Description
Mexico's oil history is strongly tied to its national identity, with the oil nationalization of 1938 representing a national symbol of sovereignty. AMLO's presidential term (2018-2024) was characterized by strong support for the oil industry and a melancholia for the success of the oil expropriation. Throughout his political career, AMLO had a clear priority to pursue energy sovereignty - with fossil fuels at the center stage. Despite the implications of the climate crisis and the indebtedness of PEMEX, AMLO's government continued to invest in the sector, sidelining a sustainable energy transition. In this paper, I present a discourse analysis of the speeches and legislative debates during AMLO's presidential term (2018-2024). For this analysis, I use a postcolonial lens alongside a discourse historical approach of Critical Discourse Analysis to explore the legacies of colonial resource extraction and the valuation of an extractivist mode of production. In this analysis, I compare a historical and a contemporary corpus to build historical links of language and discursive themes, which nowadays are used to justify the continued extraction of fossil fuels. National ownership of extractive means of production became a symbol of independence which became embedded in the collective memory. The underlying linguistic themes of sovereignty and nationalism mirror historical discourses that have been reframed to reflect a contemporary view of resource nationalism. This work aims to contribute to the understanding of state behavior in environmental issues using a postcolonial approach. This perspective offers a critical and nuanced view of the reluctance to change energy policy despite the challenges of the climate crisis.
