of Bayji Iraq. (Photo courtesyBlack Anthem Military News)
The “oil protection units” were deployed to guard the pipelines after the government cancelled previous failed agreements with tribal forces to protect them. But in spite of this, oil is stolen from pipelines stretching from the al-Riyadh sub-district, 55 km west of Kirkuk, to the al-Fatha area 90 km to the west.
{Published in cooperation with the Institute for War and Peace Reporting, IWPR.}
(10 September 2007)
