In early 2017, an expected hike in gas prices in Mexico—or gasolinazo, as it was informally known—caused a mass panic that resulted in fuel hoarding, with people lining up for hours to fill up their tanks. I remember sitting in my cold car in the middle of the night, in a line that stretched on for a few miles, terrified that it would run out of juice before reaching the pump.
Then President Enrique Peña Nieto’s energy production reforms, which liberalized and opened Mexico’s petroleum market to private investment for the first time since its nationalization under President Lázaro Cárdenas in 1938, had recently begun to have effects on consumers. Many Mexicans experienced the prospect of an oil price shock for the first time in their lives.
Ordinary citizens and political figures alike, including opposition leader and future president Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO), were baffled by the crisis. In theory, Mexico’s maximum oil refining capacity is around 1.5–1.8 million barrels per day (throughput across 2024 was much lower), while its daily use of oil hovers around 1.75 million barrels per day. This means that Mexico, in theory, has enough petroleum in its territory to cover most (if not all) of its oil needs. Why, then, had Mexico proven so vulnerable to a shortage?
“Mexico’s energy infrastructure is old and inefficient.”
The answer is that Mexico’s energy infrastructure is old and inefficient. In 2018, the year AMLO won the presidency, Mexico had six “legacy refineries” that were running at under 40 percent capacity. Between 1990 and 2013, Pemex (Mexico’s state-owned petroleum corporation) refineries averaged utilization of about 75 percent. The result was a rising dependence on US fuel imports—nearly 800,000 barrels per day of gasoline and diesel in 2018.
On taking office in 2018, AMLO made energy and petroleum self-sufficiency a priority. Mexico acquired full control of the Texas Deer Park refinery for Pemex, and construction began on the Olmeca refinery (or Dos Bocas, as it’s popularly known) in Tabasco. AMLO’s political party, Morena, has also emphasized modernizing Pemex’s oil refineries. The “Fourth Transformation of Mexico”—the national renewal project spearheaded by AMLO and his successor, President Claudia Sheinbaum—is making real progress toward energy independence. National refinery throughput rose 44 percent year over year in the final quarter of 2025, and Pemex’s refining recovery trimmed gasoline imports from the United States by 5 percent across the year.
Nonetheless, these projects faced massive criticism from the opposition, framed in both environmental and financial terms. Morena’s opponents have pointed out myriad implementation problems and logistical setbacks in the Dos Bocas refinery—its excessive cost ($12 billion dollars over budget), its underperformance relative to its designed capacity, and a number of safety issues. Beneath these objections lies a quintessential difference between the “neoliberals” (as AMLO called them) of the opposition and those who make up his and Sheinbaum’s movement, who are driven by a fundamental distrust of the US-led international market system.
When President Carlos Salinas de Gortari signed the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in 1992, a new era of commerce and growth began for the Mexican economy. Much of the newly generated wealth relied on the opening up of trade with the United States and Canada. Mexican economists, especially those coming from ITAM (Autonomous Technological Institute of Mexico), a university whose students played a key role in Mexico’s economic liberalization, extolled free-market principles and hailed the growth that came from opening the economy to more imports. Why should Mexico pursue self-reliance when the Mexican market can reliably buy cheap foreign oil?
If the gasolinazo of 2017 provided an initial impetus for AMLO’s pursuit of domestic production, recent events have further vindicated his approach. When the Iranians closed the Strait of Hormuz in retaliation for US military action, oil prices skyrocketed worldwide by around 40 percent. To keep prices down in Mexico, Sheinbaum was forced to make a fiscal intervention. Critics of Morena’s inclination toward self-reliance lost their footing.
AMLO was correct to intuit that the systems of global commerce that determine oil prices are more fragile than the neoliberals would have you believe. A decade ago, he could sense that the era of American unipolarity—with the stability and growth that it brought—was coming to an end. Countries like Mexico would need to prepare to defend and pursue their economic interests.
Although negotiations between Washington and Tehran have brought oil prices down, Americans can expect their trading partners to continue to pursue self-reliance, whether it be for energy or other basic goods. Claudia Sheinbaum is not alone in pursuing energy independence. Indonesia’s Prabowo administration has also pursued a self-sufficiency agenda amid global uncertainty; Nigeria, long a crude exporter that imported its own fuel, became a net gasoline exporter in early 2026. World leaders have followed AMLO in recognizing that the peak era of globalized markets is over. For good or ill, they’ll now adapt to survive.