Mexican oil, gas pipelines attacked

[Eugene]

Source: Los Angeles Times

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-pemex11jul11,0,5032807.story">Mexican oil, gas pipelines attacked

Leftist guerrillas claim responsibility for the bombings.
Officials take steps to tighten security.

By Héctor Tobar and Marla Dickerson, Times Staff Writers
July 11, 2007

MEXICO CITY — A leftist guerrilla group claimed responsibility
Tuesday for a series of bombings of pipelines operated by Pemex,
Mexico's national oil company, and authorities moved quickly to
protect the nation's oil and gas industry from further attacks.

The Popular Revolutionary Army, or EPR, said in a communique
that it would continue its bombing campaign until the government
disclosed the whereabouts of two EPR members said to have
disappeared last year in the southern state of Oaxaca.

A spokesman for President Felipe Calderon said the government
would "punish those responsible" for the attacks that began
Thursday. Founded a decade ago, the EPR is a small group based
largely in the southern state of Guerrero.

-snip-

Explosions sent flames nearly 1,000 feet into the air before dawn
Tuesday outside the city of Corregidora, in the central state of
Queretaro, where several pipelines were severed, including a
36-inch pipe that transported natural gas to local distributors
and a 16-inch line that supplied a local refinery with crude oil.

-snip-

Read more: http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-pemex11jul11,0,5032807.story

[lligrd]

1. Damn, * Attacked The Wrong Country

Talk about inept.

[CGowen]

2. less oil....prices go up.... yippeee

Unlike their fellow Mexican guerrillas in the Zapatista Army of National Liberation, the Popular Revolutionary Army has a fairly Marxist-Leninist ideology, and advocates socialist revolution. Subcomandante Marcos has distanced the EZLN from the EPR in his communiqués, largely because of the EPR activities in the state of Chiapas in the midst of peace talks in 1996 and 1997. The EPR though still asserts its support of the Zapatistas.

..

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ej%C3%A9rcito_Popular_Revolucionario

The EZLN opposes corporate globalization, or neoliberalism, arguing that it severely and negatively affects the peasant way of life of its indigenous support base.

The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) is an example of neoliberal policy that EZLN is against. Apart from opening the Mexican market to cheap mass-produced US agricultural products it spells an end to Mexican crop subsidies and drastically reduces income and living standards of millions of Mexican farmers who cannot compete with the subsidized, artificially fertilized, mechanically harvested and genetically modified imports from the United States. The signing of NAFTA also resulted in the removal of Article 27 Section VII in the Mexican Constitution which previously had guaranteed land reparations to indigenous groups throughout Mexico. The start of the 1994 Zapatista revolution happened to coincide with the coming into effect of NAFTA.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zapatista_Army_of_National_Liberation