Earlier today, Rex Tillerson, Exxon Mobil’s CEO, gave a talk here at the Council on Foreign Relations in which he outlined the global oil and energy markets trajectory during the past five years. He focused his prepared remarks on the promise of North America, and its potential to finally bring about “energy security” in the United States. Tillerson emphasized not just the like-minded policies and geographic ties, but the vast resource base—today the combined U.S., Canadian, and Mexican oil output tops fifteen million barrels a day (more than Saudi Arabia or Russia), and could grow in the coming decade to some eighteen million. Read more »

Last Wednesday, Ecuador’s Supreme Court upheld sentences handed down in July 2011 for four members of the El Universo newspaper’s staff in the latest chapter of a lengthy and controversial trial. Three of the newspaper’s directors, Carlos, César, and Nícolas Perez, and an editorialist, Emilio Palacio, face three years in jail and $40 million in fines. All have fled the country or sought asylum abroad, and many expect that the fines (if collected) will bankrupt the 90-year-old periodical. Read more »

There has been a lot of talk about the shifting geopolitical weight from the east to the west due to the growth of energy resources in Latin America. Ever growing oil discoveries off the coast of Brazil, hundreds of trillions of cubic feet of shale gas in Argentina, and booming energy markets in Colombia and Peru have led many to bet on Latin America as the next energy frontier. Tempering the enthusiasm is the stagnation or even decline in output in other places — Bolivia, Mexico and Venezuela — despite the buried potential riches. Read more »

It is campaign season in Mexico, and aside from security issues, front-runners Enrique Peña Nieto of the PRI and Andrés Manuel López Obrador of the PRD are focusing on poverty and inequality. Both criticize the past two PAN governments for not improving the lot of Mexico’s poor, and for perpetuating if not exacerbating an uneven playing field that benefits the few and not the many. In a recent campaign stop in the Southern state of Veracruz, Peña Nieto came down hard on the PAN, saying “[the PRI] knows what Mexico hasn’t achieved in the past decade. We haven’t forgotten that more people are poor, that we haven’t had the economic growth that creates jobs that the public demands.” Read more »