To understand the Mexican attitude to U.S. involvement in its oil and mining industry, you have to go farther back, back to the days of Diaz and his cientificos. Under Diaz, gringos and Europeans, and their commercial interests, were immune from Mexican courts unless Diaz said otherwise. Subsurface mineral rights were bargained away by the friends of Diaz for their own benefit without regard to who owned the land. If labor was needed, Diaz had a general round up peasants to work in the mines and oil fields, and chained them up at night. This came to a head in 1938 when U.S. oil companies refused to recognize the authority of the Mexican Supreme Court and the constitution of 1917. Cardenas nationalized the oil industry and threw out the foreigners, an act that many Mexicans regard the same way we do the Boston tea Party or the Emancipation Proclamation.
Do you deny that the government and high PEMEX officials are just thugs and looters?