ng world's relations with the industrialized countries and global corporations. Mexicans still regard the expropriation as a decisive point at which their country took its destiny into its own hands. PEMEX became one of Mexico's most respected institutions:
Respondents tell pollsters of their faith in Petroleos Mexicanos even as they deprecate governors, cabinet members, and high level bureaucrats (Grayson, 1980 p. xvi).
What confluence of forces brought about first the development of a large scale Mexican oil industry, almost entirely in foreign hands, and then led the Mexican government to expropriate that industry. The active oil industry in Mexico went back a generation before 1938: a company headed by Edward L. Doheney brought in the first producing Mexican oil well in 1901 (Williams, 1979 p. 5). By 1921, Mexico was producing oil at the rate of nearly 200 million barrels a year, which was at that time second only to U.S. production (Williams, 1979 p. 5); indeed, it amounted to about a quarter of total world production (Vernon, 1965 p. 77).
The roots of oil politics in Mexico, however, go back much farther than 1901. The political environment in which the foreign owned oil industry grew up in Mexico owed much to the policies of dictator Porfirio Diaz, who ruled Mexico with an iron hand from 1876 until he was overthrown in 1910. The legal principles upon which the expropriation was based were set out explicitly in Article 27 of the Mexican Constitution of 1917 (Williams, 1979 p. 5 6). The roots of those principles, however, go back deep in Mexican history. They were based on a conception of rights over the land which originated in medieval Spain, which were brought to Mexico by the conquistadores, and were established there during the three centuries that the Spanish Monarchy ruled over Mexico (Vernon, 1965 p. 28 38). Since medieval times, mineral wealth was regarded as fundamentally the property of the Kin...