Baker & Associates reviews the career of economist Jesús Reyes Heroles who served under four presidents.

HOUSTON, TEXAS, USA, January 27, 2024 /EINPresswire.com/ -- In the preparation of its report on the career and legacy of Jesús F. Reyes Heroles (1952-2014), Baker & Associates, Energy Consultants, sought the views of admirers and critics, principally those in Mexico.

Dr. Reyes Heroles, who died on January 21 at age 72, held leadership positions in the ministries of the treasury, foreign relations, and energy. He served as cabinet minister, ambassador, and director-general of the state development bank for infrastructure (Banobras) and, later, of the national oil company (Pemex). He was the founder of a management consultancy dedicated to economic and political analysis (GEA).

He was arguably the most distinguished public servant of his generation to serve in non-elective office. He was also his generation’s most recognizable scion, benefiting from the luster of his eponymous and more famous father (1921-85), a university professor, political theorist, PRI ideologue, cabinet minister and director-general of Pemex. The son surpassed his father in roles as ambassador, consultant, and status, after his time in public service, as a much sought-after speaker from Mexico in U.S. academic and policy forums. He had a sharp institutional memory of the politicians and policies of the federal government beginning in 1964, when his father became director-general of Pemex.

The legacy of Dr. Reyes Heroles has, in equal numbers, both admirers and detractors. Admirers recall his wit, urbanity, bilingual ease, sense of humor, and cosmopolitan flair. Critics fault his under-performance in the energy sector for his technocratic focus on institutional and fiscal efficiency without a vision of regulated market solutions. He never disavowed the PRI-era Petroleum Act of 1958 which established state pricing, created a Pemex monopoly, and required services to be under contract with Pemex.

As energy minister, 1995-97, he fumbled the privatization of Pemex’s Cosoleacaque ammonia plants, blocked by the oil syndicate. He was then “moved [exiled?] to” Washington as ambassador.

In the general elections of 2006, he supported the PAN’s Felipe Calderon, who, as president, appointed him director general of Pemex. In 2007, there was the fatal Usumacinta platform accident offshore. In 2008, the president announced a refinery project, one that would eventually be canceled by his successor in 2014, 500 million pesos later. In 2008, Dr. Reyes Heroles came to Houston to speak an industry conference to promote private investment in pipelines for oil products, but neither this idea, nor that of deepwater alliances with international oil companies, was included in the Energy Reform of 2008. He was replaced without explanation in September 2009 by Juan José Suárez Coppell, a little-known specialist in corporate finance.

During a motor trip in 1991, returning to Mexico City from Cholula, Puebla, where he had attended a conference co-sponsored by UCLA and the University of the Americas, thinking like an economist, with degrees from ITAM and MIT, he mused aloud, “There must be a price point at which oil companies would agree to serve as contractors to Pemex.”

Not until 2016, however, would Pemex have an oil company as an equity partner—but not as a contractor—and then only after the Energy Reform of 2013-14 had amended the constitution and had abrogated the pernicious 1958 law.

In the Q&A of his presentation in 2019 at Rice University’s Baker Institute, where he was a nonresident fellow, he was asked, ”Looking back over the period 1987-2017, what would you have done different[ly] to have avoided the challenges of the energy sector [that you have just described]?” In reply, he brushed off the idea that those years could be treated as a historical period and recalled that the PRI had lost majority control of the congress in 1997, which prevented energy reforms. He implied that there had been no policy errors or omissions for him or his generation to repent. The questioner, undeterred, urged him to write a book about the serious mistakes in those years made by economists like him in high office.

He will be missed in the U.S. as in Mexico. His friends and patrons in the United States lament the loss of his voice and savvy. In Mexico, corporate boards, his students at the Universidad Iberoamericana, where he served as the coordinator of graduate studies, and peers will miss his counsel. For those who knew and admired him, he died too young at a time when both countries would have benefited from his knowledge and discernment.

George Baker
Bakr & Associates, Energy Consultants
+1 832-434-3928
g.baker@energia-mx.com
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