MEXICO: Josefina’s Stove

And now housewives joined the protest over the petroleum famine. Before Mexico took the oil industry away from its foreign owners in 1938, most Mexicans cooked on charcoal braziers. Then, with sudden oil wealth, the Avila Camacho Government ordered landlords to furnish kerosene stoves. A domestic revolution ensued. Last week Josefina Novarra, 23, stood in a Mexico City kerosene queue and spoke her mind. “Look how we have to stand in line to get a little kerosene for our stoves,” she grumbled. “And they want certain kinds of cans or they won’t sell you any. Damn the whole Pemex outfit!”

After eight years Mexicans were fed up with Pemex, the Government corporation that runs the oil industry. Even in the capital it was hard to get high-test gas, and when a man drove into the country he had to carry tins of the stuff or he might never get back. The gas he got often clogged feedlines, stalled the car.

In a long statement on Mexico’s oil problem last week, President-elect Miguel Aleman omitted such comments but hinted that mismanaged Pemex was due for drastic overhaul. It was gossiped that Pemex was losing $100,000 a day; it teemed with high-salaried, incompetent political lame ducks; it was constantly in trouble with labor. And in eight years it had failed to fit the oil industry into the domestic economy. It was still geared for export. Its pipelines ran down to the sea instead of to home markets in the big inland cities. A new refinery outside Mexico City would soon ease the capital’s shortage, but others had yet to be built in Monterrey, Salamanca, Salina Cruz.

Probable first Alemán move: fire Pemex Director Efrain Buenrostro. After that, anything might happen, including the return, in some form, of foreign interests (TIME, Aug. 5). There might even be kerosene for Josefina’s stove.