Mexico sends military to strategic sites
Leftists had hit fuel pipelines
MEXICO CITY -- President Felipe Calderón of Mexico has dispatched a new, 5,000-strong, elite military unit to guard strategic sites, including oil refineries and hydroelectric dams, in the wake of guerrilla attacks on pipelines operated by the national oil and gas company, Pemex, according to news reports yesterday.
Business leaders said as many as 1,000 manufacturing plants and other businesses in the Guanajuato-Queretaro region of central Mexico have been forced to shut down or scale back operations this week because of fuel shortages caused by attacks on July 5 and Tuesday.
The leftist Popular Revolutionary Army, known by the Spanish initials EPR, claimed responsibility for the attacks Tuesday, saying they were in retaliation for the disappearance of two of their militants last year in the southern state of Oaxaca.
The EPR communique said the rebels had bombed three pipelines and a switching station in the states of Queretaro and Guanajuato. The explosions severed natural gas pipelines and a crude oil pipeline that links storage facilities in the Gulf of Mexico port of Poza Rica to a refinery in Salamanca, Guanajuato, reducing fuel supplies in the region.
A fire that had burned in Queretaro since a bombing at 1 a.m. Tuesday was extinguished late Wednesday, Pemex officials said. Two hundred workers were working yesterday to repair the damaged lines.
Natural gas deliveries to residential customers have scaled back this week in several cities in the region, including Celaya and Irapuato.
The attacks shook a government already facing challenges on several fronts -- drug traffickers who outgun the police in several corners of the country, a stalled immigration reform bill in the United States, and declining output from Pemex, the country's main source of foreign exchange.
"All we Mexican men and women of good will categorically reject violence because we wish to live in liberty and peace," Calderón said Wednesday in his only reference to the attacks this week, at a ceremony announcing a new commuter rail project for Mexico City.
Calderón is dispatching the Corps of Federal Support Forces, an elite army unit created in May as part of the government's war against drug trafficking, the newspaper El Universal reported yesterday. Mexican officials have confirmed the presence of troops at the oil facilities, but have not said which units have been sent.
The Chamber of Transformation Industries, a business group, estimated that shutdowns caused by the pipeline explosions were costing businesses in central Mexico between $5 million and $10 million in losses each day.
The region known as the Bajio, centered in Guanajuato and Queretaro, is home to some of Mexico's largest industrial plants. And at least a dozen major companies in the region reported shutdowns or slowdowns this week related to the attacks, including
"The damage to the economy is serious," Ruben Aguilar Valenzuela wrote yesterday in the commentary in the newspaper, Reforma.
