On one particular pipeline being built in Mexico's desert, work stopped at 5 p.m. No exceptions.
"After 5:30, when the cartels start moving drugs, they have to leave the site. And the cartel made it very clear that if they saw them after 5:30, they would be butchered. So they enter into an 'agreement,'" says Miriam Grunstein, a professor at the Universidad Autonoma de Nuevo Leon and attorney who advised the unnamed pipeline construction company that entered into the understanding.
"It's very spooky, but that's how it works," she says.
Pick your euphemism, but oil and gas companies are certainly no strangers to working in "volatile," "dynamic" or "uncertain" settings, whether they be in Angola, Colombia, Indonesia, Nigeria or Papua New Guinea, not to mention Iraq after the U.S. invasion. Now Mexico may soon join that list: Last year, his country faced with a potential credit downgrade and hungry for cash, President Enrique Pena Nieto announced Mexico would begin allowing foreign companies to drill for oil and gas alongside the state-owned company, Petroleos Mexicanos, or Pemex, which has controlled exploration and production since 1938.
But Mexico's plan for new profits comes with plenty of risk, as hopes for foreign investment in the country's ailing oil and gas sector hinge largely on the government's ability to contain powerful and often ruthless criminal organizations like Los Zetas and the Sinaloa Cartel, or at the very least to compel them not to attack foreign oil and gas sites.
Experts say that's a faint hope, and one that grew even dimmer recently following a massive security failure. With a single motorcycle ride through a mile-long tunnel that led from a prison cell to freedom earlier this month, one of the world's most notorious drug kingpins undercut what little confidence remained in Mexico's ability to shield even its most valued assets from criminals.
source: usanews.com
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