Guest Post by Leonardo Espitia Jordan of the LaRouche Veterans of Mexico
The President of Mexico, Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO), recounts in his book the decisive support he received from President Donald Trump, even before AMLO was inaugurated, for his determination to regain Mexico’s sovereignty over its oil.
The two presidents, who had both won office running against “the system” and its “establishment,” built a fruitful and solid relationship rooted in national sovereignty for the benefit of both nations, as the Mexican President noted at the time.
On taking office in December 2018, AMLO reestablished the constitutional powers of the presidency and began to rebuild the energy sector, with popular support and the support of President Trump. He started with the state oil extraction and refinery company PEMEX, and the state electrical generation and distribution company CFE. These were strategic companies for the national economy which had been deliberately bankrupted and dismantled, and then handed over to globalist speculative interests. Once the energy sector had been consolidated, the President went on to announce the great emblematic project of his government, focused on the South-Southeast of Mexico.
This is the region with the greatest strategic potential for the national economy, due to its vast resources and its unique geographical location. Here are the most important oil deposits and the biggest water resources of the nation, estimated at more than 125 billion cubic meters of fresh water, the volume that its mighty rivers discharge annually into the sea.
Here in the states of Tabasco and Campeche are immense coastal plains of alluvial land, suitable for cultivation, estimated at more than two million hectares. At the strategic Isthmus of Tehuantepec, only 300 km separates the Pacific Ocean from the Gulf of Mexico-Atlantic Ocean. The South-Southeast is a region that had remained reserved land, forbidden to the sovereign economic development of Mexico by imperial pressures. Challenging the globalist elites, President AMLO is making a substantial investment in railways, ports, and energy and industrial infrastructure precisely in this region.
The president's strategic project involves the laying of 2,000 km of new railroads in to two projects: The Trans-Isthmus Railway, and the Mayan Railway. The Transisthmian will link the port of Salinas Cruz, Oaxaca, with the port of Coatzacoalcos, Veracruz, which will allow interoceanic trade between the Pacific Ocean and the Gulf of Mexico-Atlantic Ocean. This opens a brand new trade route between the Indo-Pacific region of the world and the Atlantic countries of the world and between the East Coast and the West Coast of North America.
The Trans-Isthmus Railway is conceived as an industrial and logistics corridor, as well as a commercial route. The Trans-Isthmus Railway will join the Mayan Railway being built simultaneously along the extensive coastline of the Yucatan Peninsula. This railway project is scheduled to be inaugurated by December of this year, 2023, and is unique in the American continent.
Xtrapolis train for the projected Mayan Railway. Credit: Government of Mexico.
As a strategic part of the South-Southeast project, a large petrochemical complex (Olmeca Refinery) has been built in the port of Dos Bocas in the municipality of Paraíso Tabasco, which is in its testing stage. This petrochemical complex was a real challenge for Mexico, since it involved overcoming 35 years of neoliberal economic imbecility.
The enormous Dos Bocas refinery in Tabasco is one of the President's key infrastructure projects and a centerpiece of his nationalistic energy policy. Credit: Government of Mexico.
For the initial impulse for these great works of infrastructure, it was necessary that the first two years of President AMLO's term have coincided with Donald Trump’s in the US Presidency. After the electoral coup against Trump and the return of the establishment to power with Joe Biden, it was only thanks to the enormous popular support for President AMLO, and his own determination, that imperial pressures on all fronts—environmentalist, financial, and through the corrupt justice apparatus—failed to stop the President's project.
The late American economist Lyndon LaRouche emphasized the dynamic power that infrastructure induces by increasing the productive capacities of labor in the Physical Economy. The building of this great project is fueling new productive capacities in the Mexican, the North American, and the world economy.
AMLO noted that this economic development also has security implications. He says we need an economically prosperous United States, we do not want a militarily strong United States, but in economic decline.
The great projects of President AMLO in the South-Southeast of Mexico already have a positive impact on the United States. A sample with respect to now rapid ship and rail transport of goods and materials involves a huge ship of the American company CGR which AMLO calls "Ferrobuque." It is capable of loading an entire train convoy of 135 railroad cars.
When the transisthmian train comes into operation, this ship from some port or from the East Coast of the United States, will dock in the port of Coatzacoalcos Veracruz, disembarking the train convoy in just two hours directly on the train tracks. The train will then go to the port of Salinas Cruz Oaxaca in the Pacific where another ferroship awaits in order to travel to a port on the West Coast of the United States. The same equipment would also traverse the same route from West to East.
President AMLO and the South-Southeast Development Project. Credit: Mexican Presidency
The other project presented by the Canadian Pacific Kansas City company, consists of an ambitious railway project of 32,000 kms of extension to unite the industrial regions of Canada, the United States and Mexico. PKC currently is the only railway company connecting Canada, the United States and Mexico, and that project unites the industrial regions of these countries. Recently, the company met with President AMLO to propose a connection with the Trans-Isthmus Railway and the Mayan Railway.
AMLO’s bold plan for the strategic Isthmus of Tehuantepec, flows from the republican principles of physical economic development which Mexico and the United States share.
From that position, AMLO is calling on Americans to take up the legacy of Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Delano Roosevelt and make America an economic superpower again for the benefit of all humanity.
The most glorious moments of the Republic have arisen when the Republic is at risk. Today the Republic is at serious risk.
