What Mexico’s State Oil Company Tells Us About the Future of Public Ownership

Sheinbaum’s strategy to save Pemex is a new blueprint for off-balance-sheet sovereignty

Mexico is doing something few countries in the Global South have managed: rescuing a massive, indebted state-owned company—without privatizing it, without calling it a bailout, and without adding a single peso to its official debt.

The company is Pemex, Mexico’s state-owned oil firm. Once the engine of Mexico’s economic nationalism and the country’s single most important source of revenue, Pemex is now the most indebted oil company in the world. It owes $120 billion and has fallen so far behind on payments to suppliers that entire regional economies—especially in Mexico’s oil-rich southeast—have stalled.