Quite a lot–but the power isn’t theirs just yet. In February, President Ernesto Zedillo proposed a constitutional amendment to allow private investors to build power plants to compete with the two state electric companies, which would eventually be sold off. But after two months of protests by the country’s 105,000 electric workers and angry denunciations from the opposition Democratic Revolutionary Party (PRD), the proposal is now all but dead.
Still, the issue won’t disappear. The money-losing state-owned companies can’t meet the growing demand for power and haven’t a prayer of generating the $25 billion worth of investment the government says is needed over the next six years. Foreign firms are eager to step in, as they have elsewhere in Latin America. Usually that has meant better service, higher rates and fewer electricity workers.
Mexico’s unions aren’t the only source of resistance. A $65 billion bailout of the nation’s banks–sold in the early 1990s to often-unqualified private investors–has soured the public on privatizations. And power’s a close cousin to the state enterprise Mexicans prize most: Pemex, the national oil company. Hernandez’s neighbors will likely be tapping into the grid until sometime after the presidential elections in 2000.
