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In July 2009 Ciudad del Carmen, Campeche, marked the thirtieth anniversary of Mexico’s success in offshore oil drilling. Officials used the anniversary to launch more than a week of memorial activities including an orchestral concert, food festival, and artisanry fair. The celebration culminated in speeches by Pemex Director General Jesús Reyes Heroles and Campeche Governor Jorge Hurtado Valdez. But the happy fa- çade of the events hid profound contradictions. All on hand at the celebrations —Pemex, Campeche state and municipal officials, and residents of Carmen and the surrounding area of the Laguna de Términos—had good reason for mixed feelings about celebrating three decades of extracting oil in the Campeche Sound. Between 1979 and 2009, Cantarell rose and fell as one of the world’s most prolific oilfields. In those thirty years, the Pemex chief emphasized in his speech, Cantarell produced an average of 1.9 million barrels per day (mbpd) of crude oil equivalent, representing 72 percent of the national effort and 2.7 percent of global production.1 During the three decades of prolific production , nearly 1.5 mbpd was sent to the export market, generating income for the country of $430 billion (Reyes Heroles 2009). The thirtieth-anniversary commemoration provided workaday residents and authorities the occasion to look back and consider the region ’s role in natural resource exploitation, not only since the discovery of oil in the Bay of Campeche in the 1970s but long before. As Governor Hurtado pointed out in his speech, across time the ecologically rich and diverse region has generated multiple “cycles of bonanza,” but time and time again the resource boom has ended in a bust. Hurtado did not have to remind his audience of the local effects of the boom-andbust cycles of natural resource exploitation in Campeche or of the diffiPART 1 PEAKS AND DECLINES 24 Peaks and Declines culties that come hard and fast following a bonanza. Indeed, peaks and declines are part of a lived reality in the Laguna de Términos. Longtime residents, despite their lack of formal education, know the stories of the parents and grandparents and great-grandparents who worked in Campeche’s landscape gathering chicle and logging palo de tinte. Most everyone listening to Hurtado speak about the vicious cycle of Campeche’s booms and busts knew from their own life experiences the bonanza and bust of the shrimp industry. As they stood within sight of Carmen’s desperately sad and depleted industrial port, the reminder of a once-thriving shrimp industry now decimated served as a daily lesson in resource economics. More than just a quotidian experience, living this cycle became, over the course of several generations and at least four commodities, ingrained into the public consciousness. Carried from the colonial era through to the present day, this cyclical culture developed in the Laguna de Términos region as a daunting heritage of underdevelopment. How could frontline communities in the municipality of Carmen break out of the cycle, given the weight of their terrible inheritance ? What was the path to the future after the peak of Cantarell? In his speech Hurtado was caught in a position of having to be respectful and somewhat deferential as a state governor, yet he also stood absolutely firm about the strategic importance of Campeche to Pemex. Hurtado asserted that the discovery of oil in the 1970s “breathed new life into our expectations for development.” Thirty years on, the governor stressed that Campeche had built a relationship of “alliance” and “growing harmony” with Pemex, revealing a less than harmonious past that needed a post-peak future with local sustainable development at its center. For state and municipal politicians, the celebration left the state poised on the edge of an abyss. On one side was the salvation offered by the proceeds of petroleum to the state. Over the dark edge was the seemingly undeniable situation that Cantarell was in a serious decline. For Campeche state officials and even more immediately for those governing the municipality of Carmen, the funding scenario was dire. For Pemex, the thirtieth anniversary should have marked a moment of sober reflection on both successes and serious setbacks. True enough, Cantarell marked the parastatal’s first offshore venture. In 1974–1975 the first exploratory well, Chac-1, named for the Maya god of rain, was drilled to a depth of 11,600 feet below the seabed forty-three miles north of Ciudad del Carmen...

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