Oil subsidies in Mexico

The popularity of oil subsidies arises from a very natural sense of oil nationalism, which developed in many producer countries over the twentieth century through painful struggles with international oil companies. Mexico was at the leading edge of the wave, in 1938 becoming one of the first countries in the world to nationalise its oil industry. While the 1917 constitution had already declared that subsoil resources belonged to the nation, this proposition was never fully accepted by the international oil companies that extracted the oil: nationalisation was the result of their refusal to respect domestic laws and institutions, and the corollary of this difficult experience was the constitutional amendment of 1960 that banned concessions. Since then, the national oil company Pemex has been the sole producer of Mexican oil