Mexican President-Elect Pledges to Save Country's Oil Sector

MEXICO CITY (Sputnik) - Mexican President-elect Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador has pledged to save the country's oil sector just like former Mexican President Lazaro Cardenas, who headed the country from 1934 to 1940, had done.

In March 1938, Cardenas announced the nationalization of the oil industry, and only in 2013, the Mexican Congress approved an energy reform opening the oil sector to private companies, including the foreign ones.

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"We will produce oil because oil and gas production has been decreasing since the beginning of the energy reform. We will save the oil industry like Gen. Cardenas did in 1938," Lopez Obrador posted on Twitter late on Sunday.

In September, Lopez Obrador, who won the election in July and will assume office on December 1, pledged that crude oil production would increase up to 2.6 million barrels per day from the current level of 1.8 million barrels per day by the end of his six-year-long administration.

In August, Pemex, Mexico's major oil and gas company, produced oil at the average level of 1,816 million barrels per day, which is a 5.9 percent decrease year-on-year, and a 28 percent decrease compared with the notch registered in August 2013.