Living with Oil: Promises, Peaks, and Declines on Mexico’s Gulf Coast by Lisa Breglia (review)

This book will position the highly alliterative phrase ‘post-peak production’ into the lexicon of energy analysts, Mexicanists, policy analysts, and security experts. Herein is the setting for cultural anthropologist Breglia’s insightful study of how declining PEMEX (Mexico’s state-oil company) revenues are not only changing the fabric of the country today, but they unleash serious implications for the centuries-long fishing industry along the Gulf Coast will also be undermined. The non-OPEC nation has long relied on the Cantarell oilfields where more than 20,000 toil on massive offshore platforms. It is near Campeche and Ciudad del Carmen, which, in turn, has given national coffers an advantage in mitigating calamitous social conditions and heightened public insecurity unleashed by the narcotraficantes. That ‘oil train’ (shall we say), is about to run its course (post-peak starts roughly in 2005), and the residents of the Isla Aguada fishing community –veterans of the 1979 Ixtoc I oil spill that rivals the Deepwater Horizon disaster of 2010 about which we hear very little—will incur the brunt of this production decline.

The book “provides a closer look at the local experience of resource peak in the oil-affected communities on the Gulf coast in order to highlight Mexico’s’ confrontation of the complex issues of sovereignty, security, and stability in…the ‘post-peak era’ ” (7). Geographers will learn that the author uses the term “spatial analysis” (which “helps us to understand representation, practice, and power on the frontlines of extractive industries across the globe (10))” in ways the quantitative revolution of the 1960s had probably not prescribed. Although oil platforms are generally not even visible from the local fishing communities under study, the book assesses the “[t]ales of suspected or anticipated encroachment of oil drills” [11].

Six chapters address what the subtitle claims: promises, peaks and declines, and they are all anchored on extensive fieldwork in the Gulf Coast region dating back to 2006. Part I, ‘Peaks and Declines’, reviews the vicissitudes of oil revenues that characterize Cantarell production. New technologies and political mandates led to more oil pumping and production that peaked nearly a decade ago. And the PEMEX tale is one of mismanagement that allowed the conservative Calderón administration to toy with the idea of privatization. Part Two brings to life the other side of coastal Mexico’s economy –fishing—and this part is titled ‘the pesquera and the petrolera.’ Celebrations of the locally venerated Virgen del Carmen are intricately tied with the fishing and shrimp industries, and efforts to transfer them to oil will not work. Cooperative-based fisher-folk have seen annual tonnage of their catch wax, but mostly wane in recent decades. Shrimp boats have gradually shifted a good deal of their catch to such finfish as sea bass, snapper, grouper, and mackerel in the Bay of Campeche. In the decade following 1988, the tonnage of shrimp catch fell by 60 percent and there was a “demise in employment and output of fisheries-related industries –boatyards, processing plants, and outfitters” (120). Oil production helped take the edge of that demise but the catch of shrimp, finfish, and octopus have become paltry. Contamination and over-fishing are to blame.

Part III, “Post-Peak Politics: Energy Reform and the Race to Claim the Gulf of Mexico,” analyzes the privatization debate as part of Mexico’s neoliberal bent, and also energy security along the U.S.-Mexican maritime border. We learn that PEMEX devoted $20 million USD to extoll the merits of then President Calderón’s energy-reform proposal. Some 93,000 ads in March and April of 2008, about 1,640 daily, were used to change the terms of the energy-reform debate away from the often negatively charged word “privatization.” Ninety-three percent of Campeche voters said ‘no’ to privatization, and Breglia’s...