Mexico City – Mexican President Felipe Calderon 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 Thursday.
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 due to fuel shortages caused by the July 5 and July 10 attacks.
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 its militants last year in the southern state of Oaxaca.
The EPR communiqué 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 Thursday to repair the damaged lines.
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 U.S., 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,” Calderon said Wednesday in his only reference to the attacks this week, at a ceremony announcing a new commuter rail project for Mexico City.
Calderon is dispatching the Corps of Federal Support Forces, an elite army unit created in May in response to the challenges of the government’s war against drug trafficking, the newspaper El Universal reported Thursday.
The shutdowns caused by the pipeline explosions were costing businesses in central Mexico an estimated $5 million to $10 million in losses each day.
