Mexico lawmakers shut Congress doors to stop oil bill

Leftist lawmakers padlocked themselves in Mexico's chamber of deputies to disrupt debate on a major energy reform bill, forcing the legislature to cram into another room.

Two dozen legislators piled chairs in front of one door and chained another in the lower house, hours after the Senate approved a bill aimed at luring back foreign investors and ending the country's 75-year-old oil monopoly.

It is a highly politicially sensitive issue in Mexico, where for decades its considerable oil wealth has been portrayed as everyone's resources.

The barricade forced 401 deputies to pack into an auditorium in the congressional complex where they opened the debate on the legislation championed by the reform-driven President Enrique Pena Nieto.

Fabio Beltrones Rivera, coordinator of the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) in the lower house, said the leftist group had "hijacked what belongs to all of us, the legislative chamber."

The defiant legislators took over the lower chamber's podium, unfurling a banner with the words "traitors" after the Senate voted 95-28 for the constitutional changes.

"We cannot allow a handful of people to take and give away the nation's property," deputy Maria Luisa Alcalde of the Citizen Movement Party said from the podium, joined by members of the Democratic Revolution Party (PRD) and the Workers Party.

The reform would let private firms explore and extract oil and gas, as well as share profits, production and risk with state-run energy firm Pemex, ending a ban cemented in Mexico's very constitution.

The centrist PRI, which negotiated the reform with the conservative opposition National Action Party (PAN), says change is urgent to give Mexico the tools to drill for more gas and oil and reverse a trend of falling production.

PRD lawmakers insisted that the reform should be discussed and voted in committees before being taken up by the full chamber, but a majority voted to fast-track it to the entire assembly.

The left, which sees the reform as an attempt to privatize a symbol of national sovereignty, has called for the reform to be put to a referendum.

Demonstrators who had set up camp outside the Senate for days moved their protest to the chamber of deputies, holding signs reading "Black gold is not traded for nick-nacks."

The bill is the centerpiece of Pena Nieto's reform drive, which has included new tax collection, telecommunications and education laws in an effort to revitalize Latin America's second biggest economy.

The president tweeted that the Senate vote was "a significant decision for Mexico" that would allow the country to "make the most of its resources to grow economically and create jobs in the coming years."

Pena Nieto denies Pemex will be privatized and insists the oil will remain in the nation's hands.

The Mexican leader says the reform is crucial to boost oil production, which has dropped from 3.4 million barrels per day in 2004 to 2.5 million today.

If it passes Congress, the reform will have to be approved by 17 of Mexico's 32 federal entities.

Analysts say the bill goes further than Pena Nieto's original proposal, though energy industry consultant David Shields said it would take "months and years" for the changes to kick in.

The bill proposes contract and licensing schemes that fall short of more controversial concessions.

The legislation also would remove Pemex's powerful union, which has been tainted by corruption allegations, from the company board.

Changes to the oil sector strike at the heart of modern Mexico's national identity.

In 1938, then president Lazaro Cardenas nationalized the foreign-operated oil industry, a wildly popular move that asserted Mexico's right to its own mineral wealth.